This is a transcript of a programme broadcast on Radio 4 on 22 August 2004. It must not be reproduced without permission

Part Three - France and the World

There's nothing like living in France, to turn a loyal pro-European into a devout Euro-sceptic. It's that peculiar French perversity that all of us who have our home here grow to know as l'exception francaise - the French exception.

A Canadian journalist who has lived for many years in England told me once that when he gets together with fellow North Americans round a north London dinner table he begins by saying "OK you're allowed one anecdote each about how awful the Brits are and then there's a moratorium on the subject for the rest of the evening, otherwise it just dominates everything".

And you've got to stop your Anglo-friends in Paris doing the same thing. We can drone on all evening about the iniquities of French exceptionalism.

At the end of the street where I live in the Latin Quarter of the Parisian Left Bank, there is an exquisite botanical garden, the world famous Jardin des Plantes, rightly celebrated by the French as the home of botany. I like it that the streets around here are named after eighteenth and early nineteenth century scientists. I admire this reverence for learning, the way in which France elevates and celebrates those pioneers who first applied rational thought to the physical world. It is a constant reminder that you are in one of the centres of the European enlightenment - arguably the centre.

But sometimes, sometimes, you get the impression that you are living in an alternative reality. Last week I spoke here about the official French version of the liberation of Paris; of the narrative of events that omits any mention of the allies, the role they played, the sacrifices they made; of the enduring need for France to believe in the redemptive power of having liberated themselves without help from - of all people - the Anglo-Saxons.

One of the streets near where I live is rue Buffon, after the pioneer botanist and geologist George Louis Buffon. I looked him up the other day on an internet search engine. He was the father, it turns out, of French anthropology. But the line his internet biographers have chosen to highlight is not this. It is that as a mathematician he discovered - alone and unaided - the binomial theory usually attributed to a famous English scholar called Isaac Newton. Without, the website continues, ever having read Newton.

France even held out against the Greenwich Meridien. Long after navigators from every corner of the globe had accepted it, the French continued using their own - the Paris Merdien, about two degrees east of Greenwich and nine minutes and twenty two seconds ahead of it. French clocks were set to it, French cartographers observed it. At a conference in Washington DC in 1884, the French fought a valiant rearguard action but only Brazil and Santa Domingo thought they had a case, and France, reluctantly, adjusted its clocks to the emerging reality of Anglo-Saxon supremacy.

If you enter the Jardin des Plantes through the gate nearest to my house you will see a statue overlooking the garden that honours - according to the inscription on the plinthe - the founder of the theory of evolution. "You might think" a friend of mine said when I first arrived here, "that Charles Darwin is the father of evolution. But not here. Because the French have got their own." The statue honours Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who predates Darwin by half a century.

Lamarck has dropped off the Anglo-Saxon radar screen, and, indeed, that of most of the scientific world. He did indeed develop a theory that species evolve and that the two crucial conditions of evolution were time and favourable conditions, in other words that species adapt to their environment. Darwin himself gave Lamarck credit. "Lamarch" he wrote "first did the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of evolutionary change being the result of law, and not of miraculous, or divine, intervention".

In the Anglo-Saxon world Lamarck's name, if it is known at all, is associated with a theory long since discredited - the idea known as the inheritance of acquired characteristics - the idea that traits or attributes acquired or learned in the space of your life time will somehow be inherited by your children at birth. Darwin's theory - of random mutation followed by natural selection according to environmental suitability - changed science, changed the world. But it is Lamarck - who went up a scientific dead end - who is celebrated in France. Lamarck stands there in stone, like King Canute trying to roll back the tide, the tide, in this case, of an Anglo-Saxon version of events.

This is the contemporary French condition: how to keep on being French, how to be true to a certain conception of what France is, in an American Age. The eighteenth century was the French century: Rousseau, Voltaire, Versailles and the court of the Sun King Louis the Fourteenth, Buffon and the Jardin des Plantes, Paris buzzing with the discourse of the enlightenment and the new supremacy of scientific method. The nineteenth was the British century, of industry and empire, the workshop of the world, Waterloo and the Great Exhibition. But the twentieth century - indisputably that was the American century. And it is the American century that has given rise to the French exception.

The inescapable reality of American might shapes France's relations with the rest of the world.

There's another statue, this one beside the Grand Palais on the banks of the Seine that I sometimes pass on my way to work. It is general de Gaulle and the bronze casting captures his proud aloof air. The state, he once said, meaning himself, cannot smile. The inscription on this plinthe is from a speech he made from London in 1941. There is a pacte, he said, two thousand years old, between the greatness of France and the liberty of the world.

Most foreigners are mystified by this. But most French people know instinctively what he means. It is part of the Gaullist world view that France has a special role in the world, a duty to stand for certain ideals, a duty to be great for the sake of greatness.

In the days of empire this was la mission civilisatrice - the civilising mission. The French state extending into Africa to bring the benefits of commerce and Christianity to what all Europe considered the dark places of the world.

In 1994 I took an aid flight from Ramsgate in Kent and landed in what seemed to be a moral darkness of great intensity - the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. It was an old Boeing 707 and the seats had been taken out to make way for a mobile cholera hospital and a couple of landrovers. I squeezed in beside a volunteer doctor and she rolled her eyes as we took off. "I don't know where the Red Cross chartered this plane" she said. "I think it's a Liberian registered Pineapple transporter." As we dipped into the blanket of cloud that hung over central Africa the frame of the old plane shuddered and creaked. The crew couldn't make contact with the landing strip at Goma on what was then the Rwanda-Zaire border. They circled and circled and the plane banked and dipped and shivered, and the cargo strained at the straps that were holding it in place.

We'll go to Entebbe in Uganda for the night, the pilot said. We're running out of fuel.

The doctor beside me leapt out of her seat and pleaded with them to try one more time. There are nine hundred people a day dying of cholera, she said. If we get there tonight we can save more lives.

We circled again and made our approach.

She was right. On the perimeter of the airport, beyond the flimsy wire fence, the bodies were already piling up, of people who had fled across the Zaire border from Rwanda.

But this wasn't just an African affair. It also had about it the anachronistic feel of an old colonial rivalry - and there's no question that that is how it was seen in France.

The Rwandan regime that planned, ordered and carried out the genocide of the Tutsi minority was an ally of France. The enemy - the Rwandan Patriotic Front or RPF - had been formed among Tutsi exiles in Uganda. These were young men who had grown up in an Anglophone country, who spoke English and not French and who were now invading from the north in an attempt to put a stop to the genocide.

For France, another chunk of la Francophonie - of French influence in the world - was disappearing beneath the unstoppable advance of the Anglo-Saxons.

In the end France sent troops. But not to stop the genocide. France sent troops to stop the advance of the English speaking RPF. In the south west of Rwanda the French troops set up a secure zone, code-named Turquoise. Tens of thousands of those who had perpetrated the genocide - who'd spent a hundred bloody days wielding machetes against their Tutsi neighbours - flocked there, to enjoy the protection of their French allies. There is a pact, two thousand years old, between the greatness of France and the liberty of the world.

France, like Britain, is no longer an imperial power. But unlike Britain it has never, in its post-imperial state, felt itself to be in search of a role. For France very quickly assumed the leadership of Europe.

We have been celebrating, today, the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Paris. The German commander, General Von Choltitz, signed the surrender document at the Gare de Montparnasse at 3.30 on the afternoon of August the 25th 1944. The other two signatories on the document are those of General LeClerc, who led the Free French troops into Paris ahead of Eisenhower's American 4th Infantry earlier that day, and Colonel Rol Tonguy of the Paris Resistance. It was the only significant surrender in the year long liberation of Europe that was not carried out under the auspices of the allies - the Anglo-Saxon allies with whom de Gaulle had so tortured a relationship.

Eisenhower's plan had been to set up an American military government of occupation in France. That's why de Gaulle needed a people's uprising in the city. That's why he could not wait for the capital to fall to the allied advance. In that sense, the Paris uprising of August 1944 was as much an uprising against the Americans as it was against the Germans.

As President, de Gaulle would go on to infuriate the nations who had liberated France. For a decade he vetoed British entry into the European Economic Community, fearing that Britain would act as a Trojan horse for American influence. He regarded post war Europe as an American colony. In 1962, after granting independence to Algeria he told his ministers "having given independence to our colonies we are now going to recover our own. Western Europe has become an American protectorate without even realising it".

Britain had been pretty sniffy about early moves towards European integration. When German and Italy teamed up with their former enemies France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee is said to have dismissed the new union as a group of six nations, "four of whom we had to rescue from the other two".

But make no mistake. De Gaulle's vision of Franco-German reconciliation, of the building of a new European order with France and Germany as its centre of gravity, ended - according to one British historian - a historic enmity created by the division of Charlemagne's empire in the ninth century.

I thought of this on the beaches of Normandy on June the sixth this year, as I watched the veterans of the D-Day landings return one last time to visit the graves of those they left behind in the soil of liberated France. They marched past blown up, black and white grainy photographs of their younger selves and I thought of the peace and prosperity that Europe has achieved in my life time, and which we largely take for granted. It wasn't true of the world those men were born into. It is, substantially, a French achievement. There is a pact between the greatness of France and the liberty of the world.

A few days ago in one of the soul-less steel and glass buildings of the Brussels Eurocracy, I watched the twenty five new members of the European commission meet for the first time. It struck me that an important shift had taken place that is part of the long, slow story of France's retreat from greatness. The new countries of Europe - those who remember not only the horror of the 1940s but the four decades of communist occupation that followed it - those countries look to Britain for their inspiration. They are Atlanticist in their thinking. They are pro-American. They want the European Union refashioned. They want the Anglo-Saxon economic model - a liberalised economy, open markets, free trade, an end to the agricultural subsidies that, for the French, have been the bedrock of the European Union for half a century. Poor France. The child it conceived with Germany half a century has come of age. It is asserting its independence. The old Franco-German motor is spluttering. The Anglo-Saxons have entered through the eastern gate. General de Gaulle, who saw it all so clearly, must be turning in his grave.