“Today, with the decline of socialist ideology, especially in its Marxist form, we are witnessing a revival of the idea of national identity.”

 — Club de l’Horloge, 1985

Americanization. Less than a year from the 2022 French presidential election, the concept is on everyone’s lips. The idea, as the New York Times recently pointed out, has become a familiar refrain, increasingly held responsible for all the problems of the nation.¹ Politicians, media commentators, and scholars from both left and right all seem to agree that the French political debate has been contaminated by American ideas. While over the last forty years the French have been watching more American than French movies and increasingly eating at McDonald’s, and traveling to the United States has become a required voyage initiatique for its elites, none of these cultural trends is what worries French politicians and intellectuals.² What they’ve been labeling “Americanization” is a certain kind of identity politics they believe is threatening French republicanism. Conservative thinkers such as Marcel Gauchet have denounced the “racialist and ‘decolonial’ ideologies . . . transferred from North American campuses,” while some progressives have also deplored the race reductionist lens of such an approach.³ Others, like Étienne Balibar, have rather celebrated the arrival of American debates in France, where they may open the path to an anti-racist and decolonized French Republic.⁴ All seem, however, to agree that, one way or another, France has been intellectually and politically transformed by American ideas over the last couple of years. In October 2020, President Emmanuel Macron himself warned against the influence of social science theories he thought were imported from the United States. Intersectionality in particular, he would later add, “fractures everything.”⁵ But it would be a mistake to see such dissent as hostility to identity politics as such.