Paris

AS THE UNITED STATES and many of its European allies girded for war last week, France's popular interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy announced that his office had "no precise information indicating any terrorist threats" in France. Nonetheless, the presence of substantial American interests--from fast-food joints (too many!) to cultural monuments--led Sarkozy to double the number of anti-terrorist operatives assigned to the national "Vigipirate" program, which keeps transit hubs and public areas under surveillance for bombs and other threats. Last Thursday, the Vigipirate officers, searching a locker in the Gare de Lyon train station in Paris, found vials with traces of ricin, the same poison that had been found on suspected terrorists arrested in London in January.

Nonetheless, France believes its position as leader of the worldwide opposition to the American-led attack on Iraq has given it a measure of shelter from the terrorist storm--or at least bought it some time. And France's estrangement from the new--military--part of the war on terror is almost complete. As Americans rallied around President Bush when the war began, the French rallied around their antiwar president. And with the popularity of Jacques Chirac soaring, his advisers are seeking to turn the magic of the moment to a vital end: solving the festering domestic Clash of Civilizations between "Old France" and its Arab immigrant population.

Chirac's stance against the war has provided something all French governments seek, but most lack: common ground with the country's poor, crime-prone, and discriminated-against "Arabo-Muslim" minority. North African immigrants and their second- and third-generation French offspring, known as beurs, account for 10 percent of the French population, by conservative estimates. (France does not collect ethnic data in its census.) Only under extraordinary circumstances do most non-Arab Frenchmen view their presence without trepidation. The 1998 World Cup--won by a French squad that included many Frenchmen of Arab descent--was such a circumstance. These days of wild popularity for Chirac's anti-American position--and the wave of street demonstrations that are its most visible sign--are turning out to be another.

Chirac is in a better position than most to woo Muslims, French and otherwise. He has long been something of a hero in the Arab world. It was he who, as prime minister, arranged the sale of the Osirak nuclear reactor to Saddam Hussein in the late 1970s. When Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin was pelted with stones for describing Hezbollah as a "terrorist" group on a visit to the West Bank in 1999, Chirac angrily reminded Jospin that foreign policy gets made by the president, not the prime minister. The French press has been full of reports in recent days that Palestinian families have begun to name their newborn boys "Chirac." When he visited Algeria early this month, crowds estimated at over a million turned out to acclaim him. And a new book that arrived in Paris bookstores last week--"L'Orient de Jacques Chirac," written by the Egyptian journalist and literary critic Ahmed Youssef--compares Chirac to Alexander the Great and Aladdin. Indeed, Youssef meekly expresses his hope that he might serve as Cicero to Chirac's Caesar, or Stendhal to his Napoleon.

Chirac is seeking to put this kudos among Muslims to use for his country. The recent insistence of Chirac and his foreign minister Dominique de Villepin that the United Nations is the sole source of legitimacy in the postwar rebuilding of Iraq is a sign that France is bidding for a role as leader of what used to be called the "non-aligned" movement. (France's ongoing military intervention in Ivory Coast is another such sign.) This is an old French dream--but it is a decidedly un-Gaullist one. As Jean-Claude Casanova, editor of the prestigious quarterly Commentaire, noted recently, de Gaulle was a U.N. skeptic. "It goes without saying," the general said during his presidency, "that under no circumstances will France accept that a collection of more or less totalitarian states and past masters of dictatorship and newly invented states . . . should dictate the law to it."