Frères ennemis has focused on the ways in which selected French and American literary texts have constructed the image(s) of the two peoples over the last century and a half. I would like to begin this conclusion with a brief recapitulation of the principal ideas developed in the preceding chapters, and then proceed to consider some broader ramifications concerning what Jacques Chirac described as the “conflictive and excellent” rapport between the United States and France (Kuisel, The French Way, 91).

Borrowing significantly from Roland Barthes's conception of myth, Frères ennemis deals in part with images which human beings had and have of each other and of their respective countries, images perceived as unstable concepts, created essentially by mixtures of historical circumstances and the needs of the moment. Henry James's title, The American, illustrates this quite clearly. The main character is finally not Christopher Newman, but rather what he represents, the volatile myth he embodies, which is that of the American. The Bellegarde family undergo the same transformation. Initially, they are simply French people; in the course of the novel they sometimes become the French. Yet, in accordance with the most significant aspect of Barthes's theory, these images are not stable. They can change in an instant, and the American and the French can briefly become individuals again. Although the form of the national images is volatile, the content is relatively stable, at least in its formulation in James's novel. The American is wealthy, vigorous, yet culturally undeveloped and naïve – the embodiment of the present and the future. The French are intellectually sophisticated and cultured, but financially strained, somewhat untrustworthy, and aware that their nation, for all its achievements in the past, is losing ground to the American upstart. This paradigm for the French and Americans’ perceptions of each other is established in The American, and recurs in various transformations in American novels until the beginning of the twenty-first century. French fiction embraced a version of this paradigmatic structure up until the middle of the Cold War.