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."