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The Americanization of France: Searching for Happiness after the Algerian War Barnett Singer. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2013.
The French Ministry of Culture has formed a "General Commission for Terminology" to monitor and preserve an authentic French language from American linguistic intrusions. With counsel from the Académie Française, the Ministry has introduced five hundred Gallic equivalents to modern American English words that have insinuated themselves into spoken French, for example, "supermodel," "take-away," "low-cost, "email," "blog" and "fast-food." While some Americans might smile at this seeming overreaction, Barnett Singer's The Americanization of France: Searching for Happiness after the Algerian War shows the French Ministry of Culture is on to something. Singer tells the story of how the decline of the French colonial empire, and especially the loss of Vietnam and Algeria, was accompanied by a malaise and a looking westward for new American cultural forms to fill a spiritual void.
Singer acknowledges Richard F. Kuisel's Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (1993) and Kristin Ross's Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (1995) and seeks to bring the subject up to date...