PARIS — Jacques Chirac has just set a record. A poll published yesterday gave him the highest approval rating ever accorded a French president. Other polls reveal that most French citizens back his government's Iraq policy. The two are obviously linked.
A week in France talking almost non-stop to politicians, intellectuals, journalists, public servants, and foreign policy experts reinforced the polls.
Only two small groups dissent: some left-wing intellectuals with strong affinity for Israel, and a cluster of conservative politicians and writers who fear for French-American relations, the most prominent in parliament being Pierre Lellouche, a former adviser to Mr. Chirac who, under the circumstances, has shown remarkable courage.
This being a country where the political and media classes are vastly better informed about world events than their opposite numbers in Canada, there are others who critically parse this or that aspect of French policy in the months leading to war.
A few observers complain that France should never have threatened a United Nations veto, because it hardened the U.S. position and made France the target of U.S. anger.
Others suggest that France should never have made such common cause with Germany at the joint celebration of the 40th anniversary of their friendship treaty. That gesture only confirmed Washington's fears that the French acceptance of military means if weapons inspections failed was a canard, since the Germans had said they would never sanction force. Still others see a logical gap in the French position. If inspections needed the threat of force to be effective, why did France not send troops or planes to the region?
These criticisms all have some merit. But even those who offer them still support the French bottom line: the U.S. war is illegal and unwise, and the Bush administration's "unilateralism" is dangerous for the world and unacceptable to France and Europe.
These assumptions are so widespread as to be almost incontestable. They are reflected hourly on television and daily in the leading newspapers. Here and there, someone takes aim at the assumptions, but they are as helpless as Iraqi anti-aircraft fire against cruise missiles.
The assumptions reinforce themselves at every level. At the deepest, they reflect an anti-Americanism that has been part of French life for two centuries, a complicated, curious phenomenon for a country that has never fought against the U.S.
Asked which country is "most unlike" France, an exhaustive study found 43 per cent said the U.S. (8 per cent said Germany). At different stages in French history, anti-Americanism was found largely on the political right, and at other times on the left. Now it sprawls in varying degrees across the spectrum.
That sentiment alone doesn't account for today's attitudes, since it has been around for a long time. What has been added is an almost universal distaste for the Bush administration -- from George W. Bush himself and his foreign policy advisers, to his doctrines of "pre-emptive" war, disregard of international law and treaties and, in French eyes, the bullying of other countries.
Claude Imbert, one of France's most experienced journalists, also proffers the shadow of France's lost influence after the defeat of 1940 and the loss of its colonies. Those memories, he says, reinforce the uneasiness, even resentment, France feels at the hegemonic power of the United States.
The most palpable factor is the profound conviction that, on this war, France got it right. The vast majority of people around the world outside the United States agree with the French analysis. That agreement reinforces France's conviction that the war so earnestly desired by the Bush administration is a horrible geopolitical mistake.
France has become public enemy No. 2 in the U.S. after Saddam Hussein. Turn "French fries" into "freedom fries," declared Republican congressmen. Right-wing commentators have been apoplectic, even racist, calling the French "cheese-loving surrender monkeys," and worse. (France, it should be noted, lost more men in the First World War than the U.S. has in all of its external wars combined.) An excitable New York Times columnist suggested throwing the French "off the island."
The French have responded with remarkable sang-froid. They have not returned the invective. Perhaps what they are getting merely confirms their preconceptions about Americans, from which the French, while taking it on the chin, derive some comfort.
