The American naturally did business, just as Molière's Bourgeois Gentilhomme did prose; and it was said that

So pervasive was the role of economics that the French felt that the Americans conducted politics as they conducted business, that their newspapers were managed like vulgar factories for making fertilizer or shoes, that their food was produced by businesses without concern for anything but profitability. So deeply marked was American life with the seal of economic activity that the famous dollar quite naturally had become its symbol; this was indeed the “King Dollar,” the almost uncontested standard for measuring the value of people and things.

Such a state of affairs was bound to surprise a French opinion that had never known the absolute reign of the laws of economics and often distrusted the world of business, which it considered necessarily shady and inevitably suspect of graft and dangerous and useless speculation. One would think, therefore, that the French would have been particularly interested in the various sectors and the functioning of the American economy as a way to help them understand this strange behavior.

But this was not the case; interest in the American economy was always rather marginal and rarely spread beyond the specialized circles of administrators, businessmen, and economic journalists. Their strictly technical approach contributed little to the formation of French opinion.