's mystique endures. When Americans travel there, as some half a million do each year, they have two nations in mind. One is the land where the word civilization was coined, where Descartes, Rousseau, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Hugo, de Gaulle, and others still loom large. Then there is "the real France," a term suggesting an almost 19th- century world of swaying poplars, old chateaux, peasants, bistros, and beaches washed by sun and Mediterranean or Atlantic breezes. The reality is that since...