Paris. New Year’s Day brings a flurry of light snow as I wander nostalgically beneath the windows of the flat I used to live in, in the heart of the Latin Quarter. I love it that the streets round here are named after eighteenth century scientists – Buffon, Linné, Monge, Lacépède. It is a celebration of the greatness of France’s intellectual heritage – its commitment to the power of ideas and the spirit of rational enquiry.

France’s character – shaped by history – is written into the street names of its capital city. On my way to work, I used to pass through metro stations called Franklin Roosevelt and George V and walk up rue Washington, named not for the US Federal Capital but for General George Washington, scourge of the British Empire and, in his day, the most famous man alive. I would stroll past a statue of Winston Churchill, and a little scale model of the Statue of Liberty. Intriguing, that: that a nation so given to anti-Americanism should be so full of symbolic declarations of friendship.

I lived in France during the years of George Bush’s presidency, the years of ‘freedom fries’ and ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’, of America’s openly expressed disdain for all that France stood for. “How many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris?” the joke went. “No-one knows. It’s never been tried.”

There is a story about a conversation between General de Gaulle, who, as president of the French Republic, telephoned his American counterpart Lyndon B Johnson, to inform him that France had decided to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance. Since its foundation nearly two decades earlier, NATO had had its headquarters in France. Now NATO would have to move. Furthermore, de Gaulle added, it was his intention that all American service personnel should be removed from French soil.

“Does that include,” Johnson is said to have replied, “those buried in it?”

Ouch.

But go to the cemeteries of Normandy and you see what an Anglo-Saxon business the D-Day landings – and the liberation of France – really were. The historian Andrew Roberts has calculated that of the 4,572 allied servicemen who died on that day on which, in retrospect, so much of human history seems now to have pivoted, only nineteen were French. That’s 0.4 per cent.

Thirty-seven Norwegians and one Belgian also died that day. The rest were all from the English speaking world: two New Zealanders, thirteen Australians, 359 Canadians, 1,641 Britons and, most decisively of all, 2,500 Americans.

After the disastrous Suez crisis in 1956, it fell to Harold MacMillan as British Prime Minister to move Britain from the Age of Empire to the Age of Europe. But his attempts to take the United Kingdom into what was then called the Common Market fell foul of General de Gaulle’s famous vetoes. Twice ‘Monsieur Non’ listened politely to Britain’s plea, and twice he slammed the door. De Gaulle saw in British membership the Trojan Horse of American hegemony, and American imperialism, in Europe. After Algeria won its independence from France in the early sixties, de Gaulle was fond of saying that he had not granted freedom to one country only to sit by and watch France lose its independence to the Americans.

MacMillan, in old age, spoke ruefully of France’s almost psychotic relationship with its Anglo-Saxon allies. France, he said, had made peace with Germany, had forgiven Germany for the brutality of invasion and the humiliation of four years of occupation, but it could never – never – forgive the British and Americans for liberating them.

French anti-Americanism has a long pedigree. The eighteenth century philosophers of the European Enlightenment believed the New World to be self-evidently inferior. They spoke, and wrote, prolifically of the degeneration of plant and animal life in America. They hypothesized that America had emerged from the ocean millennia after the old continents; and that that accounted for the cultural inferiority of civilisations that tried to plant themselves there.

I was living in Paris when France celebrated the 60th anniversary of its liberation from Nazi occupation. I went to the beaches of Normandy on the 60th anniversary of D-Day and watched veterans assembling one last time: old men, heads held high, marching past blown up photographs of themselves as young liberators. France’s ambivalence – the same neurosis that Harold MacMillan spoke of – was evident.

Paris launched a series of events to mark the liberation in August 2004. The city’s mayor had given the celebrations the title Paris Se Libère! – Paris Liberates Herself! One of the newspapers published a 48 page commemorative issue. There was no mention of the allies until page 18. An English friend of mine, in town that weekend, had remarked how abandoned Paris felt in August, the month the city empties out as its residents head for their annual sojourn in the countryside. “I see,” he said, “that Paris was liberated in August. I guess the Parisians didn’t find out about it till September, when they came back.”

Again – ouch. That caustic Anglo-Saxon wit stings.

It stings because the tale that France told itself after the war was built around a lie. Paris se Libere. The words were first spoken by de Gaulle himself at the Hôtel de Ville on the evening of August 25th 1944. Paris had been liberated by her own people, he declared, with the help of the armies of France, with the help and support of the whole of France, that is to say of fighting France, the true France, the eternal France.

France knew, in its heart, even in 1944, that that was not true. But it took until the 1980s for a new generation of historians properly to re-examine the darkest chapter of France’s twentieth century history. When I was living in Paris, it struck me that Sarkozy – not yet president – had the potential to be France’s first post-Gaullist leader. His enemies called him “Sarkozy l’Americain” in the hope that this would make him unelectable. It didn’t work. Last year, he took his country back into the Atlanticist fold, and rejoined NATO. It seems to me another step in a long journey, in which France – in its mature, disputatious, entrenched democracy, the France that loves and thrives on and believes in the power of ideas and truth – is growing reconciled to its history, and falling out of love with its myths.