Toujours l'antiamericanisme: The religion of the French elite.

The election of George W. Bush as president has released emotional spasms through Europe. With the exception of Spain and Austria, and now Italy, every European country is in the hands of socialists, champagne socialists to be sure, but all convinced that an American Republican is a beast outside polite society. In Britain, the Blair regime wrings its hands, and a columnist-in the Guardian, where else?-considers that America is now the evil empire. The Germans follow suit, in their own inimitably embarrassed and embarrassing way.

The French-mais naturellement-are far out in the lead. At the moment when the U.S. Supreme Court was sitting to decide the electoral questions put before it last November, the French ambassador, Francois Bujon de l'Estang, delivered a speech in New York, and highly articulate it was too, an exact summation of the French outlook today. He conceded that the Franco-American relationship was "extremely volatile and highly flammable," going on to list the resentments felt in Paris. He then praised the exceptional French contribution to civilization, naming all manner of artists currently at work in France (alas, not a household name among them). But what he emphasized was French universalism and its "monumental perspectives." The factors at work in French diplomacy, he concluded, are "a lofty idea of France and its role in history, its mission in promoting values, and also a certain vision of the world, the will to defend its interests on the five continents."

Vision of the world! Universalism! Five continents! Here is such stuff as dreams are made on. The French are conjuring up for themselves another monumental perspective in which to reshape the world.

The French ruling elite, its bureaucrats especially, are undoubtedly clever and inventive people, much given to the Cartesian joys of system-building. Democratic in name alone, France has always been a rigidly centralized and regulated state in the grip of those who control it. No matter whether the regime has been monarchist or republican, right or left, French statism has been the constant governing doctrine and political reality. But with troublesome regularity the vaunted French state has a tendency to collapse. The invariable tactic of the ruling elite is then to huddle together in the political equivalent of Custer's Last Stand, reinforcing statism rather than reforming it. Rebuilt as before, the system repeats its flaws.

The German invasion of 1940 and the subsequent occupation signified a collapse of France so total and humiliating that the ruling elite still cannot come to terms with it. They know that they owe their liberation to America, not to their own efforts. To General de Gaulle must go the credit for rebuilding the postwar republic, but he did so in the uninspiring image of the failed prewar republic. Whether the General really disliked and resented America is uncertain. More probably he chose to develop the ambivalence felt towards American power as social glue to fix the system as before. As the Cold War set in, the very elite that shortly before had collaborated with Nazism now prepared to collaborate with Communism. The graffito "U.S., Go Home," daubed on so many French walls, served the General's purposes well, as he sneered at NATO and whipped up animus against what he liked to call les Anglo- saxons, a bogus entity if ever there was one. By 1963 he was confiding to Alain Peyrefitte, one of his ministers and a faithful echo, "The truth is that the Americans will end up getting themselves hated by the whole world."

As a political movement, Gaullism is dead. But the psychological impulse to level accounts with both Germany and America survives like a virus in the bloodstream. The French elite believes that it is pulling off this double trick by means of the European Union currently taking shape. Here is an example of French statism writ large, a bureaucratic and undemocratic construct, seemingly the ideal instrument for refashioning the continent in the image of France. Germany, the French believe, is tamed (though still fractious). Now, in a mighty neo- Napoleonic fantasy, they aspire to co-opt into a wider coalition the statist countries of the world, China and Russia first and foremost, and then lesser but valuable allies like Iran, Iraq, and other Arab states.

In days gone by, the Soviet Union was the prime source of anti- Americanism. So effective was Soviet propaganda worldwide that the French contribution to this particular poisoning of the well was relatively harmless. Now the French are encouraging all-out ideological mobilization against the United States in the attempt to rally their prospective coalition. However shadowy its reality and meaning, globalization is the key concept upon which to mount the attack on American values and practices. Felix Rohatyn, the financier and Bill Clinton's ambassador in Paris, from time to time issues dyspeptic pronouncements on Franco-American relations, and in one such he explains that in Paris "globalization has an American face on it and is a danger to the European and French view of society."

"Unilateralism" is the term expressing resentment that America is defending its own interests. (Instead the French advocate multilateralism, meaning that they will make the decisions.) The alternative accusation of "isolationism" is a complaint that they are unable to influence America to do what they want. In this vocabulary of challenge, "unipolar" and hyperpuissance-"hyperpower"-are words further emphasizing that the French feel demoted, envious and angry. In direct competition with the United States, they see themselves creating a hyperpower of their own, an alternative globalization, a true Socialist International.

Campaigners that they are, President Chirac, Prime Minister Jospin, Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine, virtually the entire French political class, object to all Bush's policies, foreign and domestic, indulging in end-of-the-world hysterics about things great and small, from his projected missile defense to his failure to support the proposed world court, and the abandonment of the Kyoto protocol on global warming, down to the implementation of the death penalty for murder. According to Jospin, a fount of socialist dogma, the Bush administration does not think that "rules that make the international community work" need be taken into account.

Up with the European Union, therefore, which, according to Rene Remond, an eminent historian of modern France, is built on "the idea of continuing to have influence, of being heard in the world, of not being told what to do and not being dependent-especially vis-e-vis American hegemony." Up with the proposed European Rapid Response Force that will neutralize the American military presence and finally render it superfluous. Up with the United Nations whose committees can be packed and its resolutions bent (as we have seen recently with the Human Rights Commission). Up with the mobs whose anti-capitalist riots are a perfect ideological fit.

Correspondingly, down with NATO, described in Le Nouvel Observateur as America's "instrument of political and military control over Europe." Down with sanctions on Iran and Iraq, and down as hard as possible on Israel. Down with the oppressive and invasive English language, down with the Internet that uses that language. Down with Hollywood whose films have at least half the market share in France, and are self- evidently corrupting (though the historian Alain Besancon replies that a thousand Hollywood films have not done so much damage as a single French philosopher on American campuses). In the view of Jean-Pierre Chevenement, formerly Jospin's minister of the interior, the United States is dedicated to "the organized cretinization of our people." Down with fast food. A French farmer by the name of Jose Bove became a totem overnight when he vandalized a McDonalds, afterwards comparing himself to Gandhi. President Chirac, a known gourmet, joined that barricade too: "I am in complete solidarity with France's farm workers, and I detest McDonalds' food."

Louis Delmas is one opinion-monger among umpteen thousands, neither better nor worse, author of a book in praise of Yugoslav Communism (n.b., an extinct animal) with a preface by Sartre. But enthusiasm for the Serbs is incidental to his wholly characteristic cursing of the Bush presidency.

In order to reach the top in the U.S., one has to be a boot-licking son, a devoted father, a blindly faithful husband, a zealous cult worshipper, a fervent supporter of the death penalty, a preacher who can dress electoral fraud to look like God's will, and a puppet molded by public-relations specialists, just able not to stammer (too much) on television. If one can muster all these qualities, one can reach the summit of a nation whose chief characteristics are obesity, violence, and bigotry . . . Practically all our leaders scorn in private the star-spangled cowboys. Not a dinner in town that doesn't ring with contempt for hamburgers, the stupidity of Bush and Gore, the arrogance and incompetence of the newly rich, the corset in the heads of narrow- minded Puritans or the vulgarity of Yankees abroad.

For Delmas, America is Globocop, subordinating the world to its interests. In contradiction, it is also "a rotting giant now governed by a half-wit." France is "an applied ornament in an American lounge" when instead it ought to enjoy "a strong position based on the independence of a nation whose history is worthy of respect." (Ah, respect: but who was disrespectful?) This is a severe outbreak of the Gaullist virus, with accompanying symptoms of inferiority complex. Delmas has colleagues who write the sort of books Ambassador de L'Estang did not mention, with titles such as Who Is Killing France?, American Totalitarianism, The World Is not Merchandise. A book called L'Horreur economique is one of many diabolizing American capitalism and the free market. In another book, No Thanks, Uncle Sam, Noel Mamere, a member of the French parliament, reaches the peroration, "It is appropriate to be downright anti-American." Michel Houellebecq's novel Les Particules elementaires has been the main, indeed the only, recent sensation in literary circles. Outwardly it is another of the misanthropic raves in which French writers specialize, but as critics have observed, everything that he finds wrong with France is thanks to America.

People on the street, needless to say, don't have time for this. There is little room in their busy and successful lives either for neo- Napoleonic universalism and monumental perspectives, or for inferiority complexes. If they think about the political elite at all, it is to denigrate them and their ambitions, and to wish that the whole lot were in gaol (as quite a few of them are). Were it feasible, they would vote to close down the European Union tomorrow, and to back away from allies like Russia and China and Iraq.

An American almost anywhere in France is virtually certain to receive a friendly greeting, and to hear praise for the latest Spielberg movie, and perhaps even for Euro-Disneyland, that genuine cultural freak. The real mystery is how there has come to be so wide a gap between those at the top who formulate all this anti-Americanism, and those at the bottom who are indifferent to it. The French are at it again, as Noel Coward might have put it. The exaggeration, the posturing, are comic, except that fantasies and systems blow up to injure their promoters.