Recall that the “rush” to war with Iraq was attended in the U.S. by an efflorescence of Francophobic fever. Our streets ran red with Bordeaux (a revolutionary excess worthy of the Reign of Terror); France was placed in an “axis of weasels”; in public discourse, Frenchmen were reduced—quelle injustice! quelle effronterie!—to shiftless Pépé Le Pews, reeking of Gauloises and raw fear.
For all that this reaction was condemned as boorish or “xenophobic,” one feels there is a great gulf between “Chirac est un ver” or “freedom fries” and, say, Jean Baudrillard’s comment about 9/11: “How all the world without exception dreamed of this event . . . .” (Tell us what you really think, Jean.)
The question is not “Why do they hate us?” but “Why don’t we hate them?” The answer is on display in Our Oldest Enemy (Doubleday, 261 pages, $24.95), John J. Miller and Mark Molesky’s amusing, and amusingly overzealous, study of French treachery, from the Quasi-War of 1798-1800 to Vichy France to Derrida: We don’t quite hate them because it’s far more fun to laugh at them.
If good humor and thick skin are American traits, leaden self-importance and sniffling pique are their French counterparts. Bernard-Henri Lévy, in The New York Times Book Review, called the book “a mad charge (whose only equivalent I know is the fascist French literature of the 30’s) against a diabolical nation.” Do you think that’s any accident? Dig a bit deeper, Maigret, and you’ll find the joke’s on you.