The Latest Paris Fashion . . .: . . . and also an old one: Anti- Americanism in the land of Tocqueville - France

France and Germany are in poor shape. No idea how to deal with recession and high unemployment; unable to resort-without violating EU rules-to the old trick of budget deficits to buy time; caught between mass immigration, fear of terrorism, and the backlash of racism (as evinced in France by the surge of the National Front). In these circumstances, anti-Americanism is a relief, a distraction, and- finally-a source of much-needed unity.

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has committed Germany to have nothing to do with what he calls the American "adventure" in Iraq. The country's intellectual elite may appreciate that freedom and democracy arrived with the American army in 1945, but the population at large has the sense that American victory rearranged the good old order, on the one hand draining away the essential Germanness of that order, and on the other hand conscripting Germans into far too much adventure. Cruise missiles antagonized the Soviet Union, many have come to conclude, whereas appeasement and trade brought it down. Better, safer, to pretend with Schroeder that a dictator like Saddam Hussein is really a partner like anybody else.

Something like 200 German firms, large and small, have contributed in one way or another to Iraq's programs of mass-destruction weapons. Prosecutors in Mannheim have just prepared a report on a businessman by the name of Bernd Schompeter, accused of selling equipment to Iraq for its supergun project. Another among numerous profiteers, Karl-Heinz Schaab, is the subject of a newly released documentary film, Stealing the Fire. Schaab stole a classified design for an advanced "supercritical" centrifuge for making nuclear bombs, sold it to Iraq, and then went to Baghdad to supervise the centrifuge's installation. After fleeing to Brazil, he was brought to trial in Germany and given a five-year sentence, which was immediately suspended. "I stumbled naively into this thing," in his words. The defense is as revealing as the judicial leniency. Chancellor Schroeder is in touch with the sympathies of his electorate-he came from behind to win his election. Anti-Americanism did its work for him.

France is more or less the opposite of Germany in the expression of its anti-Americanism. The population at large appreciates that Hitlerites or Stalinists would today be ruling the continent if not for the United States. In opinion polls, hardly more than one in ten people declare themselves anti-American, and a majority would understand and probably approve a go-it-alone U.S. campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein and liberate Iraq.

Instead, anti-Americanism is a central project of the intellectual elite. In May 1944, with the war against Hitler still in progress, Hubert Beuve-Mery, the man about to found and edit Le Monde-far and away France's most influential paper-was already writing, "The Americans constitute a real danger for France." Their materialism, in his mystifying justification for this emotional outburst, does not have the "tragic grandeur" of German or Soviet totalitarianism.

France's abject collapse in the face of Nazism and its idealization of Stalinism consummated a general intellectual confusion, at the center of which is a fountain of pure-running anti-Americanism. This is often extravagant to the point of farce. A journalist by the name of Thierry Meyssan has sprung to notoriety with a book called L'Effroyable imposture (The Horrifying Fraud), which claims that September 11 was carried out not by Islamist terrorists but by right-wing elements in the Washington administration with a plot to go to war to grab the Middle East and its oil. The book has sold more than 200,000 copies. Even Le Monde detected something totalitarian in this displacement of reality by fiction.

President Jacques Chirac is speaking strictly for the elite in his attempts to stymie American policy. The French proposal for two resolutions in the U.N. Security Council is designed to rescue Saddam Hussein. "The objective," Chirac observed at the outset of a carefully timed Middle East trip, "is to disarm Iraq, not to change the regime." Le Monde boasts in one headline, "Chirac makes Bush reverse." Another headline has "Toward an American reign in Iraq?" with immediately below it a typical cartoon entitled "Another America," showing all the good people demonstrating for peace while an angry little Bush glowers in the corner. The Journal du Dimanche asserts that "France has spoken, resisted, laid down the law, and its voice has been heard," crediting Chirac with nothing less than a miracle.

In the National Assembly, deputies jostle to denounce the United States for pursuing its own interests while they emphasize that France must do exactly the same. A so-called Bureau of International Operations coordinates the participation of 130 French firms in an annual trade fair that will soon take place in Baghdad. The French oil giant TotalFinaElf, for instance, will be able to enjoy Iraqi contracts only through appeasement of Saddam and the removal of sanctions. Chirac's minister of ecology, Roselyne Bachelot, just happens to be the founder of the Franco-Iraq Association. Tripping up the United States, such circles hope-and expect-that France will gain the support of Iraq and the Arab world, leaving the road to power and primacy open again.