hen you think about it, Harvard has a lot in common with France. Each traffics in self-referential pronouncements considered the last word on any given subject. Both buy into the concept of le roi soleil.
So imagine my good fortune last week to find a powwow on Harvard soil plumbing the cultural rifts between France and the United States. At last: a chance to comprehend the Gallic love affair with Jerry Lewis. And why the French let us twist slowly in the wind as we struggle with, ''Had I not lost my guidebook, I would not have had to ask you for directions, now would I?'' (The Italians, in contrast, agonize with you like midwives through the birth of every tortured syllable. I know, I know - someone's going to tell me these stereotypes are wrong and pernicious. Forget about it.)
The Harvard confab is the kind of thing that separates Boston from, say, Akron. We've got Culture. They have tires. There are only so many tires you need - I top out at four these days - but you can never get enough Franco-American panels.
Besides, the temperature was strafing 60 that day. Scullers were on the Charles like waterbugs. The male species of the Crimson undergraduate - now officially smarter asleep than I am awake - played Ultimate Frisbee sans T-shirts to display their pecs and etiolated winter skin. The lawn chairs were out. Ah, the rigors of academe.
At the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, a distinguished panel (what else would they be?) led by one of Harvard's uber mandarins, Stanley Hoffmann, explored the trans-Atlantic fissures. As is so often the case around this town, what looked precious was damned interesting.
While pundits bemoan a new low in relations between the French and Americans, this group saw deju vu all over again. ''We hear young people say, `It's so last year,''' said Philippe Roger, a droll French social scientist. ''Well, this is so last century.''
To wit: ''The United States, once an obscure satellite of British power, now wants to put all of humanity in its orbit.''
This sounds an awful lot like French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's tirade two weeks ago against the American unilateralism of President George W. Bush. But the Gallic burst came in a book published in France in 1883, when Chester Arthur was in the Oval Office.
And, as Roger pointed out, ''rift'' implies a prior unity. There never really was any, he maintained, after the eclat faded from Lafayette's heralded contributions to our revolution. The relationship began to sour as early as 1792 and reached the first of its many nadirs six years later when the Americans signed a secret treaty with Britain.
The French considered this compact treasonous on the heels of their aid to the Americans against the Brits. (Their love of freedom blended with the timeless principle: Your enemies were my enemies before they were your enemies.)
Things got worse when America emerged from the Civil War with military muscle that spooked the French. In classic Gallic fashion, they had sympathized with the South while opposing slavery. (This is not unlike their passionate opposition to the death penalty, which they outlawed, along with their beloved guillotine, a mere 20 years ago.)
But it was at the beginning of the conflict, in 1861, that the term ''Americanisation'' first appeared in France, according to Roger. It appeared in a broadside against the United States by Baudelaire, of all people. Stendhal also weighed in that we had bad manners.
To be fair, President Ulysses Grant did not endear himself to la France when he sent a telegram to the Kaiser congratulating him on the German victory in the Franco-Prussian War. The relationship took a further nose dive during the Spanish-American War, when American power was unsheathed abroad. The French really didn't like that one.
American boys saved the French bacon in two world wars, but then the United States became a superpower after 1945 and the French contracted a permanent case of envy. ''America is in the position France would like to be in,'' said Hoffmann, who then quoted former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing to the effect that America can't help being an elephant - it is in the nature of the disparity of power.
The Americans, in turn, have never grasped why the French don't accept their satellite status with grace. A playful Hoffmann summed up American thinking on the subject by asking, ''Why can't they be more like the Luxembourgeois? ''
But all is not bleak. The two cultures are converging in a number of areas. The American reaction to the Monica Lewinsky affair was ''very French,'' said panelist Christie McDonald, a Harvard professor of French language and literature. We separated Clinton's personal and professional lives as the French have done with their libidinous leaders for centuries.
In a curious switch, noted political scientist Eric Fassin, the French are becoming more entrepreneurial while a growing chunk of America reconsiders unfettered capitalism. Then, too, while France excoriates American popular culture, it allowed Disney to site a giant amusement park outside of Paris while we scotched a Disney scheme slated for Virginia.
So, plus ca change. Things have been rocky between French and Americans since the opening bell. Neither side apparently would have it any other way.
Sam Allis's e-mail is allis@globe.com
