Paris

Much of present-day French politics springs from the panic of April 21, 2002, when Jean-Marie Le Pen's fascistic National Front outpolled the ruling Socialist party to finish second in the opening round of France's presidential elections. Jacques Chirac, of course, easily won reelection two weeks later, with 82 percent of the vote, by rallying the entire left around his moderate-right party. But the first order of business for Chirac's prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, was to reassure voters that he had taken full account of what a close call it had been for France. "If in 200 days we have not seen real change," he said, "the risks of tension in this society will be high."

If the 2002 elections were a wake-up call, then France has slept through it. Today, Chirac's popularity is plummeting and Raffarin's job hangs by a thread. On the day the United States launched its war in Iraq last March, Chirac had a 74 percent approval rating, while Raffarin's stood at 58. Today, Chirac is at 47 and falling, while Raffarin is at 33. Their problem is partly that they knuckled under to union protests last spring during a halting and overdue attempt to restrain public employees' privileges. It is partly that they mishandled last summer's heat wave, which saw 15,000 more deaths than would be expected according to actuarial tables. (Most were old people, ditched by their families over summer vacations prolonged absurdly by generous social legislation. The great indignity of the heat wave was thus that it reminded the French what a non-familial, consumerist, rootless, "American" society they have become.) It is partly that Chirac and Raffarin have squandered their mandate on nugatory issues, from their campaign against reckless driving to a "war on tobacco." (The latter is causing problems of public order, too, as smokers, incredulous at the near-doubled price of cigarettes, assault tobacconists and steal merchandise.)

What made this inaction possible is that the government seemed to have an important project over the last 18 months--the exhilarating task of taming (if only oratorically) American military hubris. Certainly, France had some legitimate points. An argument can be made that America's "Axis of Evil" rhetoric, far from winning respect from rogue states, led them to accelerate their nuclear programs. The same goes for France's warnings about avoiding a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West. While America believed it was avoiding a clash of civilizations--fighting our enemies in the Islamic world without fighting our friends--drawing such distinctions may be beyond the capacity of most of the Muslims Washington sought to help. Avoiding a clash of civilizations thus demanded an explication not only of our war aims but of our Western way of life, which in turn requires more rhetorical sophistication than this American administration has at its disposal.