L’Amérique inattendue

In 1930, offered a chair in literature in America, André Maurois traveled to Princeton, New Jersey, for several months. The trip gave him the material to offer French readers a new vision of America. Restlessness, the supremacy of money, violence — so many received ideas that Maurois sought to qualify in a series of articles published upon his return. He decided to gather them into a book, adding a long introduction that cites the Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke, who in 1793, speaking of France to the English, said that “a whole nation cannot be condemned”: “When that nation is young, vigorous and asks only to know us better, does it not seem more humane and wiser to try to understand it than to condemn it?”