"I am appalled by the American attitude," said Pierre Lellouche, a Gaullist legislator who dined with Secretary of State Warren Christopher in Paris last week. "To accuse us of being immoral and anti-Muslim because we ask Washington to join us in putting pressure on the Bosnian Government to end this carnage is outrageous. Our boys are in Bosnia and right now they are hostages. The real issue is that, in the first major post-cold war conflict, the Clinton Administration has withdrawn from Europe."

Getting "les Yankees" out of Europe was, of course, precisely the obsession of de Gaulle, who complained equally of Russian and American hegemony. He envisioned Paris squarely at the center of civilization and relegated America to the role of uncultured imperialist. From today's Gaullist right to the leftist intellectual disciples of Sartre, such "anti-Americanisme" often persists just beneath the surface.

It was de Gaulle who first dreamed aloud of a Europe freed of the American yoke and united from the Atlantic to the Urals, noting that for this to occur, "the Soviet Union will have to become Russia once again." With Russia reborn, a Socialist President, Francois Mitterrand, promptly took up this Gaullist idea, proposing a nebulous and stillborn European confederation. But a crucial difference exists between De Gaulle's dalliances and those of contemporary France. As Dominique Moisi, the deputy director of the French Institute for International Relations, noted, "The General's game was a lot less dangerous because he knew that the United States, in the end, needed France for its confrontation with the Soviet Union." Coming Unglued

Today, this compulsion to stick together has disappeared. In the recent global trade talks, demands that France stop subsidizing its movie industry ignited a French crusade against what many artists, intellectuals and politicians portrayed as an America bent on lowering the world's tastes to the gags, gore and gimmickry of Hollywood. "It's 'Dallas' or French creativity," intoned the singer and actor Renaud. A silly remark but one widely applauded in a battle that confirmed some powerful stereotypes: Americans as vulgar and money-obsessed; the French as pompous and unrealistic.

"We are two nations with universalist pretentions," said Jacques Attali, an adviser to President Mitterrand. "America wants to export the idea of democracy and a free market; we believe France has a civilizing world mission rooted in the ideals of the revolution and the universal declaration of the rights of man. So we clash."