The title of Jacques Portes's book, Fascination and Misgivings, immediately reveals its twofold purpose and the two poles between which it constantly oscillates. On the one hand, the United States continues to exert an undeniable fascination on French opinion; it is a fascination in which certain myths (and illusions) of earlier decades are still present. On the other hand – and this is the novel aspect of this study – this same opinion is beginning to show signs of misgivings and hesitation, even criticism and objections to what was until now considered, rightly or wrongly, the American model. This more apparent than real contradiction constitutes the originality of this study, the result of long digging in the rich loam of both literature and journalism, travel accounts and the treatises of economists, work that was rewarded with a doctorate. The present version is a less academic adaptation of that thesis.

The most symbolic example of that duality is the famous Statue of Liberty. The idea of commemorating the centenary of the United States' independence and the Franco-American alliance with the gift of a colossal statue was the brainchild of a liberal French jurist, professor at the Collège de France, Edouard de Laboulaye, at the end of the Second Empire. At the time, the gesture made a political point, which was to consecrate the United States as the land of liberty at a moment when liberty was still under threat in France. It took twenty years to carry out this project, in part because of the change of regimes in France in 1871, but also because of the Americans' lack of interest in this symbolic gift.