French fried

John KERRY has a dirty secret: He speaks fluent French. Throughout the current campaign, however, the Democrats have treated this fact and Kerry’s many French connections (including a cousin who once led France’s Green Party) as embarrassments, not advantages. Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh has taken to calling the Democratic candidate “Jean Cheri,” while House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) has been known to start speeches with the words, “Good afternoon -- or, as John Kerry might say, ‘Bonjour.’ ” Clearly, the animosities that last year gave us “freedom fries” and “freedom toast” have not yet subsided. France, more than ever, is the nation that Americans love to hate.

These animosities date back long before France’s attempt to block America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. From the earliest days of British settlement in North America, the colonial forebears of the United States frequently maligned the French as cowardly, effete, treacherous, hygienically challenged papists. Apart from the anti-Catholic part, this cloudy prism of stereotypes has survived largely intact -- even if it doesn’t stop Americans, at other moments, from rhapsodizing over French art, food and style. Meanwhile, the French have their own enduring stereotype of us as overgrown children: friendly but hopelessly uncouth, blundering and aggressive.

Since World War II, the animosities -- and accompanying prejudices -- have been kept alive above all by the imbalance of power between the two countries. Put simply, France is too strong, both economically and militarily, to settle into the role of an American satellite but too weak to act as a true counterbalance. Britain, which suffers from a similar problem, can at least cast itself as America’s wise elder cousin (or, in late British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s wishful words, an Athens to the American Rome). France, by contrast, has swerved back and forth between alliance and rivalry and repeatedly tried to rally world opinion behind it, the better to oppose us. Now come two books that both express and try to profit from the newest wave of American Francophobia. They proceed, however, in very different ways.

John J. Miller and Mark Molesky have written what can only be called one of the silliest works of history to appear in many years. In brisk prose, they survey the history of Franco-American relations from the start, relentlessly emphasizing those elements that do the French least credit. They go all the way back to the massacre of British settlers in Deerfield, Mass., in 1704 (actually carried out largely by Iroquois allies of the French, but let’s not quibble). They then survey such familiar episodes as the 18th century XYZ affair (when French officials solicited bribes from Americans), Emperor Napoleon III’s flirtation with the Confederacy and Charles de Gaulle’s obstructions of Gen. Eisenhower, and finish up with the Iraq war.

The book is amusing but also strewn with errors -- such as the assertions that the French today unquestioningly adore Napoleon (they don’t) or that they have no tradition of assimilating foreign immigrants. (In the period from 1920 to 1965, France welcomed and assimilated a higher proportion of immigrants than did the United States.) Miller and Molesky also mistake Chauvin, the vaudeville character who gave his name to chauvinism, for a real person. Their level of analysis is exemplified by their description of Jean-Paul Sartre: “a short, stocky, ugly little gnome of a man.”

Even so, the overall account seems plausible enough -- until one asks the question: What if the authors had decided to focus on our relations with some other country? What about Britain, for instance? There, Miller and Molesky would have had the little matter of the Revolutionary War to discuss, not to mention the burning of the White House by British troops in the War of 1812. What about Spain, from the early border squabbles to the recent withdrawal of its troops from the Iraq coalition. (And remember the Maine!) What about Germany, Japan or Russia? The history of international relations is rarely an unabashed love fest. Miller and Molesky could have written this book about almost any country with which America has had significant relations. In fact, despite all the squabbles they recount, and despite the mutual stereotyping, our relations with France have been, relatively speaking, quite good.

“The French Betrayal of America” at first seems like more of the same. “What’s wrong with France?” asks Kenneth R. Timmerman in his introduction, and indignantly he surveys recent expressions of French anti-Americanism. But Timmerman is an investigative reporter with many years in Europe behind him, and once past the first few pages of France-bashing, he has fascinating stories to tell.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he writes, as much as half of France’s annual arms exports went to a single country: Iraq. In the same period, Iraq signed lucrative deals with French oil companies. And, in that oil-glutted land, the French constructed a nuclear power reactor, which Saddam Hussein himself called the first step on the road to an Iraqi A-bomb. During this period, one French politician stood at the center of all those deals. He was the protege of the founder of the French arms conglomerate Dassault. He was the leader of a political party that received large illegal donations from the oil companies. He was the promoter of the Osirak reactor (which Israel destroyed in a daring raid in 1981). And he was a self-proclaimed “personal friend” of Hussein. His name was Jacques Chirac. Chirac’s dealings with Hussein’s Iraq continued even after the 1991 Persian Gulf War and contributed directly to his opposition to George W. Bush’s Iraq war. In other words, in the debate over the war in 2002-03, the country arguably most obsessed with Iraqi oil profit was not the United States, but France.

Unfortunately, Timmerman does not tell this amazing story straight but weaves it confusingly in and out of a general history of Franco-American diplomatic relations since the 1960s. His telling of this larger tale is fairly conventional, emphasizing the shifts from a bumpy period under De Gaulle in the 1960s, to better times in the 1970s and 1980s, to the present unpleasantness. (It’s worth noting that, unlike Miller and Molesky, Timmerman accepts that France and America have historically been good allies.) The principal twist is that Timmerman, an old-fashioned hawk, makes a surprising hero out of the late French Socialist President Francois Mitterrand. Not only did Mitterrand share crucial intelligence data on the Soviet Union with the U.S., he supported the U.S. decision to station medium-range missiles in Germany and later backed the first President Bush in the Gulf War. However, Timmerman adds that Mitterrand, angered by American attempts to block French high-tech exports to the Soviet Union, finally broke with this honorable record in 1988-89: “The cold war was far from over, yet Mitterrand appeared to have switched sides.” This is a strange interpretation, to say the least, given that the Cold War was in fact nearly over, and that France did not come close to leaving the Western alliance.

On the subject of Iraq, beyond the damning portrayal of Chirac, “The French Betrayal of America” makes a number of spectacular claims. Notably, Timmerman alleges that Hussein promised the French $100 billion in exclusive oil contracts if they kept him in power; that the French supported Hussein’s genocidal tactics toward the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, so as to make the region safer for French oil companies; and that France helped Iraq build the long-range missiles used in the first Gulf War. On these points, it is not always clear how far we can trust Timmerman’s often-unnamed sources, many of whom are present or former officials on both sides of the Atlantic with obvious axes to grind. As a good reporter, Timmerman has been cultivating them for a long time -- but, of course, they have been cultivating him as well.

Still, Timmerman’s real contribution is not so much any particular “revelation” but his compelling description of the corruption in the French political system and its consequences for French foreign policy. Well-meaning Americans who have not followed French news closely over the last few years may find it hard to believe Timmerman here, too, but he is not exaggerating. Over the last decade, one major French figure after another has been implicated in scandals that range from housing relatives rent-free in luxurious state-owned apartments to illegally funneling millions of dollars into their party treasuries -- or their own pockets. Chirac himself has escaped prosecution only because France’s constitutional council ruled that he had immunity from prosecution while in office -- incredibly, the justice who handed down the decision almost certainly relied on Chirac’s help to then escape jail on corruption charges. No wonder that nearly half of all French voters cast ballots for extremist candidates on the right and left in the first round of the 2002 presidential election. In his final chapters, Timmerman lucidly summarizes this recent history, emphasizing that Chirac’s shady dealings with Hussein are part of a larger, and very ugly, picture.

This story of how Gaullist rhetoric about France’s role in the world ended up serving as little more than a cover for pure venality is a story at least as disturbing as anything in “Our Oldest Enemy.” This does not mean, however, that we should applaud Miller and Molesky in their crude revival of anti-French stereotypes and their selective rewriting of history. The corruption of what the French call “the political class” is a sign of the failure of France’s political system, not the deficiencies of its national character. The story does, however, mean that American policymakers should stay highly alert and suspicious in their dealings with the Chirac administration. If “Jean Cheri” beats George W. Bush in November, he might do well to practice some extra-sharp French phrases before his first visit to Paris. *