Thirty years ago, when green movements around the world were first taking off, the French greens, like those of other nations, struggled to articulate a basic list of long-range goals. Two of these goals eventually became very clear: first, to dismantle the centralized bureaucratic state, and second, to restructure the capitalist consumer economy. How these things were going to be done, and what the end results should look like, were naturally the subject of endless debate, but the underlying values of antistatism and anticonsumerism became leitmotifs of the new movement.' Three decades later the results are, to say the least, ironic. The French state has transformed itself into a colossal green Leviathan, its politicians and bureaucrats propounding environmental laws, decrees, regulations, and guidelines faster than the body politic can absorb them. Green activism has resulted in more, not less, government. The French consumer economy, for its part, has reveled in recent years in the profitable opportunities of a burgeoning new sector: environmentally oriented goods and services that range from eco-friendly laundry soap to nature tourism to what the French have come to call le marketing vert(green marketing). The products and ideas associated with a no-growth economy turned out to be a booming growth industry. Crushing defeat for the long-haired idealists of the sixties generation? Yet another example of the insidious adaptive capacities of industrial capitalism, absorbing the bitterest blows of its opponents, blandly digesting its enemies within itself, turning Bob Dylan into elevator Muzak? Perhaps. In any case, this ironic subversion of the subversives' intentions is the broader issue explored in the present article. Before focusing on this theme, however, a more fundamental subject must be addressed: the widespread reputation of the French as a peculiarly and truculently ungreen people.2 If this perception was accurate, and the French population