Charles Cogan, French Negotiating Behavior: Dealing with Le Grande Nation (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2003), 344 pp., $14.87.

Thomas Cantaloube and Henri Vernet, Chirac contre Bush: l'Autre Guerre (Chirac against Bush: The Other War) (Paris: Jean-Claude Lattes, 2004), 349 pp., €18.

John J. Miller and Mark Molesky, Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 294 pp., $24.95.

Nicolas Sarkozy et al., La Republique, les Religions, l'Esperance (The Republic, Religions, Hope) (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2004), 172 pp., €17.

Dominique de Villepin, Le Requin et La Mouette (The Shark and the Seagull) (Paris: Plon, 2004), 260 pp., €19.

Dominique de Villepin et al., Un Autre Monde (An Alternative World) (Paris: L'Herne, 2003), 668 pp., €26.50.

Last October, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, Michel Camdessus, published a report, originally commissioned by then-Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, on the grim economic prospects of his native France. Despite the country's impressive achievements in aerospace, nuclear power and high-speed trains, Camdessus warned that without almost revolutionary change in working hours, taxation, higher education and the welfare system, the decline of France would become unstoppable.

"A serious syndrome of denial is setting in which curbs all but superficial reforms", Camdessus concluded, pointing to a decade of low growth and high unemployment. "But the fact is that we are indeed stalling, and if nothing is done to overcome the pernicious phenomena that we have observed, in about ten years time it will lead to an irreversible situation."

Sarkozy hailed the Camdessus report, which he described as "essential reading" for the entire country, and noted that it echoed his own attempts to scrap the 35-hour working week and steer France towards the type of free-market reforms that had done rather well for the Anglo-Saxons. But in the very month that Sarkozy warned of "la patrie en danger", his great rival for the succession of President Jacques Chirac, Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin, published a remarkable book that claimed the new tide of globalization was flowing France's way and a new golden age for France and her ideals could be dawning at last. In it, Villepin suggests,

"After the first globalization dominated by Spain at the time of the Renaissance, and after the second, launched by the Industrial Revolution and dominated by the Anglo-Saxons, cannot one wager that the third globalization, that of identities, of cultures and of symbols, will bring a new spirit to French ambition? For the values that energize our ambition are equally those to which international society aspires--the universal rights of man, faith in solidarity and fraternity, the hope of reuniting all human differences in the single human community, the need to correct the distortions of the market by means of regulation."

The title of Villepin's new book translates as "The Shark and the Seagull" (a quotation from the little-known French poet René Char). Villepin has carefully avoided challenging the general view of his reviewers that the shark is a metaphor for the United States while the seagull represents France. Villepin's shark (masculine in French) "drives through the sea to snatch its prey, . . . a symbol of power, strength and the refusal to be halted by the complexity of the world." His seagull (feminine in French) is a much more spiritual and graceful creature, at home in the heavens, blending and merging with the air, "intoxicated by the sky."

"She turns, borne by the winds, with wings that beat and curve like waves, unleashing from time to time her agonizing cry of laughter", he writes. "She watches, soars, approaches, climbs and swoops, turns suddenly. The straight line is seldom her course. She listens to the world."

Villepin's new book is best read in conjunction with his previous publication, Un Autre Monde (An Alternative World), in which he is simultaneously author, editor and commentator on the work of other analysts who tend to share his view that "Two visions of the world confront each other." One vision is American (sometimes characterized as Anglo-Saxon), based on a brutal Darwinian capitalism of the survival of the fittest, and the other--for these are the only two with "universal aspirations"--is French, and committed to social solidarity. The heirs of the two great revolutions of the 18th century are thus condemned to be rivals throughout history in "the cultural and moral spheres." For Villepin, their warring principles echo to this day in America's Declaration of Independence, which celebrates the individual, and France's "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité", which understands that man is a communal and, at his best, a cooperative animal.

The Shark and the Seagull takes this inherent tension between French and American views of the world and applies it to the crisis unleashed by the Iraq War and the threatened clash of civilizations with Islam. Accompanying this leaden horseman of Villepin's apocalypse are familiar dark cavaliers: the advance of a soulless globalization, pollution, nuclear proliferation, new epidemics and so on. "This future of planetary disaster darkens our horizon", according to Villepin. "Everywhere resounds the chorus ofa world deprived of soul and of spirit, crushed under the heavy roller of an economic liberalism without brakes or morals, of a conquering and inhuman technology."

But cheer up. Inspired by the principles of the French Revolution, led by the kind of great man that France uniquely produces (Napoleon and de Gaulle are his heroes), and infused with the warm glow of human solidarité, a brighter future beckons. Humanity is

"in search of ways to cross to the shores of a new age, of illuminators capable of seizing the spirit of the world and unveiling for it a new dawn. Our epoch above all needs the will of us all. Lucidity and courage, cunning and grace will be the qualities required to escape the yawning gulf and chart another destiny. To get out of the confrontation that looms, to escape the perplexities of modernity, to found a pact of salvation, we need a new myth, a fertile word, a grand gesture to define a future."

And guess who can provide this pact, this myth, this fertile grandeur?

"This book is enriched by the conviction that France was never so faithful to herself as when she had the audacity to reach for the universal. Our country has a message of hope to deliver. It is capable of calming the tumult of fear and hatred while opening a prospect of justice. France, a middle-ranking power, a nation like the rest? No. But power in the service of the peoples, a power that is awaited, expected and understood, seized by the values of tolerance, of democracy and peace . . . yes, I believe in this crazy French immortality which seeks to reconcile the opposites. I believe in the eternity of the man born one evening in 1789 [the year of the French Revolution]."

Villepin's work can be seen as an extended manifesto for his claim on the presidency, a post for which a certain intellectual and literary distinction has long been desirable. As well as a diplomat, he is a poet, a historian (of Napoleon's last Hundred Days, in which he noted that the catastrophic defeat of Waterloo "gleams with an aura worthy of victory") and a political philosopher of what de Gaulle called "une certaine idée de la France." Villepin also has a catastrophic record as a political advisor to Chirac, recommending an early election in 1997 on the issue of "Who governs France?" after Prime Minister Alain Juppe's failed attempt to face down striking truckers. The Socialists under Lionel Jospin won the subsequent election. The Socialists' defeat in 2002 paved the way for Villepin to become foreign minister, an appointment initially welcomed in Washington, where Villepin had graced the French embassy during the Reagan years and was thus somehow assumed to be unusually sympathetic to American ways. Colin Powell was to learn the limits of this assumption in their confrontation at the UN over Iraq.

It is a lesson that American diplomats have been slow to learn. As Miller and Molesky point out in their jolly canter through 225 years of Franco-American relations, Americans have too easily thrilled to references to Lafayette and Yorktown, to St. Mihiel and Normandy, to F. Scott Fitzgerald being dashing in Montparnasse and Ernest Hemingway liberating the Ritz. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson had to grapple with the ruthless self-interest that underlay French support for American independence. Charles Gravier de Vergennes, the French foreign minister who in 1775 proposed covert support to the colonists because it would "diminish the power of England while it will considerably extend ours", was no friend to the infant republic. His instructions to the first French minister accredited to the United States noted, "The King feels that the possession of these three countries (Canada, Nova Scotia and Florida), or at least that of Canada by England, would be a serviceable principle for keeping the Americans uneasy and cautious."

Whether monarchy, republic or empire, Miller and Molesky entertainingly recount how French interests--and thus French policy--did not change. Within a month of becoming president, Jefferson was sounding the alarm about French ambitions to build "New France" in Louisiana, which became one motive behind the Lewis and Clark expedition. "The day that France takes possession of New Orleans fixes the sentence. . . . From that moment we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation", Jefferson wrote. Madison boasted of an army of American militia poised to take the city. Napoleon was ready for war, until he learned that the French army in Santo Domingo had been destroyed by yellow fever. At that point, he cut his losses and authorized Foreign Minister Talleyrand to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase. The Bonapartes were not quite done with North America: Napoleon's comic-opera nephew, Napoleon III, tried to take advantage of the Civil War to establish a French protectorate in Mexico.

Villepin's other hero, Charles de Gaulle, is seen by Miller and Molesky as "the worst . . . of all the arrogant Frenchmen who had put their thumbs in American eyes." They cite de Gaulle's instinctive response when awoken in 1942 with the news that American troops had landed in Vichy-controlled North Africa: "Well, I hope the people of Vichy throw them into the sea. You can't break into France and get away with it." The Germans had of course gotten away with it (and a lot of Frenchmen helped them do so), and any hope of liberation lay with the Anglo-Saxons.

All this is useful and important, but Miller and Molesky take matters just a few millimeters too far for their engaging polemic to be taken too seriously as scholarship. Just because Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot studied in Paris, one cannot blame the Cambodian genocide on the French. While French intellectuals had a great deal to do with existentialism and structuralism, with deconstructionism and post-modernism, it is a stretch to conclude: "Not only did the postwar French intellectuals prepare the tainted broth from which future despots would drink, their poisoned leftism also inspired them to invent modern anti-Americanism." And while the Treaty of Versailles has few admirers, it verges on the outrageous to say that World War II "was as much the product of French intransigence and vengefulness as it was Hitler's lust for dominion."

Above all, Miller and Molesky do not seem to grasp the degree to which France seeks to exercise her traditional diplomacy through the European Union. Just as the more insufferable Brits used to pontificate about their being the Greeks to the American Romans, the French have a metaphor about a French rider guiding the German horse that pulls the European cart. "The U.S. has a clear incentive not to let Paris emerge as the capital city of a new axis of anti-Americanism", Miller and Molesky conclude, which is obvious enough, but only takes on real significance in a broader European context. These days, France alone is little more than a nuisance.

It is at this point that we can hail a treasure. French Negotiating Behavior, by the former CIA station chief in Paris, Charles Cogan, is a real discovery, a gem of a book that starts where Miller and Molesky leave off, but clearly knows a great deal more about France, its history and the self-defeating and arrogant way the Quai d'Orsay goes about its diplomacy. This has become so offensive that even some Frenchmen are starting to notice. Cogan cites former-Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine saying:

"We've got to be careful lest our European partners end up saying that if by chance the French were to find themselves in the same position as the Americans today, they'd be even more unbearable than the Americans! Many Europeans think this already."

Cogan's book is profoundly useful, because he understands the degree to which the French today believe their country and system to be in deep crisis and to be even more imperiled than Britain during its 1970s decline. The French problem runs much deeper than the economic mismanagement and fits of self-doubt that Margaret Thatcher so briskly addressed and corrected, because the French grand strategy of the last forty years is crumbling in their hands. Europe is not prepared to be the vehicle to maintain French greatness, and Germany is too big, too rich and increasingly too self-confident to play the equal, let alone the horse to France's cavalier. The European Union of 25 countries, and soon perhaps thirty, including Turkey, is beyond any hope of French control.

After France's humiliation at U.S. hands over Suez in 1956, German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer told premier Guy Mollet, "Europe will be your revenge." And at least until German unification, Adenauer's advice seemed to hold good. But France then damaged its own economy with high interest rates to maintain "le franc fort", a currency strong enough to take France into the euro. This was Mitterand's price for accepting German unification, locking Germany into the ultimate European institution of a common currency. And just as the price of unification was a decade of low growth and high unemployment for the former powerhouse of Europe, along with the sacrifice of the deutschemark, the price of the euro has been equally dispiriting for France's economy. Moreover, the new enlarged Europe is no longer made to French specifications. Increasingly Europe speaks English, looks to Thatcherite principles of free trade and free markets, to lower taxes and privatization, and rejects the French concept of state-led industrial strategies.

"For having too long believed that Europe was being built in its own image, the French suffer today from not recognizing themselves in it", noted Pascal Lamy and Jean Pisani-Ferry in 2002, in one of many quotes astutely chosen by Cogan. (Lamy, an excellent EU trade commissioner, may well be a future Socialist president of France, and Pisani-Ferry could well be his prime minister.) "The French see themselves diminished in the face of a Germany numerically more powerful and an England politically more alert."

No American diplomat or official should henceforth be allowed to set foot on the European continent without having read, swallowed and inwardly digested Cogan's book. Thoughtful American tourists are also strongly advised to read this distillation of a long career's wisdom and to ponder Cogan's three case studies of French diplomacy in action: France's failed bid to get the Mediterranean command in return for rejoining NATO; the Uruguay Round on trade; and the tangled period between the happy agreement of the NATO summit in Prague in November 2002, the Franco-American confrontation at the UN in February 2003, and the outbreak of war in March. Cogan gives a masterly summary of this last crisis, citing French sources to note that a French general was in the Pentagon in December of 2002, declaring that 15,000 French troops and 100 warplanes would be available in the event of war. And on January 7, 2003, speaking at the Ecole Militaire, President Chirac told his troops to prepare for action.

So, what has been hailed in France as the "revelation" in the Bob Woodward-style book, Chirac contre Bush--that Chirac was quite prepared to go to war and had prepared the French army to fight in Iraq--is not so new after all. It is entertaining to learn that President Bush's nickname for Jacques Chirac is "Jackass", and not a great surprise to read that the Americans were able to bug Chirac even in his Elysée palace. The authors claim that a senior U.S. official told a French counterpart, "The relationship between your president and ours is irreparable on the personal level. You have to understand that President Bush knows exactly what President Chirac thinks of him." (Given Chirac's contempt for Bush, for Bush to call him "Jackass" in return seems fairly mild.) They offer some interesting details. It seems plausible that the French and Germans were drawn to work more closely together in New York after the French were invited to make use of the glass anti-bugging cage installed in the German mission. They may or may not be right to say that Bush was irritated from the start by Chirac's constant references to his father, the 41st president, which were interpreted as a crude attempt to remind Bush Junior to respect his elders.

But go back to that crucial two weeks between Chirac's speech to the Ecole Militaire on January 7 and then-Foreign Minister Villepin's famous January 20 "ambush" of Secretary of State Colin Powell at a UN meeting convened by Villepin to discuss "terrorism", after which Villepin gave a press conference saying "we believe that today nothing justifies envisaging military action." What changed?

None of the books on offer has a clear explanation. French officials now say that it was partly the reflex decision to adopt a "European position" by supporting the anti-war stance of German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. The current French ambassador to the United States, Jean-David Levitte, took a high-minded line in a lecture at MIT: "If this were not a matter of principle, don't you think we would have jumped on the bandwagon of war?" Miller and Molesky cite Richard Holbrooke saying that it was routine French brinkmanship: "The classic play out of the Charles de Gaulle playbook; hold out to the end, get more leverage."

"We refused to establish a link between the terrorist networks and the Iraqi regime, and in the absence of a prospect of peace in the Middle East, we feared that violence in Iraq would only intensify the resentment and anger", is one part of Villepin's explanation in The Shark and The Seagull. France could simply not go along with the broad approach of the Bush Administration to the Arab world. Villepin goes on:

"But the misunderstandings proceeded less from such recent events than from much deeper historical roots. Against France, heir of the pragmatism of Cardinal Richelieu, supporter of a system of interstate relations based on custom, on the transaction and exploitation of national interests, the United States affirmed its power and refused to share it. For the Americans, any agreement would be seen in one way or another as a compromise. In the concert of nations, the United States saw its place only as conducting the orchestra."

Chirac contre Bush has the French president in that crucial two-week period recalling his days as a young officer in the doomed war to keep Algeria French and what he saw as the new danger of the Iraq War unleashing a clash of civilizations with Islam. Something else that lay heavily on Chirac's mind was the new Bush Doctrine that justified preventive war and the heady rhetoric from Washington of "regime change" in Iraq as part of a broader ambition to democratize the Middle East.

"If we want to intervene in order to change countries' political systems, then we're in another civilization", Chirac told the New York Times in an interview on September 8, 2002.

"Or in any case, we're not in a civilization organized like today's. I think such speculation is very dangerous, very dangerous indeed. You get started and you have no idea where you will end up. And think of the reaction on the street, among the people. If, for example, you want to change the monarchy in Morocco or Jordan, you'll have a lot of trouble with the people of those countries."

In that same interview, Chirac spoke of another matter on his mind, which may have had some bearing on his decision to back out of the war.

"We have about four million Muslims in France. Many of them are French nationals, a few are foreign, mostly from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia--i.e., essentially North African--with a few from Black Africa. But they are perfectly integrated in France and practice their Muslim faith undisturbed, when they practice at all. We have no Muslim problem, and we are making an effort not to have one. We have other problems, because we have some rough neighborhoods. In those neighborhoods, there are many young people whom we call beurs, whose families come from Arab countries; we also have many social problems that have not been effectively dealt with. But we have no concerns as far as terrorism is concerned, although of course, we have been victims of terrorism in the past. Islam doesn't worry us, per se; what worries us are Islamic terrorist networks from abroad. That's different."

That interview was given just four months after Chirac had been re-elected with a massive 85 percent of the vote against the National Front candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen, in an election in which French Muslims had played an important role. Chirac's complacency about the French Muslim population was also about to be rocked by the success of the radicals in the first elections for France's new national council of Muslims, when the French state thought it had arranged matters to ensure the safe old moderates would win. Surprisingly, the role of French Muslims (and most observers who include illegal immigrants reckon the number is more like six million than Chirac's four million) barely figures in any of the current books under review. Cogan has one reference, but it is striking:

"Multiculturalism is seen as an American disease and not as a French one, although this assertion is sometimes contradicted by facts on the ground--for example, there are certain sections of Marseilles that are de facto off-limits to non-Maghrebians."

That is putting it mildly. There are sections of almost every French city that are intensely Arab, and one reason why Sarkozy became so popular as interior minister was his announcement that there would be no more "no-go areas" for the French police, and he set up the special squads of riot police, gendarmes and customs agents to invade and bring the ruling gang leaders, or caids, to book. In an interview with Le Figaro in September 2003, he announced a tough new policy for visiting Muslims seeking to radicalize their French brethren:

"No one should expect any weakness from me. Mosques where extremist Islam is preached will be closed. Imams who give radical sermons will be expelled. And people coming to conferences who don't show proof of respect for republican rules will find themselves systematically denied visas to enter France."

Sarkozy, whose career seemed to have stalled in the 1990s, has now become the most popular, and also the most exciting, politician in France. Moved to the Finance Ministry after his impressive time as interior minister, he was again successful, blending almost Anglo-Saxon rhetoric about the free market with a traditional French regard for government intervention and bailing out of national champions. Chirac once saw Sarkozy as an adoptive son (not least when Sarkozy dated Chirac's daughter), but then Sarkozy jumped aboard the political bandwagon of a now almost forgotten technocrat named Edouard Balladur, and Chirac never forgives a slight. Sarkozy has now taken over the leadership of Chirac's ump party (now the letters stand for Union for a Popular Majority, but it was formed as the Union for a Presidential Majority), although Chirac insisted he give up his ministry and seat in the cabinet to do so. The stage seems set for a battle between the two men to win the presidential nomination in 2007, although Chirac may fight by proxy, with Villepin as his champion. Either way, one probable motive for Chirac is to secure a presidential pardon, or to continue using his presidential immunity to avoid any prospect of criminal prosecution over alleged bribes while he was mayor of Paris.

Characteristically, Sarkozy staged a very American kind of political spectacular for his investiture as head of the UMP, in a vast hangar at Le Bourget Airport decked out to resemble Bush's Republican convention arena in New York. Chirac chose not to attend (and made some waspish remarks about the reputed cost of $6 million), but 40,000 of the party faithful turned up to hear Sarkozy promise a new era for France and cheer him to the echo. As he told them,

"France is not nostalgia, a past that we venerate the better to forget the disappointments of a less glorious future. France is not a museum or an amusement park for tourists. It is not condemned to decline. It must reconquer its future . . . . To all those of you who came here today in the hope that things will change, I say to you that you will not be disappointed--they will change. France doesn't fear change; it is waiting for it."

Sarkozy has now produced a book, which translates as "The Republic, Religions and Hope", that seeks to address the issue of Muslims in France, which many voters put at the top of their concerns. It is a thin volume of 180 pages, mostly conversations with philosopher Philippe Verdin, but it is revolutionary by French standards in that it calls for an end to the 1905 law that established France as a secular republic, separating the state from religion. If the state can subsidize sports and culture clubs, Sarkozy asks, why not churches?

Religion is a quality essential to civilization and morality, Sarkozy insists (an unusual stance to take in what is fast becoming post-Christian Europe). "The moral dimension is most solid, most deeply rooted, when it proceeds from a spiritual or religious engagement, rather than when it seeks its source in political discussion or republican morality." Only religion can define and assert the moral absolutes that a just and self-confident society requires, he argues, adding that it is a weakness of the French state that it lacks this moral dimension. In a France whose schoolchildren are still inculcated daily with "republican virtues", and where the American political process is mocked for the power of religious groups and the prevalence of religious rhetoric, this is bold stuff. But Sarkozy is clear: "the Republic does not recognize the distinction between good and evil. She defends rules, the law, without grounding these in a moral order."

Religion is thus too important to be left to the faithful. The state is entitled to get involved, particularly with a relatively new religion (in France) like Islam. So Sarkozy wants to provide state funds to bring mosques out of the underground garages where extremists can fester, and into the open where the state can help train and set conditions for the imams. "What is dangerous is not minarets, but caves and garages that keep clandestine religious groups hidden", Sarkozy argues, but insists, "I don't want any more imams who don't speak a word of French."

Sarkozy's call has been highly controversial in France, where Left and Right alike have accused him of undermining the very foundations of the republic. But then Left and Right also accuse him of undermining the foundations of the social economy with his Anglo-Saxon belief in profits, competition and tax cuts. He is unrepentant. France simply cannot continue like this, he maintains, with only 24 percent of its under 25-year-olds in work, with 57 percent of state revenues going to the government's wage bill and interest payments (up from 42 percent 20 years ago.) France faces a triple crisis, he asserts, of its economy, of its sense of social and civic cohesion, and of its Muslim minority. He is prepared to tackle the challenge, or as he said at Le Bourget, "to speak the truth, to have the courage to look problems in the face, to start saying things without incessantly demanding whether they are popular or not." Chirac, it goes without saying, is determined to torpedo Sarkozy's ambitions as he sank President Bush's hope of a UN mandate for the Iraq War. For the next two years, France will be preparing not just for an election but for a highly personal duel.

Essay Types: Book Review