Of all the international rancors that have blazed to life in the last few years, none seems more frivolous and pointless than that between France and America. For an American, to be hated by the Taliban, Al Qaeda, or the Baath Party is a cause for pride; the perpetual low-grade hostility of the French is simply depressing. After all, France and the United States have the oldest republican traditions on earth; France is the only major European power with whom we have never been at war; America owes its existence to French support during the Revolution, and France owes its survival to American intervention in the two World Wars. If these two countries can’t rise above picayune sniping – the nasty editorials, the wine boycotts, the “freedom fries” – what hope is there for India and Pakistan?

Yet as Philippe Roger shows in “The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism” (University of Chicago Press, 536 pages, $35), what we are witnessing now is just the latest attack of a chronic French illness. For more than 200 years, the French – and especially French intellectuals – have found an endless series of reasons to despise, fear, and mistrust America. Actual events, Mr. Roger insists, have little effect on this antipathy; it can adapt to war and peace, cooperation and rivalry. This makes it hopeless to try to explain the periodic surges of French anti-Americanism as a response to specific American actions. It is, rather, what Mr. Roger calls a “discourse,” a system of ideas and images that creates its own reality.

The trouble began, in fact, even before there was a United States. Cornelius de Pauw, Dutch by birth, nevertheless deserves to be counted as the father of French anti-Americanism, since his 1768 book, “Recherches philosophiques sur les Americains,” achieved its greatest influence in Paris. De Pauw described an America he had never seen as Nature’s trash heap: The air was thick with salt, the waters fermented, the land a swamp. No wonder animals in the New World were smaller and feebler than their European counterparts – De Pauw’s predecessor, the famous naturalist Buffon, had declared that American dogs do not bark – or that humans were “astonishingly idiotic, enervated, and vitiated in all parts of their organism.”

De Pauw’s vision of America proved disturbingly influential in 18th-century France. Indeed, as Mr. Roger shows, American envoys to Paris saw it as a major obstacle in their efforts to win French support for the Revolution: It was to counter De Pauwian myths that Jefferson wrote his “Notes on the State of Virginia.” Inevitably, this counterfactual portrait of American nature faded with time. But successive generations of French writers preserved its essential traits: complacency, intellectual dishonesty, and a predisposition to think the worst of America.

Mr. Roger goes on to trace the evolution of French anti-Americanism through the 19th century, a period when Tocqueville was far less influential on popular opinion than Mrs. Trollope. Early on, America was seen as a land of graceless shopkeepers, where no refined Frenchman could bear to live – Talleyrand, in exile in Philadelphia during the Revolution, mocked its “thirty-two religions and only one dish to eat.” Later, during the Civil War, the French proved remarkably sympathetic to the South, despite their nearly unanimous rejection of slavery.

But as Mr. Roger shows, it was, surprisingly, the Spanish-American War that inaugurated the great age of French anti-Americanism. The French were not involved in the conflict, yet many intellectuals – the young Paul Valery among them – felt that it marked an upsetting of the balance of nature, as the child of Europe turned on its enfeebled parent. The bulk of Mr. Roger’s study focuses on the half century after 1898, when the major tropes of French anti-Americanism were solidified: All the “‘folds’ of the discourse,” he writes, “were made before 1950,” and have been repeated ever since.

These “folds” are basically familiar, but to see them brought together in Mr. Roger’s book is to marvel at their sheer intellectual incoherence. America, successive generations of French intellectuals believed, was at once the home of unfettered capitalism and menacing collectivism; of teeming cities and barren emptiness; of “Anglo-Saxon” aggression and racial mongrelization. The brief Franco-American honeymoon of 1917-18 gave way to even greater hostility as the interwar crisis of French democracy produced a new school of vehemently right-wing America-haters.

The peak, or nadir, was a book called “Le Cancer americain,” which maintained that World War I was a trap laid for Europe by American financiers. It concluded with the cry, “Europe, wake up!” – a deliberate echo of Hitler’s slogan, “Deutschland erwache!” Ironically, anti-Americanism would revive after World War II as a mainly left-wing phenomenon, stoked by the French Communist Party. Mr. Roger even unearths a Communist newspaper’s endorsement of the Catholic theologian Etienne Gilson, as unlikely a pair of bedfellows as could be imagined, brought together by – what else? – their loathing of the United States.

Mr. Roger’s dense and scholarly book, which first appeared in France in 2002, is explicitly intended to shame his fellow countrymen out of their complacent hostility. “What if anti-Americanism,” he asks in his conclusion, “were now nothing but a mental enslavement inflicted by the French on themselves?” There is a danger here for the American reader, who may be tempted to dwell on the mote in another’s eye rather than the beam in his own (or vice versa, as the case may be). But there is also a lesson, in this time when thoughtful Americans are so often uneasy about America’s image in the eyes of the world: We should not blame ourselves for the delusions of our enemies, or of our friends.