Jean-Marie Le Pen and the French paradox. (Foreign Affairs).(retrospective view of French politics)

LAST YEAR the great French film-maker Eric Rohmer released his latest film, L'Anglaise et le Duc (The Lady and the Duke in anglophone countries). Set in Revolutionary France, it is based on the diaries of a Scottish woman named Grace Elliott (she was known as "English" by the French of the time, who then as now rather gallingly make little difference between the inhabitants of the Isles).

Grace Elliott, an intelligent, spirited woman, was for a time the mistress of the infamous Duke of Orleans, cousin of Louis XVI. This liberal, revolutionary grand seigneur signed the warrant for his own cousin's execution, thus exemplifying in one hideous gesture the fratricidal nature of the Revolution. (It did not save Citoyen Orleans from the guillotine, of course.) Grace Elliott left Orleans, but stayed in Paris during the Reign of Terror, thus providing an eyewitness view of the Revolution as it was truly lived, not mythologised.

Rohmer's portrayal of the period, of the inhumanity and terror of a time when ideologues and psychopaths were in charge of affairs of state, and a kind of collective madness gripped a large section of the population, is unexceptionable to most people, certainly in anglophone countries. His non-ideological stance, focusing on the suffering and terror of the victims, and the hypocrisy and viciousness of the tormentors and fellow travellers; his pessimistic theme, that the road to hell often starts with the search for heaven on earth: all these things are not exactly virgin territory, you might think. Most anglophone reviews of the film tended to focus on his unusual cinematic technique, and whether it worked in conveying the sense of the time.

But in France, the reaction was different. Although, in a sign of the times, on websites devoted to film, ordinary French filmgoers reviewed the film fairly, media critics focused almost exclusively on the fact that Rohmer should dare to imply that the Revolution was anything other than an unalloyed good, and its participants anything other than saintly idealists. The octogenarian film-maker-was forced to defend himself against the charge that he was some kind of traitor. His plea, that he "did not do this film for political reasons, but to tell historical and human truths", did not sit well with the hypocritical Committees of Public Safety who inhabit the "quality" media in France. It was all reminiscent of the furore surrounding another daring, or innocent, film-maker back in the seventies: Louis Malle, and the reaction to his ground-breaking masterpiece about the Occupation, Lacombe Lucien.

The whole kerfuffle was an illuminating illustration of the fact that the wound of the Revolution has never healed in France. Periodically it reopens, and shows forcefully that there are not one but two Frances; those divided not only between pre and post 14th July 1789, but more cogently, between pre and post 10th August 1792. That is, before and after the radical coup d'etat by the two extreme factions, the Girondins and Jacobins, which unilaterally abolished the 900-year-old French monarchy and installed the world's first modern totalitarian dictatorship and first Year Zero dystopia.

Worldwide, this is also where Nazism's and fascism's, as well as Bolshevism's true roots lie. Here is the birth of extreme right and extreme left, reflections of each other, brothers under the skin, would-be moulders of humanity: its supposed saviours, but in fact its enemies.

BEFORE THE RADICAL takeover, there had been a possibility that a truly representative government under a constitutional monarchy might be formed. This was Louis XVI's wish: in his papers found at the Tuileries (but quickly suppressed) were plans for a two-chambered parliament, reform of laws, and much else that would have made France into the same kind of stable parliamentary state as Britain.