FRANCOPHOBIA: Anti-French sentiment in the United States
Contemporary French Civilization
Deadline:
Saturday, November 1, 2025
Review Begins:
Monday, December 1, 2025
We are co-editing a special issue of Contemporary French Civilization dedicated to anti-French sentiment in the United States and are currently soliciting abstracts.
Please read the description of the special issue below.
We welcome any abstract that fits this broad category. Submissions can focus on any time period and can come from any discipline.
Abstracts should be no longer than a single double-spaced page. Please send abstracts along with a short bio to sgunther@wellesley.edu by November 1, 2025. We will let you know by December 1, 2025 if your abstract is accepted, in which case, you will have until August 31, 2026 to complete your article, which should be approximately 6,000 words in length (including notes and bibliography).
We look forward to reading your submissions,
Scott Gunther (Wellesley College)
William Poulin-Deltour (Middlebury College)
William Poulin-Deltour (Middlebury College)
DESCRIPTION OF SPECIAL ISSUE ON "FRANCOPHOBIA" IN THE UNITED STATES
2028 will mark the 25th anniversary of a moment of particularly prominent Francophobia in the US. In 2003, the United States was trying to form an alliance of countries to intervene militarily in Iraq. Two of the most important countries that refused were France and Germany. Oddly enough, Germany did not receive nearly the same level of vitriol as France did (remember "freedom fries"?). It was a time when the right-wing press in the US became absolutely obsessed with France and relied on tropes such as the effeminacy of French men, the cowardness of the French, the weakness and excessive pacifism of the French, the laziness of the French, the French as untrustworthy, the French as back-stabbers, and even the French as unhygienic.The origins of many of these tropes can be traced back to our image of the actions of the French during World War II. The fact that our memory of World War II played such an outsized role here could also explain why Germany was pretty much off the hook in 2003 (nobody accuses German men in World War II of being overly pacifist or effeminate, for example).
With the approaching anniversary of a particularly significant moment in the history of Francophobia in the US, it is a fitting time to reflect on the phenomenon of Francophobia and its history. While the raison d'être for the special issue is the 25th anniversary of 2003 and we anticipate including submissions on contemporary Francophobia, we hope that the historical scope of the special issue will be broader and will include submissions that might help us understand the origins of anti-French sentiment and the reasons for its ebbing and flowing over time.
In looking at Francophobia, it's important to consider a few things. First, the words "France" and"French" are, in the words of Levi-Strauss, "floating-signifiers," which may bear little or sometimes even no connection to the reality of France. Instead, they serve as a sort of shorthand for a whole bundle of ideas, values, and images. Second, the stereotypes that these words might evoke often tell us more about the people generating them than about any reality of France -- determining what precisely they tell us about these people and the context in which they are used is an interesting inquiry. And third, in exploring Francophobia, contributors will also implicitly be exploring the phenomenon of Francophilia in the US, since one cannot have meaning without the other. Rather than explicitly stating that this would be an issue about both Francophobia and Francophilia, We have chosen to give the issue a sharper theme by focusing on Francophobia, which also more clearly associates it with the 25th anniversary of 2003.
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Posted for ASA Office in Special Issues