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Listening to these kids talk, an American might be tempted to think they attended some Middle Eastern madrasah or had been reading Noam Chomsky. "Sometimes you get the impression the Americans want to be masters of the planet, and that they're only in Iraq for the oil," says Constance Pluviaud, 17, before class last week. "Her friend Julien Cothenet, 18, chimes in: "They don't have the right to decide for the whole world on the basis of sheer power." Yet these are French students at the prestigious Lycée Chaptal, a secondary school in Paris that counts Alexandre Dumas junior among its illustrious alumni. Here, students as a rule take a dim view of President Bush's agenda for the U.S. and the world. André-Claude Thollon, a history teacher at Chaptal, says there's no doubt that his students are "very anti-Bush."

But are they, by extension, anti-American? Distaste for Bush, and opposition to the war in Iraq has made France ground zero for a certain brand of intellectual anti-Americanism. A new book stirring controversy in France puts the blame for a lot of that negative thinking on French textbooks. In Eléves sous Influence (Pupils under the Influence), authors Barbara Lefebvre and Eve Bonnivard claim the country's school books promote a skewed, decidedly anti-American view of the post-9/11 world. They analyzed 24 textbooks, most of them written in 2003 and 2004 and intended for the 9th and 12th grades of college-directed French schools. In most of them, Lefebvre, a history teacher, and Bonnivard, a journalist, found not exactly outright dogmatism, but "an ideological softness and falsely critical attitude that leads finally to the denunciation of a sole guilty party for the ills of the planet" — the U.S. "America is presented as a caricature," says Lefebvre, "while France wants to present itself as an anti-America."

It's hardly a surprise the textbooks denounce the U.S.-led war in Iraq: the overwhelming majority of the French opposed it. But according to Lefebvre and Bonnivard, textbook authors have carried their opposition to the war into broad simplifications that demonize much of America's role in the world. "There's a tendency to make everything relative," says Lefebvre. "Bush and bin Laden end up looking like two sides of the same coin." Sometimes Washington's vaunted unilateralism gets inflated beyond established facts. A passage in a textbook from publisher Magnard says that after the U.S. was attacked in 2001, "it decided to bomb Afghanistan"; in fact that conflict — unlike Iraq — was sanctioned by the United Nations. And when the U.S. has actually done something laudable, Lefebvre and Bonnivard note, American motives are cast in a negative light. "Having vanquished the Great Satan of the Soviet Union, the American government chooses new enemies," reads one account.

Jean-Michel Lambin, editor of history textbooks for Hachette, agrees the book has a point: "There is a strong weight of political correctness, especially after 9/11, and that leads to a confusion between morality and history." But not everyone buys the thesis. "They found some particular phrases that are objectionable, but that's a long way from proving the books are intentionally anti-American," says Chaptal's Thollon, who makes only selective use of textbooks anyway.

If French history texts are uniformly tough on contemporary America, which fought alongside France in four 20th century conflicts, they're notably nicer to a traditional enemy. French authors are currently working with counterparts in Germany, the country France has faced in war three times in the last 135 years alone, to synthesize a common view of their modern relationship. "We've started with the easy part, from 1945 onward," acknowledges Guillaume Le Quintrec, who directs the French part of the project for the publishing house Nathan. Still to be addressed are a wealth of events where a common view will be hard to find, points out his German colleague Ilas Körner-Wellershaus of the German publishing house Ernst Klett in Leipzig. The Treaty of Versailles in French declares Germany's "résponsibilite" for World War I; in the German version, the term has been translated as "Schuld," meaning guilt. The authors say they want to highlight such juxtapositions. "We do not want to smooth down the rough parts or reach an ultimate verdict," says Körner-Wellershaus. "We want to show the rifts that existed, and to create understanding of these differences."

It's taken the French and Germans half a century of common purpose in Europe to try to create a tolerant narrative of their mutual history. Too bad that the clash of worldviews between France and the U.S., whose differences have never led to violence, might take just as long to resolve, if French textbooks have their way.

• JAMES GRAFF
• A controversial new work says French school textbooks post 9/11 are just plain anti-American