Richard Reoch:

For me the starting point is overcoming ignorance. That is where the Buddha said we should start. We have to make it part of our daily discipline to become better informed about the world we live in. We need to be able to distinguish between truth and falsity such as misinformation from our governments and from mainstream news media.

Vida Scudder:

It is through creating, not possessing, that life is revealed.

Vauvenargues:

The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught.

Shunryu Suzuki:

If it's not paradoxical, it's not true.

Sylvia Boorstein:

Entry-level right speech is speech that doesn't add pain to any situation. This takes care of the obvious mistakes, like telling lies or purposely using speech hurtfully. High-level right speech maintains the balance of situations by not adding the destabilizing element of gossip. Gossiping is talking about someone not present. Except on rare occasions when one might need to convey a need on behalf another person, gossip is extra. Talking disparagingly about a third person is inviting the listener to share your grumbly mind space. Talking admiringly about a third person might cause your listener to feel unimportant. Why not choose to talk about current experience?

Mark Epstein:

Ignorance means misapprehension: in buddhist parlance, it means imputing a sense of solidity in persons or things that is not necessarily there.

Samyutta Nikaya I, 117:

Were there a mountain all made of gold, doubled that would not be enough to satisfy a single man: know this and live accordingly.

Henepola Gunaratana:

View all problems as challenges. Look for opportunities to learn and to grow. Don't run from them, condemn yourself, or bury your burden in saintly silence. You have a problem? Great! More grist for the mill. Rejoice, dive in, and investigate.

Bernard Glassman and Rick Fields:

The question is designed to let you keep probing all the different concepts you have about yourself. You make a list, you start with your name, 'I'm Bernie.' But then you might think, 'I'm not just Bernie, I'm an engineer.' Then again, 'I'm a father,' or 'I'm a brother.' And so on. But whoever you come up with is not who you are. It's one of the roles you play. But if you keep going, past all those roles and identities, you might eventually find yourself in a state of unknowing . . . when we let go of all concepts and ideas, we experience ourselves as we really are.

Pir Vilayat Khan:

There are certain times in life . . . when you find yourself in a state of suspense, in a crisis where you know you simply cannot go on the same way you have so far. You don't know exactly yet how you are going to change, but you know that you have reached the stage where there must be a dramatic turn-around . . . I am talking about a change in the way you are thinking. It is during that instant of time, when you are free from the past and future, that you can make a pledge to turn over a new leaf. Like catching a fresh breeze at sea, this gives you the impetus to make a new start; with the suddenness of a boat changing tack, you can feel your life changing direction. Because from the moment you have made this pledge, you are a different person. You have strengthened yourself and now proceed by leaps and bounds. This will have a corresponding effect on your surrounding circumstances because the effects of the past have been interrupted by your pledge; the past has finally lost its power over you.

Photograph by Megan Holmes

Joseph Goldstein:

Speech is a powerful force. But how much attention do we pay to our speech? Do we actually bring some wisdom and sensitivity to our speaking? What is behind our speech, what motivates it? Does something really have to be said? When I was first getting into the practice of thinking and learning about speech, I conducted an experiment. For several months I decided not to speak about any third person; I would not speak to somebody about somebody else. No gossip. Ninety percent of my speech was eliminated. Before I did that I had no idea that I had spent so much time and energy engaged in that kind of talking. It is not that my speech had been particularly malicious, but for the most part it had been useless. I found it tremendously interesting to watch the impact this experiment had on my mind. As I stopped speaking in this way, I found that one way or another a lot of my speech had been a judgment about somebody else. By stopping such speech for awhile, my mind became less judgmental not only of others, but also of myself, and it was a great relief.

Agnes Martin:

I think it's quite enough to investigate your own negative feelings. You will learn the truth about life investigating your own mistakes, and not worrying about the mistakes of others. Your own will be enough.

Jon Kabat-Zinn:

Cultivating mindfulness is not unlike the process of eating. It would be absurd to propose that someone else eat for you. And when you go to a restaurant, you don't eat the menu, mistaking it for the meal, nor are you nourished by listening to the waiter describe the food. You have to actually eat the food for it to nourish you. In the same way, you have to actually practice mindfulness in order to reap its benefits and come to understand why it is so valuable.

Bill Whittle:

Transcript of "A Tale of Two Revolutions: The War of Ideas & Tragedy of the Unconstrained Vision"

You know, we've been talking a lot of politics lately, so why not just for a change, why don't we talk a little bit about some of the philosophy behind the politics.

Some questions are eternal. Why has there always been war and conflict? What drives men to destroy each other over ideas? Is conflict the result of a giant, horrible misunderstanding between peoples? Is there a universal right and wrong? A code that all of humanity can agree upon?

Well, I'm not smart enough to know the answers to those questions, but I know someone who is. An American philosopher and raw genius, Thomas Sowell has a theory: Sowell says that beneath politics and party, beneath even ideology and morality, lies "a conflict of visions" about the very nature of what humanity is and about how the human heart is constructed. It's this fundamental view, not of who we are but of what we are that determines the trenches we will inhabit when were confronted with a war of ideas.

Now, during the Age of Reason, endless thought was given to the nature of mankind, because needless to say, the kind of government one vision of mankind required was very different, opposite even, to the one best suited to a different vision of the human animal.

One school of thought held that mankind is inherently flawed, limited by his personal fears and desires; man as a being constrained by the essential, unchangeable weakness of his nature.

Now according to the constrained view of humanity, primitive man lived a life doomed in the words of Thomas Hobbes to be ". . . Solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short." And it was largely this pessimistic view of mankind as having inherent irredeemable flaws that so greatly influenced the founders of the American Revolution, to design a society that would prevent this vision of a flawed mankind from accumulating too much power.

That political vision became coupled with the equally constrained economic views of Adam Smith who saw common good coming from what is essentially selfish individual pursuits.

Now after a great deal of thought and debate, adherence of this constrained view shook the world in 1776 with the American Revolution. Let's call that the "constrained revolution."

Now opposing this constrained vision was the belief that man in a state of nature was not a brood at all, but rather virtuous, compassionate, sharing, noble and kind.

The Swiss philosopher Jean Jean Rousseau wrote ". . . You are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody." Well now. That is a very different view of the natural state of mankind; it's a different vision than that of the power and money-grubbing creature espoused by Adam Smith in the constrained view.

Now although the phrase the "noble savage" is often attributed to Rousseau, he never actually in fact used that term, but he did believe that man in his natural state was a virtuous creature and that all of the wars and conflicts that have arisen were merely the inevitable result of people staking claims to property and ownership that primitive man never envisioned let alone practiced.

This man, Rousseau's man, was unconstrained by his past or his biology, and therefore free to become whatever he could imagine for himself. And remarkably, just a few years after the birth of the constrained revolution in the New World, in France, this romantic, optimistic view of the nature of man also erupted into revolution; the French Revolution; the "unconstrained revolution."

So, which vision of man comes closest to the mark? Is man a fatally flawed creation whose constrained by his nature to act selfishly and whose best hope is to cobble together a series of checks and rules that allow him to pursue his own self-interests with the least damage to others? Or, conversely, is man a fundamentally good and wise and generous creature, unconstrained by nature, wanting only a just society and freedom from the superstitions of the past to achieve heaven on earth?

Because if you accept the constrained vision, then history is a catalog of trial-and-error, it's a vast storehouse of wisdom from which to draw upon. You would view all that's gone before as experiments that test an unchanging human nature against various forms of government, and from this data you would pick the least flawed elements and try to make a culture from those. You would want to conserve this wisdom.

But, if you side with the unconstrained vision of humanity, then mankind's past would not be a source of wisdom to be conserved, but rather philosophical and political shackles that one must be liberated from through a process of reasoned debate and introspection; that was the outgrowth of what many have called the "cultivated mind." Nothing would be beyond the power of a few such reasonable, virtuous men.

And it was this unconstrained view of a new man free from the chains of decadent bourgeois morality and religion that through the French Revolution would light the way to a future of liberte, egality, and fraternity: liberty, quality, and brotherhood.

So which is it? Well, here I must leave Thomas Sowell behind to draw my own conclusions.

One of the men who argued most passionately for the virtue of mankind was one of the architects of the unconstrained French Revolution; his name was Maximilien Robespierre. When he saw the poverty and the ruin inflicted upon the French people by their king, Louis XVI, he argued for his execution saying "Louis ought to perish rather than 100,000 virtuous citizens. Louis must die so that the country may live." And so die he did on the guillotine, followed by his queen, Marie Antoinette.

She in turn was followed by most of the hated aristocracy, and the priests, and the well-to-do merchants. You could be guillotined for having insufficient fervor and in fact, you could be guillotined for having too much.

Innocent people, thousands of them, were often sent to their deaths just based on an anonymous whisper. And Robespierre approved of all of this: "If virtue be the wellspring of a popular government in times of peace," wrote Robespierre, ". . . Then the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror . . . . Virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent."

Robespierre and his fellow revolutionaries with their highly cultivated minds called themselves the "The Committee for Public Safety." (They always call themselves something like that.) And when the unconstrained revolution finally came for Robespierre and his closest confederates (because it always has, and it always will), these disciples of Rousseau and his noble man of nature found themselves barricaded in a small hotel room at 2 o'clock in the morning.

Robespierre's brother Augustin threw himself out of a window. George Couthon was found lying crippled at the base of the stairwell where he hurled himself down in order to escape from the virtuous. Now Robespierre himself tried to shoot himself in the head, but he only succeeded in shattering his own jaw. He screamed in agony the next morning when they tore off his bandages so he could be guillotined cleanly.

And legend has it, that of all the tens-of-thousands that were beheaded in the pursuit of heaven on earth, only Robespierre was executed facing upwards so that he could watch his own death coming to claim him.

Now, if the guillotining of a champion of virtue amid rivers of blood was the moral of the unconstrained revolution, what example can we take from the constrained revolution across the sea in America?

Well, right after the Boston Massacre where the hated British Army fired upon unarmed American civilians, the soldiers accused of this murderous act were put on trial in Massachusetts. That they were guilty of this action is not up for discussion. They shot those people and by the standards of the French Revolution they were infinitely more guilty than the tens-of-thousands of innocent French men and women that were sent to their deaths on a whisper.

But . . . but, a society based upon the constrained vision of mankind which sees him as irredeemably flawed and slaved to his emotions and fears, determined to protect itself against those defects, and devise a system of justice that called for a trial by jury and demanded a competent defense. That defense, was provided in-turn by an obscure lawyer who would go on to become the constrained revolution's second president.

John Adams argued that these hated soldiers were in fear of their lives, and they as individuals did only what any man would do in such a case . . . they simply defended themselves, and John Adams won that case, and those hated enemies were set free.

And a government based upon the constrained vision of a flawed mankind gained another data point with which we can weigh our decision.

Now since that time the unconstrained view of a perfectible, naturally virtuous man and his utopia-on-earth has given us 11 million gassed to death in national socialists death camps, no less than 30 million killed in various purges in government induced starvations in the paradise of equality known as the Soviet Union; 50 million, 50 million killed in the communist Chinese utopia of cultural revolution and the great leap forward, millions more executed for lack of revolutionary virtue in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and in Vietnam under the victorious armies that were so celebrated at the time in the streets of America by those most blinded by the beauty of unconstrained virtuous new man and his godless heaven right here on earth.

And yet . . . there in the gloom and pessimism about what and who we are lies the unlovely, stony and narrow path, a vision not of what might be, but rather of what is and always was. It's a road not of ideals in unity, but of messy and imperfect compromise, where scandal and corruption are never defeated but only contained. Where hundreds-of-millions of people going about their own lives and making their own decisions function not without mistakes or tragedy, but only do so far less than they would if only the best and brightest did the thinking for them.

The so-called "cultivated mind" is no match, none, history records none for the collective wisdom, for the common sense, and the common self-interests of imperfect and flawed but fundamentally moral and decent people. It's far from perfect . . . it's merely good. That's all it is.

You see, the shiny golden road of the unconstrained vision leads to the death camp. The gloomy narrow path of the constrained vision leads . . . to Disneyland. Disneyland isn't perfect . . . it's just the happiest place on earth.

Ezra Bayda:

Intellectually we may realize that we need to look deeply inside, yet we don't really know it. There are people we laugh at because they can't see the most obvious things about themselves. Well, those people are us! We have to acknowledge that we often simply don't want to see the aspects of ourselves that cause us distress. We basically want life to please us -- to feel comfortable and secure. Our last priority is to expose our own shaky supports, the tenuous beliefs that stand between us and unknown territory. Why? Because investigating ourselves at this level doesn't necessarily feel good. But until we become aware of all the ways in which we keep ourselves oblivious to what lies under the ice, we will continue to simply glide along with no direction.

Huang-Po:

Consider the sunlight. You may say that it is near, yet if you pursue it from world to world you will never catch it. You may say it is far, yet it is right before your eyes. Chase it and it always eludes you; run from it and it is always there. From this example you can understand how it is with the true nature of things.

Dzigar Kongtrul:

When we're watching a movie in the theater, we can relax and enjoy the show because we know it's an illusion. This magical display that we're watching is the result of a projector, film, light, screen, and our own perceptions coming together. In separate momentary flashes of color, shapes, and sound, they create an illusion of continuity, which we perceive as characters, scenery, movement, and language. What we call "reality" works much the same way. Our ability to know, our sense perceptions, the seeds of our past karma, and the phenomenal world all come together to create our life's "show." All of these elements share a dynamic relationship, which keeps things moving and interesting. This is known as interdependence.

When we look around us, we can see that nothing exists in isolation, which is another way of saying that everything is interdependent. Everything depends upon an infinite number of causes and conditions to come into being, arise, and fall away moment by moment. Because they are interdependent, things don't possess a true existence of their own. For instance, how could we separate a flower from the many causes and conditons that produce it -- water, soil, sun, air, seed, and so forth? Can we find a flower that exists independently from these causes and conditions? Everything is so intricately connected it is hard to point to where one thing starts and another ends. This is what is meant by the illusory or empty nature of phenomena.

The outer world in all its variety and our inner world of thoughts and emotions are not as they seem. All phenomena appear to exist objectively, but their true mode of existence is like a dream: apparent yet insubstantial. The experience of emptiness is not found outside the world of ordinary appearance, as many people mistakenly assume. In truth, we experience emptiness when the mind is free of grasping at appearance.

Seeing the emptiness of the phenomenal world relieves us of the heavy notion of things being solid or intrinsic. When we understand that nothing exists independently, everything that does arise seems more dreamlike and less threatening. This brings a deep sense of relaxation, and we feel less need to control our mind and circumstances. Because the nature of everything is emptiness, it is possible to view our life the way we would view a movie. We can relax and enjoy the show.

Fred Pausch:

. . . even if you are in a position of strength, whether at work or in relationships, play fair.

"Just because you're in the driver's seat, doesn't mean you have to run people over."

Hui-neng:

Realize that understanding is always so much more than the words themselves. So much of what we read or hear requires engaging ourselves deeper with the material than a cursory reading to understand. Too often we read or hear something profound, nod our heads, and file it away for later. There is an expression "A hundred times make clear the reading." How often do we reread anything stretching to understand? The next stage is finding a way to apply the material so we can feel it in our bodies, not merely in our heads. The challenge for all of us is to find a way to move the knowledge from head only "understanding" to real life experiential, in our bodies understanding. While there are many paths, the only ones that count are the ones we truly engage ourselves in. Long ago Confucious said, "Only one who bursts with enthusiasm do I instruct; only one who bubbles with excitement do I enlighten. If I hold up one corner and you do not come back with the other three, I do not continue the lesson." Straightforward mind is the place of practice; straightforward mind is the pure land.

Ayya Khema:

Due to having made karma, rebirth consciousness arises. But we need not think of rebirth only in a future life. We are in actual fact reborn every moment with new thoughts and feelings, and we bring with us the karma that we made in the past moments. If we were angry a moment ago, we are not going to feel good immediately. If we were loving a moment ago, we would be feeling fine now. Thus we live moment to moment with the results of our karma.

Every morning, particularly, can be seen as a rebirth. The day is young, we are full of energy and have a whole day ahead of us. Every moment we get older and tired enough in the evening to fall asleep and die a small death. All we can do then is toss and turn in bed, and our whole mind is dreamy and foggy. Everyday can be regarded as a whole lifespan, since we can only live one day at a time: the past is gone and the future may or may not come; only this rebirth, this day, this moment, is important.

Shunryu Suzuki:

Naturalness is always there, moment after moment. But usually, forgetting all about naturalness, you behave as if you have something. What you do is based on some possessive idea or some concrete idea, and that is not natural. For instance, when you listen to a lecture, you should not have any idea of yourself. You should not have your own idea when you listen to someone. Forget what you have in mind and just listen to what he says. To have nothing in your mind is naturalness. Then you will understand what he says. But if you have some idea to compare with what he says, you will not hear everything; your understanding will be one-sided; that is not naturalness. When you do something, you should be completely involved in it. You should devote yourself to it completely. So if there is not true openness, it is not natural.

Bukko Dendo Kyokai:

There was a man who was apt to get angry easily. One day two men were talking in front of the house about the man who lived there. One said to the other: 'he is a nice man but is very impatient; he has a hot temper and gets angry quickly.' The man overheard the remark, rushed out of the house and attacked the two men, striking and kicking and wounding them.

When a wise man is advised of his errors, he will reflect on them and improve his conduct. When his misconduct is pointed out, a foolish man will not only disregard the advise but rather repeat the same error.

Paco Ahlgren:

Everything in the universe is either knowledge or potential knowledge. Every decision we make is the manifestation of ideas -- progress is generally defined as the growth of knowledge. And while knowledge can be both helpful and deadly. Once it exists the only way to control it is not to control it. That's true simplicity. If you try to swim up a river, eventually the river will win. The more we try to defy reality, the more dramatic the repercussions will be.

Marcel Proust:

The grandeur of real art . . . is to rediscover, grasp again and lay before us that reality from which we live so far removed and from which we become more and more separated as the formal knowledge which we substitute for it grows in thickness and imperviousness -- that reality which there is grave danger we might die without ever having known and yet which is simply our life, life as it really is, life disclosed at last and made clear . . . .

Kirk Varnedoe:

Somewhere back in a rainy summer in the 1970s, I made a pilgrimage of sorts to a place in the north of England that had fascinated me for years; it's a playing field that's part of the Rugby School, and on the wall next to that field is fixed the marker I came to see. It reads: "This stone commemorates the exploit of William Webb Ellis, who with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the Rugby game. A.D. 1823." After duly photographing that stone, I ceremonially smeared two postcards with the turf of the field, and sent them to two brothers, who, along with me, had caught the bug of the Rugby game, an ocean and a century and a half away from that 1823 event.

It's a long tale how the game spread, then changed into eleven-man block-and-tackle football, and thus spawned a vast, expensive industry that absorbs American Saturdays and Sundays from the sweat of August to the ice of January. But in the late 1960s, a lot of American collegians, disenchanted with the corporate, semimilitary aspects of that industry, regressed against its grain. They went back to what seemed the simpler fun of Rugby, a rough but virtually equipmentless game without substitutions or time-outs, then played by makeshift clubs with few spectators and no publicity--in a spirit of sportsmanship that revered, in about equal measure, a hard contest and a good party afterward. I was among these primitivists; and as I moved back toward the bare essentials of the sport, I found my curiosity enduringly piqued by the tale of its origin. What possessed Webb Ellis, in the heat of a soccer game, to pick up that ball? And stranger still, why didn't they just throw him out of the game?

I understand now that it's all more complicated. Not just soccer but the broad variety of English schoolboy ball sports provided Ellis a panoply of waiting options, and the opportune moment was owed partly to Rugby's desire for a game of its own to match those, like the Eton wall game, of its rivals. The spread of the British Empire then did a lot to foster the branching diversity of seven-man, thirteen-man, Australian rules, and gridiron eleven variants that followed. Also, French "revisionists" try to argue that British chauvinism ignores the precedents in some ancient Gallic ball game, and so on. But whatever blurring these alternatives effect, and whatever historical details flesh out the tale, Webb Ellis's exploit still seems to me to be as sharply chiseled out a kernel as we could hope for of what cultural innovation is all about. Somebody operating in the context of one set of rules sees that there is another way to go, and takes matters into his or her own hands; and someone else, or a lot of others, chooses to view this aberrant move, not just as a failure or a foul, but as the seed of a new kind of game, with its own set of rules.

The rest, we say, is history. And when we say so, I think we mean that, while the consequences (like the football industry) lend themselves to mundane chronicling, there's something about this kind of "fine disregard" that doesn't easily fit into that kind of history. A gesture such as Webb Ellis's explains what followed from it a lot more convincingly than it is itself explained by what came before. Nothing we could know of the boy and his background, nor any account of the circumstances of the school, could independently suffice to rationalize the wonder at the core: a charmed moment of fertilization between a gesture that might otherwise have fallen on fallow ground and a receptive field that might otherwise have gone barren. Innovation is a kind of secular miracle: secular, because it happens amid the humdrum machinery of life getting along, and virtually everything about it is comprehensible without recourse to any notion of supernatural mystery or fated destiny; miraculous, not only because it can change things dramatically, but because none of that machinery suffices to explain why it had to happen this way.

Among the rewarding, educating pursuits of my life, Rugby ran for many years in happy parallel with the study of modern art, and I don't accept the notion that they are incompatible. But when it comes to origin stories, there is a difference, and Rugby has the edge. It's not that I yearn for a Webb Ellis painter, and the clean simplicity of one originating gesture. The greater number of renegade players, the complexity of the audience, and the higher cultural stakes, all make the history of modern art a much more absorbing tale of change. But we need some better accounts of how that game, too, first got off the ground. The available ones tend to make the opening exploits seem all miraculous or all secular, too transcendent or too mechanical to properly credit some of our culture's fines and most fruitful transgressions of its rules.

On the side of miracles, we have to concede something to those who say modern art is like a religion. There has been a kind of orthodoxy, inculcated in countless devotees, about how it all came to be; and the doctrinaire version of that story, of Edouard Manet who begat Paul Cézanne who begat Pablo Picasso, in a march out of servile naturalism into the promised land of abstraction, explains what has happened in art since 1860 about as adequately as the seven days of Scripture account for the fossils in Devonian shale. Yet the people behind the weak gospels are often the very people who created the powerful art. Perversely, some of the liveliest rhetoric of artists and critics--the manifestoes and battle slogans of a pugnacious new minority out to change the world--has come to nourish the most inert, cardboard notions of what that art means. And though that embattled minority has now spread its domain to extents even its palmiest prophets never dreamed of, friends and enemies alike still look to these shopworn sermons as guides to understanding how it happened, and what it has all been about. In this sense, modern art after World War Two, and after 1960 especially, is not so much a cult with a bible as a culture without a constitution: a far-flung, complex republic that seems to keep flogging the propaganda of its founding guerrilla wars as its only operating charter.

It is not hard to see how this impasse developed. Any account of modern art's origins has to tie together a bewildering variety of objects and events, from Manet's urbane spaces and Claude Monet's landscapes, through styles as disparate as Paul Gauguin's flat color and Georges Seurat's dots, to the more hermetic departures of Picasso and Georges Braque in Cubism. The canonical way to make sense of that story was to describe all those rapid-fire changes as a march of progress, and explain the welter of new forms as revelations of necessary truths. This approach treats Auguste Renoir's portrait of Monet painting outdoors, for example, or Gauguin's "primitive" visions as emblems of discovery, almost in the fashion of pioneering science: Realists or Impressionists renouncing the musty academic studio to capture immediate sensations of natural light and color; and Post-Impressionists like Gauguin moving on to explore symbolic forms engendered deep within the mind. Such art was bound to succeed, the story goes, because it was RIGHT. Whether by fidelity to the givens of nature (Monet's trued observation) or to the structures of the mind (Gauguin's purer imagination), it reached outside the confines of mere convention, where the academics were mired, into the domain of the necessary and universal.

The more aggressive the changes, the greater the apparent need to claim a basis in something permanent and objective. When early modern painters broke established rules, and let go of resemblance to mundane reality, proponents typically maintained they were actually following better rules that charted a higher reality--according to the dictates of, say, Platonic philosophy, Bergsonian time-consciousness, or n-dimensional geometry. The push toward forms of abstraction around World War One brought this kind of advocacy to a special, fevered pitch. Discrediting familiar European artistic traditions, artists and supporters alike invoked the more absolutist authority of sources in science, mathematics, mysticism, primitive or exotic art, and so on, that were "timeless" by virtue of their disconnection from the historical clocks of Western taste. And for more than half a century since, we have continued to hear such appeals to non-art systems of determining order and higher truth, variously found via recourse to dreams, mathematics, or cognitive theory, in sources that range from X rays to entropy, form new religions like theosophy to new sciences like cybernetics.

At the same time, though, others have preached that modern art's progress was shaped by an internal aesthetic logic that accorded with the most advanced intellectual spirit of its time and place. The most sophisticated version of this story describes a sequence of step-by-step refinements, in which each art form gradually moved toward a purer realization of its essential nature. Painting, for example, stripped itself of illusionism and literary reference to arrive at an unadulterated presentation of color and shape of a flat plane. In this reading, Monet and Gauguin pioneered not by superior advance toward facts, but by retreat from art's perspective and modeling and the forthrightness of their bold brushstrokes or unalloyed color, inaugurated a world-spurning drive toward the medium's self-definition--a drive that, so the creed upholds, distinguishes the truly modern from the merely novel in twentieth-century creativity.

Clearly there's a big difference between explaining the last hundred years of art as a search for ultimate truths, and analyzing it as a baton race toward historically appropriate aesthetics. Yet both those stories are about focused movement toward absolute forms, and both evoke an air of destiny. That kind of vision--the kind that makes modern art a goal-oriented crusade and a cause of faith--has been indispensable in embattled times, and generative in crucial ways. For countless artists, a deep belief in one or another of these higher systems has been a key motivation to creativity, in the face of few other assurances and against considerable resistance. And histories based on such an idealistic sense of purpose--showing, for example, how the flat picture plane ultimately triumphed or how form hewed ever closer to function--have set the benchmarks for any account of modern art's origins and development. Like other kinds of evangelism, though, these credos degenerate into dogma. And more important, over the long haul and in the broader view, such stories about ordained progress and perfection just do not work.

As regards Monet and Gauguin, for instance, neither the notion of pure "impressions," nor that of eternal mental forms, stands up in terms of what we know about cognitive processes--or tells us anything useful about how their pictures were really made. And the subsequent path of modern art is littered with countless other lost causes, fad enthusiasms, and misused authorities, from Milarepa to Mesmer to Mandelbrot. Grand pronouncements of aesthetic/historical necessity have recurrently proved to be only excuses for a moment's taste; they invariably scant the complexity of modern art's origins, and crumble in the face of its ongoing permutations.

Such arguments for transcendent values also notoriously disregard the perturbations of history, to portray instead a grand procession that strides along above the muck of ordinary life. Little wonder, then, that as those claims have lost their credibility, the story of modern art should be retold--as it has been often in the past two decades--in a more tendentiously secular way, as a function of sociopolitical context. In this approach, for example, Monet's garden views aren't neutral glimpses of nature, but politically slanted fictions of 1970s suburban life in Paris; and Gauguin's glorifications of untutored rustics have less to do with eternal ideals of a pure mind than with dated illusions about France's rural underclasses.

This kind of demystification has substantial justice on its side. Countless modern artists have proclaimed that their boldness was an integral expression of the society of their time. And it is far more believable, just on a human level, that even the most potent innovations are less prompted by predestination than by a tangle of local motivations and conditions. Art historians love to unravel those tangles, too, because it involves fascinating sociological research and engages charged issues of political concern. But by shifting their emphasis to social context as the prime source of meaning, some of these historians are also devaluing the most basic notions of modern art's significance.

The crucially original aspect of later nineteenth-century art has always been seen to lie in the steadily more obtrusive inflections of style--Manet's peculiar spaces, Seurat's insistent geometry, and so on--that apparently began moving painting away from figurative representation toward abstraction. But the recent writing redefines these innovations as analog transcriptions of social conditions. The ambiguous space in Manet's Bar at the folies-Bergere is said to convey, for example, the confusions of class mixing in Parisian cabaret life; and the frozen architectural rhythms in Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte are meant to critique the starchy rigidity of the middle-class strollers. The new social historians treat such monuments of the later nineteenth century--previously seen as premonitions of a new, autonomous language of art--coded commentaries on the social conditions of their day.

Pictures like Monet's, formerly touted as transparent naturalism, are now interpreted as opaque screens, inscribed with the prejudices of a particular mind, class, and epoch. And where we were formerly asked to see opaque devices closing off worldly representation, as in Manet's spaces or Seurat's repetitious rhythms, the new account asks us to read specially structured reports on the conditions of the day. Realism is unmasked as disguised stylization, and stylization--even as it later moves into abstraction--is deciphered as disguised Realism. The frontier between them, that crucial line that modern art crossed, seems diminished in significance.

This kind of revision has been most provocative when it unveiled new, hidden meanings in icons of early modern art like the Bar and the Grande Jatte. The revisionists maintain that the attention and honor given these works over the past few generations have been either misdirected, or sublimated, away from recognition of the real critical function of the pictures. But critiques that require a century to decipher have failed in some basic sense. And it is hard to categorize these artists as exemplary failures--unless one is willing to count the whole enterprise of modern art which they initiated as equally inadequate and unsuccessful, on the same grounds of a pesky lack of political clarity. That larger conclusion, in fact, seems to lurk not too much further down this interpretive path.

This new social history of art is often deeply researched and subtle. Rather than dealing in simplistic notions of literal content, it recognizes that innovative forms are the key aspect of early modern art. But its interpretations of those forms almost always scant something basic. If literalism and critical precision were their aims, certainly these artists were foolish to pursue them in terms of unfamiliar and often willfully illegible, nonreferential new forms. And to say that they used such devices in order precisely to map particular unfamiliar and imprecise conditions (e.g., and untraditional and confusing pictorial space is a calibrated analog for a novel and complex social space) is to put back into the art new elliptical versions of the very things that were highest on the modern artist's reject list: little moralizing narratives and legible, one-to-one correspondences between art forms and specific, textual meanings.

The effort to enlarge the human import in modern art's innovations must entail more than reducing them to a freshly clever form of oblique social reporting. It has to allow that these innovations succeeded as they did by resisting simple explanation, and by proving adaptable to other, unexpected uses, as bearers of an expanding set of meanings. If Manet's core contribution was to capture class anxiety in cabarets, or if the most telling challenge Seurat posed was how to take a stand on the social problematics of leisure time in Paris in 1884, would these pictures have gone forth and fructified as they did? More baldly, why would anyone but academic partisans care? Ultimately, history has valued these pictures more for the questions they raised than for the ones they resolved, more for what they opened up than for what they pinned down.

A moral issue is entangled with an interpretive strategy here. Some people think that unless a picture bears timely social freight, it is not doing any useful work; and that idle art is the devil's plaything. For those who reckon art a pawn to larger societal powers, it follows that it must graft itself aggressively to a chosen aim, lest it be taken hostage for someone else's purposes. Art with less than secure ties to explicit texts (like Jackson Pollock's dripped paintings, for example, or abstract art in general) runs a higher risk, so the argument goes, of being appropriated by unacceptable admirers. Hence the new way of decoding makes an effort to rescue modern masterworks from a long history of such purported misuse, and rehabilitate their authors as adherents--at least by intention, if not by result--to this proper moral position.

But that's not how modern art works. Such discomfort with the vagaries of artistic license, and with the uncertainties of any art that is not didactic, is profoundly antimodern; and revalidating major monuments of modern art in these terms is a chillingly perverse enterprise. Besides delimiting the bounds of innovation on the artist's end, it also devalues the contemporary viewer's perception and judgment, and mistrusts the possibility for art, without attendant documents, to be intelligible in any worthwhile way. If the only real meanings of the work are those that we derive from understanding its original context, then the merely "visual" is to be mistrusted and must be heavily framed with research. In place of the close-order (but historically unconcerned) looking required by adepts of the "pure" analysis of form, the social history of modern art demands a detailed "reading," in which what is not present in the work is asserted to be just as important as (or more important than) what is.

This effort to reweave a net of original contextual linkages around modern art's experiments, as a way to capture and constrain its meanings, is born of a basic skepticism about human communication. Can the things people make in one set of circumstances communicate anything useful to other people in other times and places, without some explanatory lexicon? Can an insider language say anything to outsiders--or more pointedly, when rogue individuals transgress the limits of a consensus vocabulary, how can the forms they invent carry any real significance for a wide and diverse community? Some of the stories we hear about modern art are illegitimately optimistic on this question, and ignore the difficulties involved; others harden them into impossibilities. One side proposes that as it becomes more abstract, art approaches the domain of guaranteed truths. By implying that people can have access to universal truths through personal insight, this notion continues the venerable hope for an ideal language that could transcend time and place, and make the same sense to cavemen and nuclear physicists. The opposing view, skeptical of the possibilities for individuals freely to gain and transfer knowledge, sees modern art, and especially abstraction, as a set of time-determined conventions that only force into higher relief the artificial, limiting nature of all languages.

These positions are interwoven, too, with emotional assessments of the gains and losses of modern experience. In the one view, art is the partner of modern creative discovery and heightened consciousness; in the other, its virtue lies in a critical mirroring of modernity's failings and special injuries. Here in a nutshell is the familiar antinomy of utopian and dystopian views of modernism, and the characteristically modern mood swing between extremes of hope and despair--or intellectually between extremes of absolutism and relativism. Each side has its evidence, for there are lists of artists' statements and powerful works of art that seem to back up one or the other view: a positive exhilaration about the expanded possibilities of individual freedom, and liberation from the dead weight of tradition; and an alienated ache for lost stability and consensus, or the equal dread of monotonous conformity, and inescapable oppression. In such dilemmas, there is not going to be a final "right side"; experience tells us modern life is a mixed blessing whose mix keeps changing. But if we will never resolve this problem we might at least get a better fix on what modern art--unquestionably the signal, defining cultural invention of our epoch--has to tell us about it.

As the disenchanted never tire of pointing out, there are glaring disparities between what modern art promised in the manifestoes and what it has proved to be. But the problem is not just that a lot of the early utopian visions don't square with what went wrong--as in the gap between the reformist hopes of some architects and the mean uninhabitability of instant slums built to their model. It is also that such rhetoric, and the standard origin stories built on it, offer no adequate explanation for all that went right--no plausible way to account for the immense dissemination of modern art's innovations, or for the pleasure and stimulation diverse masses of people have derived from them. Even the most overreaching early claims made for the new art tend to tie it to a specific set of intentions and a focused destiny in a way that shortchanges its potentials for more complex meanings and a broader base of acceptance.

The importance of Monet and Gauguin is not measurable against a scale determined by perceptual theory, any more than it is delimited by Third Republic politics. We do not have to agree either with Seurat's color theories or with his anarchism to find profound human content in his landscapes, any more than we have to be Einstein to be fascinated by Cubist portraits. And only an infinitesimal percentage of those who jammed Picasso's 1980 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, or who have come to stand before Pollock's drip paintings in various degrees of bewilderment and thrall, cared an iota about the historical destiny of the picture plane. And yet people--a broad range of ages and types of people--have found in these odd and difficult things a rich spectrum of meanings and uses, in private, social, and civic life. Those Pollocks, for example, which at first seemed only like spattercloths or chimpanzees' scribbling, have swiftly come to inform a spectrum of visualization and thought that runs from banal decorative patterns to the most serious efforts to reimagine the sublime, and have served in turn to empower a vast, expanding field of art that in no evident way resembles his. Modern art's most salient and valued attributes have to do, not with absolutism and exclusivity, but with this heterogeneous inclusiveness and unprecedented openendedness, in its means, its concerns, and its audience.

The choice between determined, explicit meaning and no meaning at all is a false one. Abstraction, for example, has proved to be an enduringly fecund aspect of the culture of this century, without being either a universal lingua franca, or a code for hidden textual meanings. The willingness to explore such forms, without defined, consensus significance, has been the motor force of modern art. In this regard, the progressive arguments about the search for truth and perfection get things backward: the art has turned out to be more accessible and replete with meaning, more powerful and enduring, than the authoritative systems or historical destinies that supposedly produced it and gave it significance. Such art has persisted, and been generative, by failing to fulfill, and thus outstripping, the claims its advocates made; and even, in many cases, the boldest intentions of its creators. This dissemination, moreover, had nothing to do with destiny. The astonishing thing is that a whole array of outrageous new forms was produced and accepted, proliferated, and eventually radically transformed Western visual culture--though there was not historical necessity, and no foundation in fixed Truth with a capital T, that justified the oddities or validated the attention paid them. In sum, the art works, and the stories do not.

We need better stories. To recover a truer sense of the secular miracle in modern art, we have to replace its conventional genesis accounts with a genuinely Darwinian notion of evolutionary origins and growth. The record of its history so far--the succession of fault lines and fissures, the mix of extinctions and expansions of new family trees--doesn't present just a roster of forms developed to fit changing conditions, any more than it reveals the playing out of some predestined design. It is a powerful demonstration of the creative force of contingency--the interaction of multiple mutations with special environments that started with a few basic reshufflings of the existing gene pool, and has yielded an amazing, diverse world of thriving new forms of life.

The signal difference, of course, is that this evolution has nothing to do with universal, natural law. Its unfolding depends on (though its results are not determined by) the conditions of specific cultures at a distinctive moment in history. The shaping "environment" is a shifting cast of people who have decided, for a panoply of reasons noble and ignoble, to tolerate, pay attention to, or actively support, an unprecedented expansion of artists' prerogatives to create what a biologist might call "hopeful monster"--variations, hybrids, and mutations that altered inherited definitions of what could be. The profligacy modern art needed in order to grow--the seemingly gratuitous attempts to adapt familiar things to unexpected purposes, the promiscuous couplings of disparate worlds of convention--could not survive outside this climate. And the raw material here is not random change, but personal initiative: the individual decisions to be an outsider within one's own world, to try new meanings for old forms, and attack old tasks with new means, to accept the strange as useful and to reconsider the familiar as fraught with possibility.

That's why Webb Ellis's exploit seems such an apt model--not as a determining stroke of genius, but as a seemingly gratuitous rearrangement within a fluid set of established conventions, that finds its possibilities and purposes as its ripples spread. The act focuses our attention on the indispensable role of personal will and initiative, certainly. But precisely because this act was so simple, human, and willfully contrary, it illuminates the creative power that lay around it, in the interplay between the possibilities a culture offered, and those it proved willing to accept. We should not allow the power and complexity of the universe of artistic forms by which we have come to identify our epoch and ourselves in it, form Manet to Pollock and beyond, to blind us to its origins in just such occasions, when individual acts of conviction deflect known but neglected potentials to meet a field of latent but undefined opportunities, and thereby empower whole new systems of unpredictable complexity, with far more than intramural appeal.

A prime intention of this book is to honor those exploits: modern art, I hope to show in detailed examples, did not originate in the wholesale overthrow of all conventions and the protean creation of wholly new forms, nor in the impact of alien influences from outside the Western world. Nor were its innovations shaped by the grinding-wheel of local social forces. It has been the product of individual decisions to reconsider the complex possibilities within the traditions available to them, and to act on basic options that were, and remain, broadly available and unconcealed.

This kind of art is conceivable only within a system that is in crucial senses unfixed, inefficient, and unpredictable--a cultural system whose work is done by the play within it, in all senses of the word, in a game where the rules themselves are what is constantly up for grabs. More than the forms themselves, it is this frame of mind, individually and societally, that is crucially new about modern art. That is why those early innovations, those first ruptures of convention that detonated the sequence, remain so fascinating as exemplary acts. If we lose sight of them in the fog of theories, or overrationalize them in the web of art-historical detailing, if we let them get hardened into legends of predestination or reduced to mechanical responses to circumstance, we explain away modern art's birthright. But if we can have better, more accurate stories that do justice to those origins--to the initial moments of "fine disregard" when artists grasped new possibilities from within established games, and transformed what was known into the seeds of something new--we will have a better sense of why the rest is history.

Paul Berman:

I.

The September 11 attacks ignited in France a burst of ardent solidarity with America, but also a series of chillier responses, which can be described and classified. There was an onrush of wariness, along traditional Gallic lines--a fear that America, in its wrath, was going to wrap its muscular arms ever more tightly around the world and crush the French under all kinds of new pressures and competition. This kind of worry has plagued the French imagination for centuries, originally in regard to England--a worry that has never been entirely foolish, given the generally downward trajectory of French power and glory. But the ancient worry grew unusually intense after September 11.

This was because, in the estimation of more than a few French observers, America in the modern age had ceased being the benign and generous power that so many people flattered themselves on remembering from the glorious days of Franklin Roosevelt. The signs of America's transformation had already begun to appear during the Clinton years--most horrifyingly, during the struggle against Milosevic's Serbia and the NATO air campaign, which in some people's estimation already suggested an eerie parallel between modern America and Hitlerian Germany. Then Clinton's successor ascended the White House, and everything about the new president, each strange tic and motion--the street thug's swagger, the inability to compose his face into a civil expression, the problem with alcohol, the apparent lack of formal education, and so forth--conjured in Europe the worst of clichés about Texas barbarism.

The new administration made the rather weird decision to do away with diplomatic niceties, except in regard to minor questions, with the result that Washington's dismissal of the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol on gas emissions, and a number of other agreements succeeded in alarming French opinion twice over--first, because the issues in question loomed large in French eyes, but mostly because of something else, which needs to be explained. France during the last sixty years has achieved a gigantic victory, and this has been to make peace with Germany.

A century and a half of catastrophic wars were brought to a pleasant and profitable end--an occasion for quiet joy and perpetual self-congratulation. It is true that, in the euphoria of this achievement, French political thinkers have sometimes gotten carried away and, in their own imaginings, have projected France's diplomatic triumphs upon the world, quite as if every national dispute and fanatical political movement around the globe could be peacefully suppressed, if only governments everywhere would follow the French example and insist relentlessly on patient negotiation and sweet reason. This idea has proved to be a little fanciful, more than once. Still, in Europe itself, France's achievement was undeniable and vast.

But was this achievement guaranteed to endure forevermore? The French did have to wonder. What was likely to happen if Bush's disdain for diplomacy and his nationalist struttings and his peremptory style ended up establishing a new tone in modern affairs? America wanted to lead, but what if other countries chose to follow? The French knew exactly what would happen. Where Bush's American admirers and even some of his non-admirers merely saw cowboy hats, the French saw lederhosen. And the French--a great many of them--recoiled. I find it hard to believe that anyone with lofty responsibilities in the Bush administration ever appreciated how much damage was done to Franco-American relations by Washington's foreign policy maneuvers in those early months of 2001--by the arrogant air and the rejection of the Kyoto Protocols and all the rest. Or more likely, no one gave a damn, given that nobody in the administration seems to have imagined that someday the United States might need a bit of French solidarity in the Security Council or a few French soldiers on the ground.

The French uneasiness with Bush touched on something else, too, and this is because France's achievement during these last sixty years has been more than foreign. The French put an end to 150 years of war with Germany, and they put an end to 150 years of war with one another, as well--the permanent French civil war that got started in the Revolution of 1789 and continued through the class struggles of 1848 and the Paris commune and led at last to the triumph of Marshall Petain and victory for the Nazis. The French put an end to all this by agreeing, in the course of the post-World War II decades, on a grand compromise that was never entirely articulated but was, even so, pretty much fulfilled--the modern French compromise that banned the Catholic Church from playing a central role in politics, and that established a generous welfare state for the oppressed proletariat, and in this manner co-opted the revolutionary left.

Extremist violence, right-wing and left-wing, was erased from the national repertoire, and so was the hope of using the state for extremist ends; and the symbol of this civilized compromise was the abolition, during the presidency of Francois Mitterrand, of capital punishment--the definitive end of the guillotine and the firing squad, at long last. This achievement, too, led the French sometimes into dreamy illusions about the scale of their own success. The proletariat received its welfare state, but the proletariat in question turned out to be the children and the grandchildren of the proletarians of yore--and not the new immigrants of the 1950s and 1960s, who were shunted into the invisible suburbs and left to their own devices. Nor did the anti-clerical side of the postwar compromise do the immigrants very much good, for if the Catholic church was by and large pushed out of political life, so was Islam, and the immigrants found themselves prevented from speaking in the only tones that were theirs by birth, which were Muslim tones. And so, the immigrants, left to their own devices, discovered that they had no devices, with the result that--well, the streets have been on fire lately. Nor was the abolition of capital punishment entirely popular.

Still, France's domestic achievements were genuine, even if the achievements never did penetrate into the suburban housing projects. And from this angle, too, from the perspective of France's domestic peace, the America of George Bush seemed a little worrisome. In America, Christianity had not been pushed out of political life. On the contrary, Christianity in America seemed to have gone insane, with the evangelical sects as principal evidence. Nor was the welfare state looking too healthy in America. The welfare state was shrinking. Nor was capital punishment at an end, in its American version. America seemed poised to execute Mumia Abu-Jumal, who was regarded in France as a famous black leader--a martyr awaiting his martyrdom.

Now, this particular view of American conditions might have looked a little different if the French had kept in mind the peculiarities of American history. In the United States, evangelical sects have always been insane. ("Various forms of religious madness are quite common in the United States," Tocqueville wisely observed.) Even so, Christianity in America has by and large served as democracy's foundation, and not its enemy--which was another of Tocqueville's points. Nor has capital punishment ever played the kind of political role in America that it used to play in France. ("North America," Tocqueville went on to say, "is, I believe, the only region on earth where not a single citizen has been deprived of his life for a political offense for the past fifty years.") As for the welfare state, the French critics had a point, though perhaps it could be argued that jobs, too, have a virtue, and not just jobless benefits.

In any case, instead of looking at these matters from the vantage point of American history, the French observers tended to adopt the vantage point of French history and concluded that America was retreating into the Middle Ages, even if America had never been in the Middle ages. And since Bush in his vigor and naiveté seemed to be in a missionary mood, the danger arose, or seemed to arise, that America's clericalism, its state violence, and its anti-proletarian biases might, like McDonald's, end up spreading to the European continent, and France's achievements might get undone, and the miserable French past might turn out to be the miserable future.

These were the worries. They were scary. And with these purple fears already abloom on the bookstore shelves and in the news kiosks in the early months of 2001, the French watched aghast as, post-September 11, Bush and the Texas barbarians brushed aside the Geneva Conventions and other aspects of normal legality, and the obscurantist Christian bigot John Ashcroft took charge of American law, and the widely predicted American crimes of war did in fact get underway in several parts of the world, quite as if Bush were striding the globe with his six-shooter, dispatching prisoners at random with a cheerful yipee-yi-yo.

The French began to hear about an oppressive political atmosphere in America--the sort of atmosphere in which American magazines and newspapers could shortly expect to be crushed under Washington's iron heel, and political dissidents could expect to be violently suppressed, and power would fall into the hands of a tiny sinister clique. And this most sinister of anti-democratic cabals--who were its members, exactly? Here followed the murmurings about neoconservatism and the heavy hand of Israel on the American steering wheel.

Nor was America's lurch into a post-democratic, ultra-montane, and crypto-Zionist authoritarianism going to bestow upon the world any of the benign effects that might be expected from a well-administered dictatorship--a reliable sense of security, for instance. On the contrary! In France a fear arose that, for all of America's bellicosity, expansionism, and savagery, American power was fragile, and the United States was poised to collapse into economic catastrophe and racial mayhem--which meant that if, out of some perverse logic, France felt tempted to cast its lot with Bush's America, any such alliance would prove to be imprudent, and America was going to drag its friends and allies down to defeat. Weakness, not strength, was the ultimate American reality.

This last argument was the theme of a big best-seller in France, After the Empire, by Emmanuel Todd, which was translated into languages all over the world--a grimly amusing book to read in these recent weeks of French rioting (the subtitle of Todd's book is The Breakdown of the American Order), but all too representative of a certain French estimation of life in faraway benighted America. And so, a great many French people gazed across the Atlantic at Bush and at the raving evangelicals and at the crimes of war, and the French observers began to worry that if America were allowed to run amok, a tide of violence, illegality, and barbarism might steal across the world, and a new Dark Ages might arrive. And this, not anything else, was the greatest danger of our time.

II.

How seriously did people in France cling to these beliefs? Here is a puzzling question. Modern political life is a landscape befogged with mists and clouds of halfway held fugitive opinions--the kind of landscape that allows an intelligent and well-educated person to say with perfect sincerity, "George W. Bush is a fascist and the United States is on the brink of becoming Nazi Germany," and yet allow that same earnest person cheerfully to acknowledge, in the next breath, that, come January 2009, Bush and his entire fascist crew of Zionist conspirators are absolutely guaranteed to vacate the White House in favor of a new and popularly elected team, who might well be Bush's fiercest opponents.

The further away from power someone feels himself to be, the easier it is to wander into these foggy zones of half-believed beliefs, freed of any responsibility to subject any given opinion to the simplest of common-sense tests. In France, even the most sophisticated of people have felt themselves to be located ever further away from the power that is American, and triply so after Bush decided, by abolishing diplomacy, to make a public show of his indifference to French opinion; and this has given a powerful allure to the half-believed beliefs. Nor are the French unusual in this respect, by the way. A fairly astonishing number of serious and prestigious journalists and intellectuals throughout Europe harbor a suspicion right now that, in the age of the possibly crypto-fascist Bush regime, America has turned away from civilization--an opinion that I have heard repeated in one country after another, usually in a tone of sad and anxious concern, the way that someone might express worry about a friend with advanced cancer. And, naturally, there are always professors from America at hand to assure their European colleagues that life in America is sheerest hell, and dissident opinions are about to be crushed under the iron heel, and Bush is a sort of Hugo Chavez, if not far, far worse--just to make these fears seem realistic.

As for the less sophisticated European observers, they have, in a staggering percentage of cases, allowed their own beliefs to wander into fields of purest fantasy that, at some level, every reasonable person knows to be untrue but are, even so, wonderfully amusing and satisfying to uphold, and are therefore irresistible. A writer named Thierry Meyssan came out with a book called Le 11 Septembre 2001, l'effroyable imposture (translated into English as 9/11: The big lie)--which postulates that September 11 was a plot by the FBI and other sinister agents, and that no airplane ever did crash into the Pentagon, and the Jews knew in advance about the World Trade Center. Meyssan's book expresses aspects of the paranoid and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that sprouted up instantly in large parts of the Muslim world after September 11. It goes without saying that, in the French newspapers, Meyssan was denounced right away as a sort of Holocaust denier. Liberation, the hip left-wing daily, played an honorable role in this regard.

Even so, Meyssan's ideas received a more respectful attention in some places--for instance, in Le Monde diplomatique, which is something like The Nation in the United States. An enormous public read Meyssan's book--read it with raised eyebrows, possibly, but read it. A month after publication, the publisher claimed to have sold nearly 200,000 copies, and the book remained number one on the best-seller lists for many weeks. Meyssan's book served as a freaky counterpart to Emmanuel Todd's saner and calmer After the Empire, with one of those volumes predicting America's impending doom, and the other denouncing the infinitely sinister quality of America's evil conspiracies, and both books reigning in the bookstores--this, in a country of supremely cultivated book-buyers.

Pierre Rigoulot is a well-known political writer on anti-totalitarian themes (he was a contributor to The Black Book of Communism a few years ago), and he has written a biting polemical account of these developments in French opinion called L'Antiamericanisme: critique d'un pret-a-penser retrograde et chauvin, or Anti-Americanism: Critique of a Retrograde and Chauvinist Ready-Made Idea, in which he cites a truly impressive number of idiotic French estimations of American life. In Rigoulot's judgment, the slightly exaggerated but reasonable worries about America, together with the genuinely distorted and unreasonable interpretations, together with the outright absurdities, all pulled in the same direction, finally had the effect of producing a condition that he describes as a "pensee unique."

He means by this the intellectual equivalent of a one-party state, or a "near-North Korean" consensus about the horrors of life in America. The pensee unique in France stretched across the political horizon from Jean-Marie Le Pen and the neo-fascist right through the Gaullists and the Socialists to the Communists on the extreme left, and from the respectable intellectuals in the mainstream press to the wide-eyed conspiracy-mongers and screwball anti-Semites--all of whom, right-wingers, centrists, and left-wingers, heartily agreed that Bush's America posed a terrible danger not just to the narrow national interests of France but to civilization.

To be sure, the notion of a pensee unique has a distinctly cartoon quality--an impudent spirit of hyperbole in the French style, which Rigoulot tosses at his readers in the hope of riling everyone up. One of Rigoulot's other books is called The
Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, which he wrote with the North Korean dissident Kang Chol-Hwan--a book that has attracted attention in the United States chiefly because some Christian evangelicals and George W. Bush have taken it up now that dissident testimonials from totalitarian countries have fallen out of vogue in the New York intellectual magazines. But this is to say that Rigoulot, being an old North Korea hand, knows perfectly that nothing like North Korean conditions afflict the intellectual zones of France.

Last year Rigoulot co-edited, together with the journalist Michel Taubmann, a book called Irak, An I, or Iraq, Year One, on the Iraq war, with contributions from Andre Glucksmann, Pascal Bruckner, and quite a few other well-know writers in France, most of whom dissented from French policy and the pensee unique, and many of whom went so far as to applaud America's overthrow of Saddam Hussein. And yet, not one of those heretical editors or contributors was dragged in chains to a prisoner's doom in Devil's Island or some other terrible outpost of the French gulag.

Even so, in writing about an oppressive and conformist intellectual atmosphere, Rigoulot in his L'Antiamericanisme does describe something real--a pressure on writers and journalists in France to stand firm against American foreign policy and especially against the American campaign to overthrow Saddam. Whatever may be the complaints from American intellectuals and journalists about terrible pressures on them in the United States to conform to the Republican line, I am convinced, from hopping back and forth between France and the United States over these last years, that conformist pressures in France have been decidedly heavier. Rigoulot points out that not a single one of the daily national or regional newspapers in France, nor any of the TV chains, supported the American overthrow of Saddam--a degree of unanimity that surpassed even the Germans on this issue.

Well-know independent writers were perfectly free to applaud the overthrow, if they wished to do so. But journalists at big institutions and writers who were younger and not so well-established had to think twice about expressing any such view, if only to protect their careers. During the height of the Franco-American crisis over Iraq, no fewer than three reporters at big national newspapers in France confessed to me, each reporter independently of the others, that the demand for conformity was becoming insupportable, and maybe emigration to some foreign land of freedom might be a good idea--which was yet another hyperbolic exaggeration, to be sure, since no one had the slightest intention of emigrating.

Yet these comments expressed the tensions of the moment. Well-known journalists from other European countries, too, have muttered words to the same effect to me during the last couple of years, but I have the impression that pressures in France have been harder to endure than anywhere else. Nor has it been possible to escape these pressures. French schools have begun to teach current events, and one textbook after another (with Hachette's not so bad, others much worse) have taken to presenting the United States in the grimmest of terms--as the principal danger to world peace and even to France, perhaps even a grater danger, readers might conclude, than is pose by jihadi terrorism.

The pensee unique ended up generating a giddy feeling of patriotic righteousness in France, and it was the giddiness, I think, that led the French government and sometimes the general population to adopt some very peculiar political positions during the last few years, pretty much without regard to the long-range predictable effects on France's standing in the world. The French did not reap any benefits in Central and Eastern Europe from the eagerness with which Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin, his foreign minister in 2002-2003, lined up with the other members of what was most unfortunately described as the "peace camp"--meaning the Russia of the Chechen genocide and the China that, as Rigoulot points out, had executed 30,000 people during the 1990s. France wanted to lead Europe, and the French giddiness helped, instead, to bring about the collapse in the European consensus.

It was the pensee unique that let about a third of the French public to express to pollsters a preference for Saddam's victory over Bush in the war (which, if Saddam's followers do manage to win, as may still happen, would bring about genuine calamities to France). Ultimately the pensee unique produced a slightly hysterical opposition to what is called "Anglo-Saxon" culture, and this led a majority of the French public to turn away the advice of their own political elite and to vote against the European constitution in May of '04--a vote that, once again, will probably tell against France's fortunes in the long run and will certainly tell against the immigrant suburbs, where people need jobs more than social benefits. All of which suggests that, in France, the pensee unique about America and its evils was never really a logical expression of the national interest, but was, instead, a kind of nervous agitation.

III.

And yet, for all these phases of hostility and hysteria about America over the last few years, the French have passed through one additional phase, which Philippe Roger, a cultural historian, describes in his own solid and scholarly book, The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism. This additional phase has been a response by the very people in France who managed not to be drowned beneath the waters of the pensee unique--the freethinking journalists and intellectuals. These people succeeded in launching, in spite of every pressure, a public discussion of the ideological presuppositions that have so weirdly shaped the French discussion of American realities--a new discussion in France, or, at least, a discussion with a wider public than in the past.

And who were these people, the free-thinkers? Roger himself is one of the intellectuals who, back in 1976, figured among the original group of "New Philosophers" in the Nouvelles litteraires--the anti-totalitarians of the left, the old '68ers, who managed to persuade huge portions of the French public to re-think their admiration for communism and the Soviet Union. Pierre Rigoulot comes from the same intellectual and political tradition, and likewise Glucksmann, whose most recent book, Le discours de la haine, figures in the new French discussion of ideas about the United States. Pascal Bruckner is yet another writer with the same trajectory, and I could cite one or two others, as well. Then again, there is Jean-Francois Revel, the author of a book that has been translated as Anti-Americanism--Revel, whose spirit of dissidence antedates the rise of New Philosophy. And there are writers of a much younger generation, born in the 1970s--Barbara Lefebvre and Eve Bonnivard, the authors of Eleves sous influence, or Students under the Influence, which offers a shrewd and detailed analysis, influenced by Philippe Roger, of anti-American prejudices and assumptions in the current textbooks.

Should we look on these writers as a powerful new school of thought, then--a new wave in French intellectual life, maybe a new phase of the old New Philosophy of thirty years ago? The discussion by these writers of anti-Americanism in France already counts, I think, as the broadest and most thorough conversation about this particular topic that has ever taken place in France--or anywhere else, for that matter. There does seem to be an echo in the general press. Le Monde nowadays expresses a more nuanced view of the United States than used to be the case two years ago. Eleves sous influence came out just a few weeks ago and seems to be getting a good reception. So, the clouds may be breaking, yes--that is a possibility. And yet there are grounds to be skeptical about the likelihood of any kind of impending over-night shake-up in public opinion or even in elite opinion--grounds to be skeptical not just because the beliefs about America run deep, but also because the whole cluster of these particular doctrines and attitudes is painfully difficult to disentangle and analyze.

What, after all, is this amorphous thing, anti-Americanism? A reasonable person might even wonder if such a phenomenon actually exists. In our modern world, hardly anyone outside of the fervid ranks of the most extreme Islamism and movements of that sort will acknowledge harboring any kind of top-to-bottom contempt or hatred for America at all--only a mix of yay and nay on American themes, as with any country and its failures and achievements. Emmanuel Todd, in his After the Empire, goes so far as to emphasize that he has an American ancestor, who was Jewish to boot.

Here is our problem, though. If popular doctrine or bias could be described as anti-American does, in fact, exist, the doctrine or bias could only resemble, in this respect, racism and anti-Semitism in their modern-day versions--attitudes that not one person with a cosmopolitan or sophisticated outlook will ever acknowledge harboring. Yet if no one admits to holding such opinions, how can we possibly even begin to identify or to define the attitude in question?

People criticize the United States for all kinds of reasons, and anyone who wanted to provide a definition for anti-Americanism would have to begin by distinguishing very carefully between one criticism and the next--between indisputable criticisms (which nobody could regard as anti-American); and certain kinds of disputable ones (which, no matter how outlandish, might nonetheless be honestly arrived at, betraying no hint of ideological hostility, and therefore should not seem to us anti-American); and criticisms that do, in fact, reflect a hidden system of bias and contempt.

But how to make such distinctions? The task is rendered doubly difficult by a pro-American demagoguery that is always seizing on silly or hateful comments about the United States and using those remarks to dismiss even the most fair-minded and well-intentioned of criticisms, such that anyone who merely glances sideways at a flaw or failing in the United States can end up getting hanged as an avatar of beastly anti-Americanism. In order to make sense of anti-Americanism, we would have to find a reasonably reliable method of sorting out the possible criticisms, and sorting out the criticisms of the criticisms, too--a hugely complicated business, awash in the murks of subjective judgment, where no two people are ever going to agree, nor even any one person, given that everybody has his moods. It is hard to know even how to begin.

Philippe Roger's The American Enemy is by far the most substantial and historical-minded of the new books, and it must be said that Roger does know how to begin. He forthrightly asks, does such a thing as anti-Americanism exist? He responds by noting with great precision that, at a minimum, in France people believe that such a thing exists. The word "anti-American," Roger tells us, first came to be used in France sometime around 1948, perhaps as a counterpoint to "'anti-Soviet," which was a staple of Soviet ideology (designed to dismiss criticisms of the Soviet Union as mere effusions of an illegitimate and irrational bias). "Anti-American" entered the French dictionaries in 1968--the only such "anti" word applied to a country, Roger tells us, though he doesn't say what happened to the word "anti-Soviet." And what did "anti-American" denote--this term whose meaning Sartre once claimed not to understand, but which the traditionally starchy authorities on the French language accepted as a legitimate word?

Roger answers this question still more carefully by observing that, in France, a sharp hostility to America has been more than a reflex, an instinct, a thesis, a snobbism, or even a policy--though each of these elements has played its role. Anti-Americanism in France has been, by Roger's lights, a cultural tradition elaborated by one writer after another over the centuries--a current of thought and literature that has passed through several phases, each of which can be identified and studied, and each of which has deposited a lasting sediment of ideas and images, destined to influence the writers of the next phase. With this notion in mind, Roger sets out to record the history of these phases, as expressed in works of literature, philosophy, journalism, social criticism, and even painting.

Roger is not the first historian to have composed a history of this sort. The earliest important scholar of the literature of anti-Americanism was the Italian historian Antonello Gerbi, whose vivid and densely researched book, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, published in 1955 and translated into English in 1972, remains marvelously rich and stimulating even today--certainly a source of a good many of Roger's insights, as he acknowledges. A number of American or American-based scholars from different sides of the political spectrum have likewise written on these themes over the years--Henry Steele Commager, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Paul Hollander, and just now Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin (who draw on the original French edition of Roger's book), not to mention Andrei S. Markovits, who published a book in German last year called Amerika, dich hafst sich's besser (America: Easier to Hate). Over the years, the French, too, have composed their histories of anti-Americanism, as in a book called The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism that was brought out fifteen years ago by Denis Lacorne, Jacques Rupnick, and Marie-France Toinet. But Roger's The American Enemy is, of all the books after Gerbi's founding volume, the most thorough, and especially so in regard to the peculiar anti-Americanism that is French.

In Roger's interpretation, as in Gerbi's, the literature of outright hostility to America got started in Paris in the later eighteenth century, and did so as a very odd twist within the history of scientific naturalism. During the first two and a half centuries after Columbus, scientific observations from the Western hemisphere emphasized the diversity of New World natural phenomena--mountains and plains, flora and fauna of many stripes, and so forth. But the Comte de Buffon, an authentically great naturalist, came to picture New World phenomena as a composite, without much variation; and the composite was distinctly dreadful.

Buffon postulated that, in the New World, the Biblical flood had taken place much later than in the Old (which, by the way, is a notion that lingers on in Tocqueville, though he gives the deluvianism a positive spin). And, because the flood had taken place not so long ago, the New World was still a bit soggy. Animals and plants were feebler and less fully developed than in Europe. Trees were stunted. Dogs did not bark. Humans were hermaphroditically less sexual. Men's breasts lactated. Birds sang less melodiously in the New World. (Gerbi believed this was true, by the way, and I suspect that he is right--a point for Buffon.) All of nature degenerated in the disgusting sogginess, and people who came from Europe were bound to degenerate, as well. One of Burron's influential disciples was the Dutch savant Cornelius De Pauw at the court of Frederick the Great in Berlin (where, in Frederick's time, the court language was French--just to uphold the Frenchness of this analysis), and De Pauw calmly concluded, "A stupid imbecility is the fundamental disposition of all Americans."

All of this strikes us as comic today, except for the part about birds and a worry about imbecility. And yet Buffon, it is said, went about his researches in a spirit that struck other scientists as fair and reasonable. Darwin in the next century openly saluted Buffon, his scientific predecessor. And Buffon's disciples stood in high repute among the champions of the Enlightenment all over Europe. The absurdities, in short, did not seem absurd. Roger reminds us that Jefferson and Franklin, in their debates with the French, devoted themselves principally to refuting the naturalist arguments about American inferiority--this, instead of trying to affirm the virtues of democracy or the possibility of human progress. The naturalist argument occupies a great deal of Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, which is one of the reasons why that book tends to be keenly disappointing to modern readers.

Franklin, at a dinner in Paris, asked all the American men to stand up, and likewise all the French men, in order to demonstrate that Americans were taller, not shorter, than the French--which was a devastating refutation of the naturalist theory of biological degeneration, and a genial display of American wit, to boot. But Franklin's dinner is likewise bound to disappoint us. We would prefer to learn what Franklin might have said to his dinner partners on just about any other topic at all. Electricity, for instance; or liberty. Only, what alternative did Jefferson and Franklin have, except to demonstrate at length that, whatever the possibilities for human freedom might be, New World moisture did not stand in the way?

The existence of these debates shows us, at the very least, just how radical and even bizarre was the democratic idea in the late eighteenth century--an idea that ran up against science itself, let alone five thousand years of political wisdom. And the debates suggest how deeply and even unconsciously the leading thinkers in Europe, the lights of the Enlightenment, the best and not the worst in European civilization, recoiled at the new society arising across the ocean.

The next phase of hostility to America, Roger tells us, took shape in the early nineteenth century and was mostly aesthetic--an argument to the effect that people in the United States were coarse in their tastes, gross, impolite, materialistic, and generally not up to the standards of the sophisticated class in Europe. The influential literature on this theme was English, but the English condemnations were taken up by Balzac and Stendhal and other writers, who elaborated these themes at length, and did so in books that have had the misfortune (from an American point of view) of proving to be immortally delightful. A few years later Baudelaire worked up some of those same judgments and a few others into very nearly an analytic system, in which American civilization was pictured as soulless, philistine, machine-driven, and inhuman--the kind of society that would pitilessly drive Edgar Allan Poe to his untimely death.

These ideas, Roger tells us, expressed the romantic disillusionment with the notion of progress. By the mid-nineteenth century, no one believed anymore in the biological inferiority of the New World or in the post-deluvian sogginess, nor did anyone doubt that Americans were piling up hordes of wealth at a spectacular rate. But where in America was art, wit, style, cuisine, and refinement? Progress, if this was progress, was deplorable. And what about its moral costs?

The notion of drawing up a moral balance sheet of America's success led to a fairly early French sympathy for America's victims--for the Indians and the blacks especially (who, in the pages of some of the French writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, are presented in a much more human and sympathetic light than in a great deal of American writing from the same period). Then again, the same generous impulse led some of the French writes later on to adopt a curious position on the American Civil War. French national policy in the 1860s favored the Confederacy for pretty much the same reason that British policy did--to prevent the United States from bloating up into a formidable rival, economically and militarily.

A big swath of French public opinion, as Roger presents it, followed the French government on this matter--not out of sympathy for slavery (the French supporters of the South figured that slavery was going to disappear anyway) but out of fear of the aggressive North. And when the aggressive Northerners finally won, the oppressed Southern whites joined the Indians and blacks in the French imagination as one more group of pitiful victims of American progress--to be followed, soon enough, by the oppressed immigrants from Europe who landed on American shores to enter upon their grim new lives of exploitation, persecution, and exclusion.

From yet another French point of view, progress in America appeared in a dreadful light not so much because America mistreated its Indians and blacks and other minority groups as because it produced a population of nothing but minority groups--a population without the organic unity that French liked to ascribe to themselves: a population with no capability to congealing into a "people," therefore no hope of generating anything as magnificent as the French Revolution. Then again, perhaps a "people" did preside over the United States, and this was the "Anglo-Saxon" people, whom the French racial theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries distinguished from the "Germanic" peoples, e.g., the franks. Germanic peoples showed themselves to be ferocious and community-minded. Anglo-Saxons, by contrast, combined the Germanic vitality with an anti-social cult of the individual, thus leading to a vigorous non-community, something truly appalling. All in all, the United States looked pretty repulsive in its racial makeup, no matter how the racial questions were posed--either because American society was horribly racist against Indians and blacks and other groups; or because American society, in its racial mix, was horribly mongrel; or because Anglo-Saxons ruled the roost, and their racial traits were horrible in still another way.

By the turn of the twentieth century, it had become obvious that America was expanding its power all over the world, just as the European supporters of the old Confederacy had feared; and the sundry racial and cultural factors came to seem frighteningly dynamic. Woodrow Wilson seemed like a scary man, insane, imprisoned by his Christian fanaticism, and manipulated by Jewish financiers. The years that followed Wilson's intervention in France produced, in Roger's account, the high tide of anti-American literature. The United States was a racial horror, a machine-like menace, a disaster for the working class, a tool of the Jewish conspiracy, and so forth--all of which had a way of making America seem much more dangerous than Germany. These attitudes were upheld by people on the extreme right and by a number of independents who were neither right-wing nor left-wing, and, in the age of Petain, these became the reigning attitudes.

Then again, Petain's defeat and the catastrophe of the extreme right in France merely ended up producing still another wave of anti-Americanism, this time promoted by the communists, whose left-wing feelings were just as virulent as the old right-wing version. The United States, no longer a greater danger than Nazi Germany, was now the heir to Nazi Germany. "Truman, Hitler's authentic successor" was a communist slogan. The communists campaigned against blue jeans, Coca Cola, and Hollywood. The right-wing themes from between the wars were in these ways re-fitted for the postwar left, and the revised themes were massively disseminated.

"The logic of suspicion that took hold in the interwar years," Roger observes,

would long govern the collective French discourse on America: a sham democracy and insidious totalitarian state. The devil's last trick, as we know, is making people think he does not exist; the same was true for the American "dictatorship." But the French intellectuals were not taken in. Right when fascism was on the rise and Stalinism was being consolidated, it was America they denounced as the great totalitarian Satan. Among the rubble of cold war Europe, half subjected to the Soviet "liberators," it was still in the United States that they uncovered, beneath the patina of formal democracy, the texture of a "true fascism."

In this fashion, a cultural tradition arose in which America was condemned for every possible reason and its opposite--condemned for being less advanced than Europe, which is to say, geographically and sociologically younger; and also for being ahead of Europe in its social development, which is to say, older. America was a country without values; and appallingly moralistic. Repulsive for being racist; and for mixing its races. America's democracy was a failure and a sham; and America was repeatedly said to have lately fallen away from its admirable democratic past. America was governed by a dictatorship of millionaires; or by a rabble of corner grocers. Worse than Hitler; or Hitler's heir; and either way a threat to humanism.

America was frightening because it was excessively powerful; and was repeatedly declared to be on the brink of collapse. America was bellicose; and its soldiers, cowardly. America was hopelessly Christian; and, beginning in the 1920s, America was, even so, dominated by Jews. Coldly calculating; and, at the same time, religiously insane. Talleyrand made the complaint about religious insanity at the very start of the American republic (he had fled to America in 1794 to escape the mass guillotinings that were mandated by France's new religion of the Goddess of Reason) in his witty remark that America featured thirty-two religions and only one dish, which was inedible. The remark about food was significant in itself, and suggested, as well, a larger complaint about the unattractive thinness of America's culture--a main theme of the anti-American accusation. And yet America's greatest danger to the world was also said to be its culture, which, despite its lack of appeal, was dangerously appealing, and was going to crush all other cultures.

IV.

Nobody has done as much as Philippe Roger to lay out these phases of the French animus, or to show how vast has been the literature rehearsing these themes--to demonstrate, in short, that in France such a thing as anti-Americanism does exist and has been expressed in extravagant detail over the centuries. The dictionary compilers who, back in 1968, chose to accord a place for the word "anti-American" in the French language were not mistaken. Roger's account of the anti-American tradition, it must be said, is sometimes a little difficult to slog through--partly because he addresses the educated French reader, which means that, in one passage or another, he presumes a level of French cultural literacy higher than we non-French readers may be able to claim; and partly because his American publishers have banished Roger's clarifying footnotes from the bottom of the page to the back of the book; and partly because Roger's prose gets a little flowery, now and then. "At the turn of the twentieth century," he says not very helpfully, "North America had become the irritating X in a socialist equation where the trust was a second variable."

He makes one argument that is unusual in the literature about French anti-Americanism. Most of the commentators on this topic have agreed in according to the French a schizophrenic response to America, in which each expression of French disdain or hatred appears to be balanced or more likely provoked by an excess of love. Roger will have none of this. In his view, the fondness of certain French writers for America's Indians but not for America's non-Indians, or the enthusiasm for America's counterculture but not for the mainstream culture, bespeaks an underlying hostility, and not an ambivalent confusion. "The taste for the American counterculture is anti-Americanism carried on by other means," he says. This has got to be true at times--for instance, in the European mania for Michael Moore, which Barbara Lefebvre and Eve Bonnivard, and Andrei Markovitz all single out in their own books.

Still, I think there is something complicated about French sympathy for the American counterculture. Jean-Francois Revel, in his capacity as world-trotting journalist, visited the United States in 1969, at the high tide of hippiedom and Black Power and other mass American rebellions against barbering, and Revel was wonderfully smitten by these rebellions and wrote a defense of them called Neither Marx Nor Jesus--quite a celebrated book in its day, and for good reason. "The real revolution was taking place not in Cuba but in California," said Revel at the high tide of worldwide Castro-mania. Yet Revel's taste for California hippies has turned out to be the first step in what has become an authentic lifelong passion for America itself, as shown in his new book Anti-Americanism.

This book came out in France in 2002 and enjoyed quite a lot of success, even if not on the titanic scale of the books by Thierry Meyssan and Emmanuel Todd. Not one hint of "anti-Americanism carried on by other means," in Roger's phrase, crops up in Revel's pages. A few such hints might even have done Revel's commentary some good, given that his enthusiasm for fending off the anti-Americans has led him to rally around every last indefensible aspect of modern America, down to the Florida vote count in the 2000 presidential election (which Revel cites as proof that America is, in fact, a democracy, on the somewhat flimsy ground that Florida's shenanigans revealed, at least, that elections in America are hotly contested).

In any case, I cannot imagine why so many French writers would bother composing their diatribes against the United States if they were not motivated either by internal doubts, or by the worry that other people in France were succumbing to America's seductions. The eighteenth-century naturalists emphasized the horrible qualities of New World geography precisely because, as I learn from reading Philippe Roger, they wanted to counter an impulse to emigrate to the New World that had seized masses of the European population; and because a fad for American styles had simultaneously seized a portion of the Paris aristocracy.

If there is a big flaw in Roger's account of the French animus against America, it is only that his story dribbles to a halt sometime during the early Cold War years, in the heyday of Sartre and de Beauvoir--even if, in a few passages, Roger does fast-forward to September 11 and the Iraq war. I hope that someday Roger will add a second volume to his history, where he might tell us in more detail about the consequences of Charles de Gaulle's alliance with the communists and the usefulness of anti-American ideology for the Gaullist myth of France's victory in World War II, and the role that anti-Americanism has played in keeping the French from looking at their own suburbs and immigrants, and a few other strands of French thinking that lead into our present era of street riots and jihadi terrorists and faraway wars.

Pierre Rigoulot has meanwhile done some of this in his own more modest L'Antiamericanisme, which repeats a good amount of material from Roger (with due acknowledgement) yet also takes up the post-September 11 debates. And, by doing this, Rigoulot manages to demonstrate the over-all accuracy of Roger's main point. This is the recognition that anti-Americanism in France constitutes by now a hoary and well-defined cultural tradition, whose principle arguments and references and tropes took their shape long ago and have remained more or less fixed ever since--a tradition that is perfectly capable of thriving today regardless of strange new circumstances and unprecedented events.

Rigoulot shows this most strikingly by presenting a few comparisons between the extreme right and Vichy arguments from the 1930s and 1940s with the anti-Bush arguments of today. The fear of American aggressiveness, the conviction that America is nonetheless fundamentally weak owing to its racially diverse quality, the conviction that secret Jewish cabals are running American policy, the belief that America is championing a barbarism against French civilization--all of this, which you could pluck from the pages of Meyssan, Todd, and many other writers in present-day France, turns out to be fully traditional argument, entirely recognizable from the French polemics of long ago against Franklin Roosevelt's America and even against Woodrow Wilson's.

We have not seen anything new in the French antagonism during these last few years. We have seen something antique, and this antiquity, once you are aware of it, is hard to miss. After you have read the chapters in Roger's and Rigoulot's books on the extreme right of the 1930s and the Vichy era, and the chapters on the Stalinists and fellow-travelers of the 1940s, the sight of one more present-day comparison of Bush and Hitler, or of America's evangelical Christianity with Nazism or bin Laden's Islamism, or one more worried concern that America is wending down the tragic path of Weimar Germany, will make your nose wrinkle, as if, merely by turning the pages of a modern French book or newspaper, you have stirred up an ancient dust, which comes floating upward from your reading table in a powdery cloud. Ker-choo!

Rigoulot feels no reluctance to underline the political meaning of all this. He thinks that the French intellectual and political elite, by muttering constantly about the evils of the United States, has rendered itself numb to any of the pricks of conscience that ought to have stimulated France into playing a more responsible role in the world.

This numbing, this reticence to take action, this refusal to take risks has a name: it is the spirit of Vichy. The spirit of Vichy continues to haunt France despite the defeat of the French state and the expiatory trials conducted during these last years. Vichy is not just complicity with the genocide of the Jews: it is a pacifist and past-oriented vision of the world. And it is above all a refusal to participate in the troubles and misfortunes that are engendered by all resistance and by any pursuit of a "warrior adventure." Vichy is the belief that one can remove oneself from history and from its necessarily tragic dimensions, the belief that one can evoke moral principles in order to avoid combat--yesterday against Nazism, today against radical Islamism. This spirit is stronger than ever.

And Rogoulot goes on: "But Vichy is itself the product of a profounder evil, tied to the terrible consequences of the war of 1914-18, which shaped for decades a mentality increasingly marked by the incapacity to stand up against the adversaries of democracy. They weren't numerous, the resistance fighters of 1940!" Rigoulot doesn't want to go too far with this remark. He explains, "Certainly, the spirit of Vichy, widely spread as it is in French public opinion, does not explain everything. But it is the guarantee that all of the anti-American discourse will find a favorable echo. Above all, in denouncing war. All war."

Those are pretty ferocious remarks. Roger goes even further in the introduction to his The American Enemy, where he recalls his experience in New York on September 11. Roger writes that French anti-Americanism has of course no direct connection with the aggression committed that day. But in all fairness, those who have been urging the Americans, since 9/11, to "get the message," "learn from the lesson," and, finally, take responsibility for the wound inflicted upon them would be better off doing their own homework and asking themselves to what extent systematic anti-Americanism, French and otherwise, has had a hand in the global process of demonization that facilitates slippage from a war of words to a war of the worlds.

Yes, there is an anger in France today. Some of it is directed at the United States, on the most traditional of grounds. And yet, as these quotations show, some of the French anger turns out to be anti-anti-American--an anger expressed by the dissident intellectuals, directed at French traditions and not at modern America. A new sort of anger: lucid, historical-minded, scholarly, critical, and eye-opening.

V.

All this is extremely interesting to see--and yet, as with Jefferson's and Franklin's polemics against Buffon and the Enlightenment naturalists, something about the modern analysis of anti-Americanism is bound to leave us Americans feeling a little disappointed. Partly that is because the French anti-anti-Americans, in their exasperation at the abuse that keeps pouring down on America's poor head, end up going too far in their rejoinders, unto absurdity. Revel's defense of the 2000 election is all too typical in this respect. Rigoulot's bad luck in writing L'Antiamericanisme consisted of completing his manuscript during the two days when Donald Rumsfeld appeared to be a military genius in Iraq--which led Rogoulot to compose a few lines in praise of American military efficiency that make you cringe to read today (and that make Emmanuel Todd's ruminations about America's military weakness look rather prescient). Roger in The American Enemy can drive you a little crazy with his re-hashing of one idiotic anti-American French writer after another, some of whom, as he scrupulously acknowledges, never did find much of a public for their books. Glucksmann, in Le discours de la haine and other recent writings, goes a bit too far, as I judge it, in supposing George W. Bush's high-flown oratory to be actual American policy.

And so forth--all of which could leave you wondering if the anti-American writers are truly so terribly wrong, after all. Do none of the anti-American writers in France say anything worth the trouble of reading? Is there nothing in the anti-American cultural tradition worth considering? These mischievous thoughts do spring to mind. You glance one more time at the anti-American literature, and sooner or later your gaze is bound to land on one or another accusation that does seem fairly accurate, even acute. And what are we to thing of that?

One of the opprobrious accusations leveled against the United States in the 1830s was--to take a vivid example--Frances Trollope's observation in Domestic Manners of the Americans that, in their plebian grossness, the Americans liked to spit, a disgusting trait of a barbarous democracy. ("I do not like them. I do not like their principles. I do not like their manners. I do not like their opinions," she wrote.) Here, certainly, was an expression of upper-class European snobbery--the sort of contemptuous generalization that has wended its way from the nineteenth century into the larger anti-American tradition, and has therefore contributed to the world's picture of America as boorish and uncivilized.

Yet just now I have been reading Theodore Dreiser's travel writings from 1911, and I see that, several generations after Mrs. Trollope, Dreiser was still writhing under this one terrible accusation, in a guilty recognition that Americans did spit too much. But Dreiser went on to note that, over the years, Americans had begun to expectorate, as he put it, a little less--which is to say, the snobby European accusation had worked a salutary reform in American customs, and sidewalks were cleaner, and social criticism is good, and sock it to us.

Roger in his book cites a number of accusations that make me respond, Dreiser-like, with a rueful feeling that, whatever may be the European biases, certain of those anti-American denunciations touch on something real, and we ought to pay attention and sometimes hang our heads. French writers, Roger explains, have waxed indignant for centuries now over the quality of American city life, sometimes for reasons that will not appeal to us--an outrage at racial mingling, for instance. Celine did not like Jews, and did not like blacks. The Judeo-negroid sidewalks of metropolitan America were not for him.

On the other hand, some of the classic French indignation will strike us as well-directed. Sartre recoiled at the lack of public places in American cities--the lack of French-style cafes, for instance. What halfway intelligent American, having returned from a week of double espressos in the cafes of France, will think that Sartre was wrong? Sartre observed that European cities benefit from a sharp definition of the city limits, as defined by the ancient bulwarks, and American cities suffer from the lack of anything similar. This remark, too, has its truth. Bulwarklessness has done us in. The plazas and promenades of a thousand European towns offer a public warmth and aesthetic joy that hardly anyplace in America can rival--a chilly reality of American life.

Reading Roger's account of these French criticisms, I found myself thinking that if this be anti-American, well, a little of this might help us out no end. But this sort of reaction does not do justice to Roger's larger point. He is not trying to argue that every critical remark uttered about the United States reveals an insidious bias at work. He means to argue only that, in France, a cultural tradition based on irrational hostility to the United States does exist, and draws on many strands, and some of those strands might seem entirely proper and legitimate, if only they could be disentangled from the larger anti-American bias. But not all of those strands can be disentangled.

A current of contempt and fear and even of outright hatred runs through some of these critical lamentations on American cities, and this may be the case even when the criticism, taken by itself, is on the mark. Thus, by 1925--to continue with this theme of French disapproval of American city life--the poet Aragon, as Roger informs us, was already writing, "May America afar crumble with its white buildings." A generation later, in 1948, a writer whom Roger cites had already conjectured in print about the desirability of seeing Manhattan's Wall Street physically destroyed.

Roger might have added that, still later on, as Glucksmann points out, Jean Genet dreamed with pleasure (as shown in one of his essays, published in 1986) of Arabs blowing up New York. And then, in the days after September 11, as Roger reminds us, Jean Baudrillard composed his famous statement on the massacres, reporting what Baudrillard described as "jubilation" at the scene: "the prodigious jubilation in seeing this global superpower destroyed." "Ultimately, they were the ones who did it, but we were the ones who wanted it." These thoughts ran in Le Monde, no less.

Yet what is striking is not the spectacle of Baudrillard himself--a man evidently in the tradition of the fascist dandies of the between-the-wars period, oohing with aesthetic pleasure at the joys of random slaughter--but something else, which Roger points out. This most striking quality is Baudrillard's easy and confident use of the word "we," as in the astonishing remark: "we were the ones who wanted it." Roger comments, "His jubilation? He knows better! Our jubilation." This, finally, is the scary part--the blase conviction of a famous cultural figure that, in cheering on the September 11 massacre, he is speaking on behalf of civilization. This is the element of Baudrillard's commentary (and of quite a few other people's, not just in France) that Roger has managed to illumine.

For Baudrillard had good reason, as Roger shows, to suppose that he was speaking for more than himself. Baudrillard's distaste for the American "simulacrum" and the American city and American civilization as a whole and even of Americans as individual human beings was, after all, anything but a curious or idiosyncratic tic. His bizarre and frightening response drew on a genuinely vast literature, going back centuries--drew on the kind of cultural tradition that, n its luxurious amplitude and brilliance, would fill anyone with confidence.

Here we come to the ultimate question in regard to anti-American attitudes. It is one thing to regret the many failings of American life; or to observe all too correctly that France and other European countries are better at doing certain things than we oafish Americans; or to regret any given foreign policy folly in Washington. But how to explain the leap from these discrete complaints into what can only be described as a genuine hatred for America as a whole--the kind of hatred that leaps up all too clearly from Baudrillard's commentary?

The historians will never be able to shed a light on this larger question. The historians can demonstrate patterns of argument, and Roger and Rigoulot have done this brilliantly in their respective books, and even Revel, for all his exasperating defense of more than ought to be defended, has made some useful points. But the historians and the journalists cannot explain, in the end, why so many people would choose to flirt with a genuine hatred--why so many people would choose to revile the United States with an effervescent passion that might bubble up into gleeful jubilation over a massacre. Why anyone would respond with quite that much pleasure might be a psychoanalytic question, but it is, in any case, a philosophical one. This is the question that Glucksmann addresses in his discussion of hatred--his Le discours de la haine.

VI.

No writer on earth has been more fired up by the September 11 attacks than Glucksmann. He has produced three books since then--Dostoievski en Manhattan, an account of modern nihilism; Ouest contre ouest, a mostly political analysis of the post-September 11 situation; and his Le discous de la haine, which is the most ambitious and philosophical of these books. His great purpose is to insist that such a thing as hatred does exist--that hatred is a passion capable of standing on its own two feet, without having to lean on anything else. Glucksmann reminds us that for more than a thousand years, writers from Aeschylus through Seneca to Shakespeare and Racine understood the ferocious independence of hatred--its extreme and irrational paroxysms, its ability to maintain its own strength and even grow, regardless of whatever may have provoked it. But this knowledge has evaporated in the modern centuries. We have ceased to believe in the reality of hatred.

We are all social determinists now. We like to suppose that everything has a material explanation--which is precisely what Aeschylus, Seneca, Shakespeare, and Racine knew was not the case. Today, confronted with the signs and deeds of an uncontrolled and murderous hatred, our first impulse is to go looking for some proximate cause--to assume that, if Medea has gone out of her mind and has slaughtered her children and has burned down the city, there must be some large motivating explanation beyond the unfortunate fact that she is upset at being abandoned by her husband, Jason.

But why should we look for larger motivating explanations? The wildest of hatreds do not need a cause outside of ourselves. This is Glucksmann's point. Hatred's causes may merely be hatred's excuses. We hate because we choose to hate. We could equally choose not to do so. And why choose to hate? On this question, Glucksmann reveals himself as the disciple, as no one could have predicted, of Sartre. In Anti-Semite and Jew, Sartre wrote that people who give in to the pleasures of hatred do so because they cannot abide their own frailties. Weakness and imperfection are the human condition. But weakness and imperfection leave us unsatisfied, maybe even disgusted with ourselves. Hatred, however, can make us feel strong. Hatred is thrilling. Hatred is reassuring. When we choose to hate, we discover that, by hating, we overcome our own disappointment at ourselves. We choose to hate because we want to feel the exhilarating vibrations of power instead of weakness, the perfect ideal instead of the imperfect reality. And so, in order to hate, we hold aloft a glorious vision that can never exist: the vision of a perfect mankind unstained by weakness and flaws, a vision of purity and power. And we give ourselves over to the satisfying pleasures of hating everyone who stands in the way of the perfect vision.

Glucksmann offers three examples of this kind of hatred, and his examples, in their extreme difference from one another, might seem almost whimsical. They are misogyny, or the hatred of women, which is, as he remarks, the very oldest hatred; anti-Semitism, or the hatred of Jews, which can claim a solid two thousand years of history in a recognizable form, which makes it nearly as old; and anti-Americanism, which is the most modern hatred (though, as Roger shows, anti-Americanism does go back a few centuries). Yet these three hatreds are perhaps not so whimsically chosen, after all.

These three hatreds--of women, of Jews, and of Americans--happen to be the three pillars on which modern radical Islamism stands, the hatreds that led Khomeini to launch his Islamist revolution by veiling women and by declaring his jihad against Zionism and the American Great Satan. Glucksmann is not interested in parsing the Islamist ideology, though. He takes up these hatreds in their Western or European version, and he shows that, in this version, the differences between these seemingly disparate hatreds are not so vast as all that.

For why do men hate women? No one ever declares such a hatred. What men speak about, instead, is a perfection of love--a world of the perfect couple, created by the perfect woman, without fault or blemish. And yet, neither the perfect couple nor the perfect woman can ever exist, the human condition being what it is. An so, the more that a man extols a woman's love as the apogee of perfection and bliss, the more his attention focuses on the failings of any given flesh-and-blood woman at hand. And what are these failings, if not the human condition itself--the inability to be perfect? Men rail at women, and even set out to murder women, sometimes in gigantic numbers, as in the classic witch-hunts of Europe. This is always done in the name of a perfection that would surely exist, if only women weren't so damnably imperfect.

In ancient times, as Glucksmann observes, the Jews were hated merely in the way that all peoples are sometimes hated. But for the last two millennia, Jews have been hated also in a special way, which is, once again, always in the name of an all-but-realized human perfection. In the heyday of Christian Europe, the Jews were hated because they alone seemed to ruin the dream of a universal truth: they alone refused to go along with the vision of an ideal society in which everyone would agree on the veracity of the Good News. People hated the Jews out of love for the Gospels--hated the Jews who, by refusing to accept the Good News, embodied the weaknesses and frailties of the human condition.

The era of modern European states got started with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which proposed a newly secular vision of the perfect society--a society in which every state was going to live in tranquility behind its defined borders and respect the borders of every other state. But the Jews scattered themselves (and were scattered) all over Europe, regardless of borders--in plain demonstration, once again, that the vision of universal perfection stood at odds with the human reality. And hatred poured down once again upon the living examples of human imperfection. Today we have moved into a new era, post-Westphalian, in which, now that France and Germany have made their peace, people look on national states no longer as a source of perfection but as the source of evil. Today the fashion is to imagine that a perfect society can only be a global community, superseding the traditional states--an international community in which no one is going to be the enemy of anyone else.

And yet, in the face of this new vision of the perfect world, the Israelis keep on behaving as if they do have enemies, and decline to entrust their fate to their neighbors or to the international community. And so, once again, out of love for an ideal, people end up gazing upon the Israelis, or upon Israel's supporters in other countries, and seeing in those people the horrid sign of the human condition--the retrograde Israelis and their supporters whose behavior attests to the lack of human perfection. And hatred pours down, just as it has always done.

In Glucksmann's picture, the Americans reap a very similar hatred--a hatred that arises out of the desire for the perfect international community that would surely exist, if only the Americans stopped being so aggressively hostile. This desire, in regard to the United States, has passed through two phases in the last sixty years, each time with the same outcome. In the earlier phase, the perfect world was pictured largely in communist terms--a world in which a healthy and prosperous "peace" was imagined as the Soviet goal, and "imperialism" as the American goal.

It was the United States that disrupted this version of a perfect world by pursuing its imperial ambitions--the United States, therefore, that merited a genuine rage, whether in regard to the Korean War (which parked massive protests in Paris), or fifteen years later in regard to the Vietnam War, or another fifteen years later in regard to Ronald Reagan's arms race against the Soviets. The communism, having turned out to be the actual example of odious imperialism, collapsed, and a certain kind of left-wing hope evaporated. Even so, a new vision of world peace emerged, and once again the United States loomed as the principle threat.

The perfect society, this time, was pictured as the rueful progeny of Europe's failures of the past--a new international system that arose out of the recognition that Europe needed to come to grips with its own disasters. In this new and modern idea, modesty reigned as the highest of virtues, and a peaceful and prosperous world was pictured as on the brink of emerging, if only everyone would accept the new spirit of ruefulness. And yet, the United States demurred once again, and, after September 11, went about behaving as if global perfection were not at hand, and things ought to be shaken up, and tyrants overthrown.

And so, like the woman whose human qualities mark her as the enemy of amorous bliss, and like the Jew who is imagined as the betrayer of one version after another of the perfect state of grace, the Americans come to be seen as the people who keep destroying the perfect world of peace that would otherwise prevail--the peaceful world that communism claimed for itself long ago, and that, in the post-communist era, is claimed by the rueful opponents of all communist-like projects to re-make the world. And hatred pours down--a hatred in the name of love for a perfect and peaceful world that is actually a hatred for the human condition. A hatred of the imperfect self. Or so argues Andre Glucksmann.

VII.

Glucksmann's theory about anti-Americanism is more abstract than Roger's, and more limited, given that it applies mostly to the anti-Americanism of the last sixty years, and not to anything from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though perhaps Glucksmann would argue otherwise. But something about Glucksmann's explanation catches the eye, and it is his emphasis on the contemporary European consciousness of failure. For why is it that, in France, the anti-American cultural tradition has achieved such prestige and prominence over the centuries: Why has France become the world center of anti-American theorizing--the generator of a larger and more virulent literature on this theme than any other country in Europe, or on any other continent, for that matter? Why France, and not, say, Mexico--the largest of the Spanish-speaking countries, which lost half its national territory to American conquest long ago and, even in the present, cannot get through a single day without undergoing visible humiliations at American hands?

Over the centuries, the United States has gone to war and defeated every one of the Western European powers--Britain, Spain, Germany, and Italy--with France the lonely exception. France is the only Western power that America has never opposed in war, the only country around the world for which America has repeatedly sacrifice itself, and on the hugest of scales (though in the literature of French anti-Americanism, as roger shows, the American sacrifices for France are portrayed as cagey maneuvers to advance narrow material interests). It might even be suspected that French anti-Americanism owes something to the scale of France's debt to America--a theory that many people have suggested, on the psychologically plausible ground that unpayable debts can only arouse unappeasable resentments. (And the same theory in reverse might account for the endless American shock at not being loved in France.) Yet there is something more than a debtor's resentment at work here, which you can see in Roger's history of the French animus.

Roger recalls the history of French grievances against America, the actual hard-fact history--this history that Americans know nothing about and can hardly even imagine, though its stages are easily identified. There was the French feeling of horror and betrayal at the secret Jay Treaty of 1794, in which, despite France's crucial aid during the American Revolution, the United States made peace with the same Great Britain that was, at that very moment, waging war against revolutionary France. It is easy to see that, on this issue, the French had a point--especially so when you recognize that, whatever France's imperial ambitions may have been (namely, to conquer Europe and the Middle East, and to re-name these regions "France"), the French were undergoing a terrible pummeling.

Then came the struggles of the Napoleonic wars, and the French navy seized a great many American ships (a total of 558, by the American reckoning). And the United States demanded compensation afterward, and not in a small amount. President Andrew Jackson pursued this demand, and French eventually agreed to pay, if only because Jackson threatened to seize French property in the United States. But, as Roger tells us, the argument over compensation to the United States aroused a tremendous anger in France--tremendous because the French had aided the United States in the past, and America ought to have allowed its feeling of gratitude to linger a little longer. And the resentment was owed to something more. For what was the meaning of France's revolutionary and Napoleonic wars?

France suffered. France's army was destroyed. France ended up under European occupation. Huge portions of the French population were killed. The defeat was spectacular and enormous. And here was the United States in the wake of these tragedies, demanding a money transfer from a somber and defeated France to the cheerful shores of a prosperous United States. The French Chamber of Deputies eventually agreed to pay, but their assent was bitter. Even the pro-Americans among them--Roger points to the poet Lamartine, a solid republican with excellent pro-American credentials--burned with resentment. An echo of this turns up, I would add, even in Tocqueville, who remarks that in the American War of Independence, the Americans endured nothing on the scale of French suffering a few years later.

The Franco-American debt crisis in the era of President Jackson (about which I knew nothing at all until I read Roger's book) was re-played in the years after World War I, this time on a bigger scale. The United States demanded repayment of France's debt. And yet the United States, out of an ex-post-facto wish to undo the excesses and errors of the Treaty of Versailles, also gazed in Germany's direction and felt a tender concern, and expressed a willingness to re-structure Germany's obligations. A good many French people viewed this as a ghastly and unjustified American tilt toward Germany. For what had happened to France during the war? Germany had inflicted death on so massive a scale that France could never be the same, afterward. And so the French observed the American policy, and were beside themselves, and, in their anger, composed books like L'Oncle Shylock, a classic of post-World War I anti-American literature, if only for its title.

After World War II, the great French socialist Leon Blum demanded that the Americans treat the French with a little more graciousness and compassion (though he is also blamed in France for having permitted Hollywood's domination of French movie theaters). And the United States, in a fit of atypical sensitivity, acceded to Blum's demand, and not only canceled the war debts but offered the Marshall Plan. In the French psyche, however, the Marshall Plan appears to have come too late, and for reasons that ought to be easily understood. Americans recall the role of France in World War II the way that Pierre Rigoulot does--as something shameful, as the role of a country that barely fought, and surrendered too easily, unlike noble Britain.

And yet, in 1940, when the Germans invaded, the French did fight, for a while. France lost 100,000 soldiers in May and June of that year--a staggering number, and simply unbearable after the losses from World War I. France surrendered in 1940 because it was impossible to fight anymore--surrendered because France had been defeated, not just in those terrible months but in one war after another for nearly a century and a half, and above all in the catastrophe of 1914-1918. French society was simply not going to subject itself to yet another round of mass slaughter.

Anyone who visits Berlin will recognize instantly that Germany is a nation that has suffered stupendous and unbearable defeats--a nation that has been reduced to rubble repeatedly by events, even if the Germans have themselves to blame for some of those events. A visitor to France will come away with no such impression. Rubble, in France? And yet it may be that France, too, is a nation covered with scars--a wounded nation, different from Germany only in France's gallant insistence that it is not a wounded nation. I turn the pages of Roger's history and the other books, and I contemplate Glucksmann's observations about the hatred that arises from a revulsion at one's own weakness, and it occurs to me that, instead of rubble, which the Germans have aplenty, the French possess the very remarkable literature that Roger and the others describe. Not exactly rubble, but a kind of wreckage--the literature of a wounded culture, expressing more than two hundred years of conscious and unconscious injury.

But I don't want to go too far with this observation. Frances grandeur is not, after all, entirely an illusion. It may even be a sign of French grandeur today that, at a moment when a more-or-less systematic anti-Americanism has blossomed from right to left all over the world, France has, ever so quietly, made itself the international home of a new literature of anti-anti-Americanism--this new and radical and brilliant literature that has not yet worked a powerful effect around the world, or even on conventional opinion in France, and is certainly not going to produce a sudden shift in outlook, but which, even so, might well turn out to be, in years to come, an event in the history of ideas. A flash of self-awareness. The stirring of an eyeball, breaking through sleep. A new realization, just beginning to awaken.