These cultural differences, highlighted by the brashness of the American news media coverage, prompted the indulgence in cultural clichés on both sides of the Atlantic, reminiscent of the period when France refused to support the Bush administration’s war in Iraq and some Americans responded with “freedom fries” and called the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.”

The French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy, an outspoken friend and defender of Mr. Strauss-Kahn, was ubiquitous, writing and speaking of his continuing anger at the “pornographic” nature of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s treatment and the “obscene” press conference that the accuser’s lawyer held detailing her physical injuries as he tried to rescue her status as victim. Writing for The Daily Beast, the American media Web site, Mr. Lévy criticized the black-and-white handling of the case, “the cannibalization of justice by the sideshow.”

He accused the United States of having a simplistic moral and political compass, saying that the housekeeper, “because she was a poor immigrant, was inevitably innocent, and Mr. Strauss-Kahn, because he was powerful, was inevitably guilty.”

He demanded that Mr. Strauss-Kahn be fully exonerated on the charges against him, which include felony counts of committing a criminal sex act, attempted rape and sexual abuse.

And Mr. Lévy scolded the United States from a particularly French intellectual height. “America the pragmatic, that rebels against ideologies, this country of habeas corpus that de Tocqueville claimed possessed the most democratic system of justice in the world, has pushed this French Robespierrism, unfortunately, to the extremes of its craziness,” he wrote, invoking the ideological bloodletting of the French Revolution. “All this calls, at the least, for serious, honest, and substantial soul-searching.”

More broadly, the French news media, which had kept track of every anti-French insult in the New York media — Le Monde, for instance, had an article called, “Trash — the D.S.K. affair as told on the front pages of The New York Post” — was full of astonishment this weekend at “The U-turn of the American Media,” as The Journal du Dimanche said, suddenly attacking the housekeeper with the same tabloid breathlessness.

Ordinary French people have been left with unease over the American handling of the case and the anti-French sentiment that came with it. Kevin Benard, 28,a real estate agent, said the initial treatment of Mr. Strauss-Kahn had given the impression that he was guilty before the investigation had even begun. “America has a very harsh justice system,” he said. “We believe in people being innocent before they are proven guilty, and not the other way round.”