Just say non.(Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France)(Book Review)

Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France, by John J. Miller and Mark Molesky (Doubleday, 304 pp., $24.95)

WHY are relations between France and the United States so bad these days? After reading this book, one might be excused for wondering when they were ever good. Certainly not since the American Revolution, is the final verdict, and not really even then.

Our Oldest Enemy, a collaboration between NATIONAL REVIEW's John Miller and historian Mark Molesky, is popular revisionist history in the best sense, a reexamination of the turbulent relationship between France and America in light of recent events, particularly the war in Iraq. It recounts much that has been forgotten by or hidden from the general reader, while letting him see the familiar, such as the liberation of France in World War II, from a fresh angle. The authors have an ax to grind: but it is a wickedly sharp, carefully honed ax. Miller and Molesky may overstate their case with their title, but no one after reading the book will fall for the notion of France as "our oldest ally" again. According to Miller and Molesky, it's been hate at first sight.

The ugliness began in the early 18th century, when American settlers became pawns in the struggle between France and Britain in the New World. Since the French liked to goad their Indian allies into massacring entire settlements, including women and children, the colonists learned to hate the Gallic sponsors of the terrorism in their midst, in this case terror with tomahawks instead of car bombs. The French returned the enmity with interest: Propagandists denounced George Washington, the young colonel of the Virginia militia who fought against them at Fort Necessity in 1754, as a coward and "assassin" (of course, when it suited them later in the American Revolution, they buried the hatchet and hailed him as a hero).

It was fear and loathing of the French, not of the British, that first encouraged the 13 colonies to draw together for mutual support against the threat on their frontier. By 1763 France had lost the war, and its hopes of an American empire; but those hopes revived when the colonists and the British Crown came to blows in 1776. It was revenge, not love of American liberty, that prompted the French to support the Founding Fathers--and it did so only after the colonists' victory at Saratoga had proven to the French that they would be backing a winner. The one sincere standard-bearer of Franco-American comity, the Marquis de Lafayette, was reviled and ridiculed in his own country; and after independence was won, America would fight its first war as a fledgling republic against its erstwhile ally.

From 1798 to 1800, France and the United States fought an undeclared war at sea, with French privateers shamelessly looting American merchants and with the republic's new navy--led by "Old Ironsides," the USS Constitution--getting its baptism of fire and capturing more than 80 French vessels. Even after the last shot was fired, the issue of compensation for American merchants whom the French had ruined would drag on and poison relations between the two countries into the 1830s. "It is high time," said Andrew Jackson after long and bitter experience, "that this arrogance of France be put down." Only the threat of war finally forced the French to pay up--but not before they had demanded an apology from Jackson. "Apologize!" he exclaimed. "I'd see the whole race roasting in hell first!"

Abraham Lincoln would have agreed with the sentiment, if not the language. He found himself constantly vexed by Napoleon III's efforts to establish an empire in Mexico under the ill-fated Prince Maximilian and his support for the Confederacy. This same Napoleon had the idea of a French canal in Panama, to sever the United States from Latin America and to revive France's already-shrinking global role; but the effort was, as we all know, in vain. France's hopes of becoming the world's leading power were crushed with the fall of ...