From the International Herald Tribune comes an article about a man named Daniel Cordier. During World War II, he was the secretary to Jean Moulin, the virtually mythic French Resistance leader. At the behest of Charles de Gaulle, Moulin parachuted into German-occupied France and for 17 months led the underground effort against the Nazis. Ultimately betrayed, Moulin was captured by the Germans and tortured to death. Every Frenchman knows his story.

But the story Cordier wants to tell is a different one. He has been writing a biography of Moulin that is also an examination of France during the war era. Cordier has found that the French did not stand up to the Nazis, did not resist the puppet Vichy regime under Marshal Henri Philippe Petain and mostly did not support the Resistance. Cordier, writes the Trib's Barry James, "leaves Moulin's status as a hero intact, but . . . demolishes myths that provide the political and moral underpinnings of postwar France." Is that so?

I ask because I think that if I let my fingers walk through a computer database, searching "France" and "myths," only the Little Engine That Could could finish the job. This has got to be the zillionth time I've read that France is going to have to face its past. Such a confrontation has been predicted ever since Marcel Ophuls first screened "The Sorrow and the Pity" nearly 25 years ago. The arrest of some collaborator, the unearthing of even more evidence, the occasional trial - all of these produce the stock reference to France confronting its past and disposing of its myths. It never happens.

I am not being critical of James, a savvy journalist. I assume he knows what he's talking about, which is that France still clings to myth about the way it comported itself during the war, preferring a cinematic version to the truth. The French, of course, are a special case since, well, they are the French. But what the French do to perfection, other nations do almost as well. Americans are no exception. We too have an idealized notion of who we are and what we have done, and will only with the greatest reluctance face our own history. It comes as a shock to many people to learn, for instance, that Abraham Lincoln was a racist, on record as favoring "the superior position assigned to the white race." This, of course, does not square with the Lincoln chiseled into one of Washington's more moving monuments, but it happens to be the case. Honest Abe was a man of his times.

Lincoln is the personification of an American ambivalence about racism. Most white Americans acknowledge a racist history, but having done so act as if it never happened. The daily onerousness of racism, so much a part of the lives of so many black people, remains unseen, unfelt and unacknowledged. A white Washingtonian gets into a cab and just assumes that for the driver, things are what they have been. You would not know that your driver, if he is black and old enough, was once barred from picking up passengers at most of the city's better hotels. You would not know, either, that Washington's swimming pools were once segregated, that the fire department was a bastion of racism (one of the stories I covered when I first got to town in 1968 was the refusal of white firefighters to wear oxygen masks worn by blacks) or that your driver just might have been one of those black soldiers in World War II who got poorer medical treatment from his own army than did German POWs.

Somewhat the same holds true for the white majority's treatment of American Indians. The extirpation of Native American religions, the attempt to eradicate their culture if not, in fact, Native Americans themselves - all this is known but not, really, assimilated. Speaking just for myself, it always comes as a shock to learn such historical facts. I categorize them as something unique to the past, having no bearing on what's happening now. Intellectually, I know what happened, but, like the French, I have to learn it over and over again.

Myth is comforting. Our national myth, like the one the French cling to with such tenacity, tells us things about ourselves we like to hear. It has always amazed me to hear older Jews, some of whom were abandoned by a parent, talk with awe about Jewish family values - cherishing the stereotype over their own experience. Similarly, the black sense of victimization is apparently vindicated by the myth that Charles Drew, the black physician who pioneered the use of plasma, died in 1950 because he was denied blood by a Jim Crow hospital. The story isn't true, but it's believed because enough blacks think it ought to be true. It conforms to their view of the world.

My own view of America is more than a little formed by myths. We are not the sort of people who would perform radiation experiments on the unaware - although maybe we did. We could never have allowed black men to die of untreated syphilis, yet that's exactly what happened in Tuskegee, Ala. We would never, of course, kill innocent women and children, yet that's what was done on occasion to the Indians, and we could not have kept Jews trapped in Europe during the Holocaust from coming to this country, yet we did. We did all those things.

By now, you'd think the French would be wise to who they are and what they did. How many times need a myth be exposed before it is junked? The answer, it seems, is that if the myth has to do with self-image it as durable as a diamond and just as alluring. The French are like the rest of us - only more so.

N'est-ce pas?