America and France are chalk and cheese. Not just any old French cheese, mind you, but one of those pungent, semi-liquid explosions that come in a special reinforced wooden container. And not just any American chalk, either, but something extraordinarily dry, hard and chippy.

George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac could not more perfectly epitomise what France dislikes about America, and vice versa. Bush’s anti-intellectualism, his big hats, his Bible-tinged rhetoric and his inability to master his own language, let alone French, fit him snugly into the French stereotype of the obnoxious, ignorant American. Chirac’s glinting Gallic arrogance, his self-conscious swagger, and his tart refusal to adopt the proper team spirit are confirmation of a France that is not only archaic, corrupt and treacherous, but probably doesn’t wash very thoroughly either.

Yet in one respect Bush and Chirac are the same: both believe, in a way that is peculiar to America and France, that the values they espouse are, or ought to be, universal. Hence the clash.

The row over Iraq has brought America’s francophobia and France’s anti-Americanism to a pitch not seen since 1797, when France demanded a $12 million loan in return for accepting a US envoy to Paris. The New York Post carries photographs of American graves in Normandy with the headline “Has France Forgotten?”, while Bart Simpson, prime example of the popular mass American culture that France abhors, rails against “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”. To this France has responded with an arch shrug, adopting a tone of superiority precisely calculated to send the Americans into even blacker fury. When the French Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, reminded the UN yesterday that he was delivering a message from “an old country, France”, Colin Powell answered with the riposte that he spoke as “a representative of the oldest democracy”.

The roots of this mutual antipathy go back 200 years, and are far deeper than anything to do with the spread of McDonald’s in France, language, culture or weapons inspections. It is an ancient antagonism: about 50 per cent mistrust, 40 per cent fear, and 10 per cent profound, if sneaking, admiration. The same sort of compound can be found in the more extreme anti-Americanism of the British Left, but it is not natural to Britons.

The points of conflict between France and America are multiple, but what truly sets the two nations at odds is not their differences but what unites them: only the US and France still have a genuinely global view of themselves, a national self-image founded on the belief that they are the repositories of universal values. Both consider themselves, with equal conceit, to be “universal nations”, in a way that Britain ceased to do with the end of empire.

For all France’s feigned insouciance about the torrent of American abuse it is now receiving, the French remain obsessed with America in a way that America is not obsessed with France. Indeed, except when France is behaving badly, America does not much care or think about France. This, of course, makes France even more obsessive.

In a new book entitled L’ennemi américain, Philippe Roger argues that French anti-Americanism is not so much a reaction to identifiable policies as a coherent world view perceiving America as a threat to France, a rival that has consistently belittled and frustrated French ambitions.

In this, modern French anti-Americanism is the direct descendant of French Anglophobia of the 18th and 19th centuries, the belief that a barbaric Anglo-Saxon capitalism was undermining French glory and excluding France from superpower status. Both Anglophobia and modern anti-Americanism contrast humane virtues with unbridled and uncaring capitalism, the kinder, gentler France holding back the geopolitical bully that was the British empire, and is now America. In practical terms, this has meant refusing the US access to French airspace on bombing missions to Libya in 1986, widespread French opposition to military action in Afghanistan, and the current stance over Iraq.

The logic of French anti-Americanism necessitates occupation of the moral and intellectual high ground. Thus Hubert Védrine, then France’s Foreign Minister, felt obliged not merely to disagree with Bush’s “axis of evil” speech, but also to dismiss it as “simplistic”. The American response to this was equally telling, with Michael Kelly in The Washington Post referring to “the French Foreign Minister, whose name is Pétain, or Maginot, or something”. The anti-Semitism in France’s past adds another, poisonous, element to the relationship. American insistence on the repayment of French war debts after the First World War led some French to speak of the US as “Oncle Shylock”, a plutocracy dominated by unfeeling billionaires determined to have their pound of flesh.

As a result, America is swift to react to real or perceived French anti-Semitism: the former Mayor of New York, Ed Koch, for example, angered by what he considers French racism, ends his weekly radio broadcasts with Caesar’s tag: “Omni Gaul Delenda est!” (All Gaul must be destroyed).

France cannot stop the spread of English at the expense of French any more than it can prevent America from invading Iraq, but it is part of the strained, defining relationship that it feels compelled to try. For Chirac, this is yet another test of France’s global stature, of its self-definition as the only other country with faith in its own universalist principles.

Védrine recently observed: “A big part of French opinion thinks that France’s particular role is to intervene abroad for the good of others. This is something very old and rather specific to France.” If one changed “French” and “France” to “American” and “America”, those words might have been uttered by George W. Bush.

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