Friend or Faux?

At Brooklyn's Cafe Barbes, Vincent Douglas, the French co-owner, thinks U.S. resentment of his homeland "is well-deserved." "It's such a long, complicated history," observes Olivier Conan, Douglas' partner, who's also French but became a U.S. citizen five years ago. "A lot of people are not that far from Chirac's position" on the war, Conan says, "but they view the French as arrogant. And in a certain way, they're right."

Arrogant, unreliable and cowardly — that pretty much sums up the way a lot of Americans feel about the French right now. They don't understand why President...