French psychologists can certainly find material to consider by looking to their own country's historical experience. France has certainly known mass trauma in its history. It has also known high-level deception. At first, the assertion that Captain Alfred Dreyfus was guilty of spying for the Germans was an unassailable truth that couldn't be questioned without the risk of having one's loyalties questioned. Fortunately, there were prominent intellectuals (notably Emile Zola) who were willing to go out on a limb and risk their reputations for the sake of waking people up to the to the truth, setting an example for others to follow. But in our own time, no intellectual of comparable stature has been willing to do the same where 9/11 is concerned.

9/11, of course, was not simply a mass, collective trauma, nor simply an instance of high-level deception. For it was a combination of the two: Elements within the U.S. government were involved in the deliberate infliction of trauma on the American people, then subsequently deceived them concerning the truth about those events, and used thier misrepresentation of those events again and again in order to manipulate that same traumatized public into accepting policies which it might very well have rejected otherwise. Even though they viewed the events and all that followed afterwards from across the Atlantic, the French people (as with the people of othe nations around the world) might still find it disturbing to contemplate that such crimes could be perpetrated in the supposedly free, democratic republic of the U.S. The U.S. role as a superpower is something which has often caused feelings of resentment in other countries--allies, adversaries, and neutrals alike. But to consider that the 'world's only superpower' is now one in which crimes of this magnitude--committed against their own domestic population no less--can be perpetrated and effectively covered up by elements within the bureaucracy and military would mean to go well beyond the more familiar resentments toward U.S. hegemony--something that might very well be difficult to contemplate, even though 9/11 didn't 'happen' to them.