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

David Pryce-Jones

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.

By coincidence and with wonderful timeliness, two books have exploded simultaneously into the cozy slum of French intellectual life, exposing the underlying vanities and illusions of French anti-Americanism. Altogether breaking ranks, Philippe Roger in L'Ennemi americain and Jean-Francois Revel with his L'Obsession anti-americaine reach similar conclusions: that anti-Americanism is not related to whatever the United States might actually be or do, but reflects murky depths of the French psyche. Persistent divisiveness and repeated social failure, general loss of influence in the world and injured pride, have solidified into an inferiority complex. Taking it for granted that France ought to be the world's leading power, French intellectuals have long been accustomed to seeing America as a standing reproach. As Philippe Roger puts it, hatred of America is nourished on a "violent contempt of oneself."

Roger is an academic, teaching at one of France's prestigious colleges of higher education. His is the first study to reveal the extraordinary continuity of French anti-Americanism and its significance in the French view of themselves. Since the 18th century, the French have been treating America less as a real country than as a theater in which to work out fears and fantasies of their own. In the eyes of Enlightenment luminaries like Voltaire, Buffon, and Cornelius de Pauw, the New World was a pale and inadequate copy of the Old World, doomed by nature to remain so. "No opera!" was Stendhal's put-down, which leads in a straight line to Sartre's notorious observation that American cities offer no protection in an "immense and hostile space."

Successive generations of French intellectuals built stereotypes of the American as an errant and inferior European, a reprobate savage, a bone-headed Yankee, and of course a cowboy, the description applied to President Bush incessantly and instinctively throughout the French media. Examining what he actually found in the country rather than the notions in his head, Tocqueville was a lone exception, but few in France read him. The print order for his famous book on America, published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840, was 500 copies. So the fantasy soon took hold that an ignorant and boorish United States was deliberately conspiring to do France down.

As France lost its position as a power in what used to be called the Concert of Europe, its ruling and intellectual circles perfected the skill of deflecting blame away from themselves and onto the United States. At the time of the American Civil War, the French overwhelmingly backed the Confederacy, dreaming of nothing less than the dismemberment of the Union, which already looked likely to dominate them. Anti-Americanism was to become the only unifying principle among Frenchmen of the Left and the Right, unable to agree among themselves on the basics of the state. War and revolution have repeatedly demoralized them. Roger leaves the reader in no doubt that anti- Americanism for the French is a defense mechanism indispensable to their self-respect.

Jean-Francois Revel puts the same argument in a more immediate and polemical form. In previous books, he has championed freedom and democracy against totalitarianism with unmatched bravura-as exceptional in contemporary France as Tocqueville was in his day. He knows America well enough at first hand to dispose with authority of the Stendhal- Sartre line that it is a country without culture. With marvelous clarity and logic-much embellished with a sarcastic wit all his own-he digs out the resentment and envy which is at the core of anti- Americanism.

And if America is today the world's only superpower, it is because Europe abandoned the field. Europeans alone are responsible for concocting, and submitting to, the two absurd and criminal regimes that brought apocalypse to the continent. To add insult to injury, Europe is now trying to draw some sort of principle out of its impotence. As Revel rubs it in, "American unilateralism is the consequence, not the cause, of the reduction of power of the rest of the world." American interventions abroad, he points out, have often been in the interests of Muslims. Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, or elsewhere cannot rescue themselves from the assorted dictators, terrorists, and Islamists who condemn them to backwardness, and therefore it is only right for America to be doing so in their behalf, as not so long ago it liberated Europeans.

With a sale already well over 100,000, L'Obsession anti-americaine is unexpectedly on top of the non-fiction bestseller list in Paris. To Revel's surprise, even Le Monde gritted its teeth and gave him a good review. The French will come through, as they somehow always manage to do. With or without due deference to Roger or Revel, Chirac and his cabinet are well able to realize that a position taken against the United States in the Security Council risks losing France the last vestiges of its influence, condemning it to the outer darkness into which Schroeder has just cast Germany.

In the event of regime change in Iraq and the resumption of normality in that unhappy country, of course, the Herr Schaabs and Herr Schompeters, along with board members of TotalFinaElf and a hundred other French companies, will be full of self-congratulation as they board their flights in the treasure-hunt for contracts, quite as though they owed this turn of fortune to themselves and their handling of an awkward situation. But they may find that the new regime in Baghdad remembers their governments' record-and that Washington does, too.

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