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After Osama bin Laden was killed, a prominent French radio station called me for an interview. It turned into a mildly hallucinogenic experience. Everybody from the president of the United States to Al Qaeda itself was saying Bin Laden was dead, but my interviewer kept pressing me for “the proof.”

I talked about DNA samples, the word of the American president, the accumulated intelligence, but it was clear that a Gallic conspiracy reflex — especially active with regard to France’s sometime American savior — had kicked in. The view that this might all be some U.S. plot or hoax had taken mysterious hold.

I was put in mind of an unpleasant Paris dinner when a France Télécom manager with international experience began to expound on the theory — more than plausible to his mind — that Jews had not turned up to work at the twin towers on 9/11 because Israel and the Mossad were behind the planes-turned-missiles that turned lower Manhattan into an inferno.

And now we have the Dominique Strauss-Kahn sexual assault case, viewed, it seems, by close to 60 percent of French society as a conspiracy against the putative Socialist presidential candidate — a sting operation that somehow placed a West African immigrant maid in a $3,000 a night Sofitel suite whose number, 2806, corresponds to the date of the opening of the Socialist party primaries in France (06-28).

Oh, s’il vous please!

A rough rule goes like this: The freer a society the less inclined it is to conspiracy theories, while the greater its culture of dependency the more it will tend to see hidden hands at work everywhere.

France remains a nation of Napoleonic centralism where the functionary’s mentality holds sway. The ingrained reflex of that mind-set is to look to the state for salvation, to believe in some all-orchestrating higher power.

The nation’s world-class private sector, believers in agency rather than dependency, follows the old principle of “vivre heureux, vivre caché” — to live happily, live hidden — and thereby allows the functionary’s order to prevail as reference point. In this view, personal responsibility does not loom large.

Countless Franco-American differences of culture have been highlighted by the DSK case — in the judicial system, the press, attitudes to public figures’ private lives, sex and the gravity of a rape charge — but a very fundamental one lies in the relation to authority. French deference to power — with the accompanying conspiracy theories — has encountered the hard-knuckled application of U.S. law as applied equally to anyone accused of a serious crime.

The response has been a gathering French outrage. I interviewed Strauss-Kahn long ago. He struck me as charming and very smart. Most impressive to me was that he seemed determined to modernize French socialism, a process too long delayed with the result that the French Socialist Party is a European dinosaur.

None of this, however, has anything to do with whether he attempted rape and forcibly imprisoned a 32-year-old chambermaid. Nor, of course, does his distinguished stewardship of the International Monetary Fund. The talent of Strauss-Kahn, 62, is not the issue.

Yet his French cohorts — men just as charming and smart as Strauss-Kahn — have made it their business to say, in essence, that he could not have done what he is accused of doing because he is one of us. He is, in effect, innocent by association. They include Bernard-Henri Lévy and Jean Daniel and Jack Lang.

Perhaps Lévy’s defense was the most extraordinary, for its cavalier dismissal of the African woman at the heart of the drama when African victims have been a focus of his various campaigns, but even more so for its language on Strauss-Kahn: “Charming, seductive, yes, certainly; a friend to women and, first of all, to his own woman, naturally; but this brutal and violent individual, this wild animal, this primate, obviously no, it’s absurd.”

I’ll let the Paris deconstructionist school do the brunt of the work on that sentence, but will observe that absurdity is no defense, “obviously” reeks of too much protest, and “a friend to women” is a super-freighted phrase in this context.

As David Rieff has observed, Strauss-Kahn’s proclivities were so well known that a French comedian had a skit years ago about him coming to a radio station for an interview and all women being ordered into a safe room. Jean Quatremer of the French daily Libération noted in 2007 that “The only real problem with Strauss-Kahn is his attitude to women. He is too insistent. ... The I.M.F. is an international institution with Anglo-Saxon morals. One inappropriate gesture, one unfortunate comment, and there will be a media hue and cry.”

And here we are. There are plenty of facts, incidents and complaints — never fully investigated by the French press — to suggest that the serious charges against Strauss-Kahn are not “absurd” and that a young African woman’s voice raised against violent abuse by the powerful should have its day in court.

Bin Laden is dead. The Jews went to work. Suite 2806 is just a number. Facts count. Conspiracy theories are the refuge of the disempowered.

DSK is just a dirty old man. Seems to be a disease going around in political types all over the world. Guys can't seem to control their sexual urges for whatever reason. As for the American justice system and NYPD, well, both have major problems. Hope he has learned something from this and manages to keep his hands off any more women or men for that matter.