George Clooney outwits him, Zorro outfights him and Bruce Willis blows him to pieces. He is the Frenchman, Hollywood’s all-purpose bad guy, but now, four years on from the feud over Iraq, France has had enough.

The opening of the fourth Die Hard has fuelled French irritation with the arrogant Gallic psychopaths who have littered US films in recent years.

“A smoker, not very clean, vain, cowardly and unfaithful, the Frenchman has come to embody the depraved morals of old Europe as evoked by George Bush,” Paris Match complained. “Each one of his defeats displays American superiority.”

In French eyes, the phenomenon has reached absurd lengths. In Die Hard 4.0, Willis’s John McClane massacres French assassins working for the American master criminal. French actors have played le salaud (bastard) in The Matrix Reloaded, Mission: Impossible, S.W.A.T., Catwoman, The Da Vinci Code and Oceans 12 and 13.

Bashing the French is risk-free, noted Libération. “Italian-Americans or Chinese-Americans are communities. Others, such as the Arab lobby, are more vigilant.” Le Monde lamented the days when the French “were admired as nonchalant, heroic resistance fighters . . . before Hollywood cast its caustic eye on the felon Chirac and his band of capitulators”.

The producers of Die Hard 4.0 said that deploying nasty Frenchmen was really a compliment. “We have to have charismatic bad guys up against George Clooney, Bruce Willis or Tom Hanks,” said Mary Tricia Wood, a casting director on Die Hard.

Jean Tulard, author of Dictionnaire du Cinéma, said that the phenomenon of the French villain would probably fade. “AntiFrench feeling is already in retreat in America because events have shown that France took the wiser position on Iraq,” he told The Times.

Evidence of Maurice Chevalier-style Francophilia has come with the success in the US this summer of Ratatouille, a Hollywood animation about a rat who becomes a chef in Paris. The rat is French – but he is charming.

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