Mouseketeers

...But Villepin is still on the way upand has plenty to play for...

...So the French still have a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council...

...action in Iraq up until the last few days—let alone felt justified in using it—may have surprised a few on the other side of the Atlantic...

...Jacques Chirac, perhaps more corrupt than some French leaders, less corrupt than others, is just the latest in a line of French heads of state who know full well it is very odd France should have a permanent seat...

...France's senior officials are extremely bright people, at least at passing exams...

...They are bright and yet also driven individuals...

...If you do the same at 3:00 A.M...

...you fall asleep," he told a recent interviewer...

...France still counts, and Chirac can bow out gracefully, to a prosecution-proof retirement...

...The corruption investigation on his conduct when Mayor of Paris between 1977 and 1995 is now pointless—he remains immune from investigation by having won the presidency again in 2002...

...by the time he finishes his term in 2007, France's statute of limitations will make it too late—by April 2004, in fact—to take him to court for stealing money as Mayor of Paris...

...By contrast, Villepin's account of Napoleon's last wild stab at dominating Europe, after escaping from the prison-island of Elba to raise another army in 1815—the legendary "Hundred Days"—is hardly as modest...

...And if anyone can see the contrast between France the stylish player on the world diplomatic stage, and France the average-ish West European country, the fiercely intellectual bureaucrats running the Fifth Republic certainly can...

...This is embarrassing for everyone to admit...

...Britons have been publicly questioning and mocking their own country's international pretensions since at least the 1940s...

...And still that new location of NATO Europe keeps the French language—though the French sneer at the way the Belgians speak it—important to Western diplomacy, an importance it has not deserved since losing Waterloo, Egypt, India, and Louisiana in the mid-nineteenth century, if even then...

...France fought tooth and nail to hang on to its much less valuable chunks of global presence (largely North African desert and Southeast Asian jungle-bits Britain had rejected in previous centuries as not worth controlling...

...Pragmatists at the Pentagon have long been bemused by persistent French brinkmanship, the diplomatic maneuvering to keep L'Hexagon—a French name for France, from its shape on the map—an independent force...

...This world-power status for France is still, half a century later, taken seriously by many, largely because no one has gotten around to taking it away...

...Paths of Wisdom, a witty history of mazes and labyrinths from ancient history, could be Attali's little joke about getting ahead in the French civil service...

...As Britain hurriedly unwound its global entanglements in the 1950s and 1960s, France's Security Council membership seemed for thirty years no more obvious or bizarre than Britain's...

...He was one of many British diplomats who feel international if they speak good French, as if France were the essence of "abroad...

...So he is almost out of the game as an individual and is playing now for the sheer gloire of showing the world that France can make the United States wait...

...How many active political players inside the Beltway today can remember de Gaulle's eviction of NATO headquarters from Paris in 1967, forcing it to resettle in Brussels...

...Chirac, like his predecessors, resents France's powerlessness and lack of importance the last hundred and fifty years...

...The answers to both questions are disturbing and point back to the strange fact that France in 1945 was considered to be one of four world powers that had defeated Nazi Germany, despite having been wholly defeated by Hitler's regime and needing to be rescued by other countries...

...Nobody, least of all its own leaders, can quite believe France has managed to hang on to its coveted world role this long...

...Jacques Attali, the high-flying French mandarin forced to resign as European Bank for Reconstruction and Development head after only two years in 1993, wrote several books (more books than his equally high-flying twin Bernard, busy wrecking Air France as CEO at the same time...

...The UK dismantled its larger international empire fairly willingly in the late '50s and '60s...

...Each of their Security Council seats has helped to obscure the silliness of the other, like matching fig leaves...

...If France is still up there, why not Britain...

...Both Chirac and his suddenly famous foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, are graduates of the ENAENArchistes, as French critics sarcastically call them...

...His remark matched what most French officials still want to do—keep the L'Hexagon in the game, keep it punching above its weight...

...Both countries have played the roles of once-loved elderly relatives, previously formidable, now quaintly frail, tolerated out of a mixture of respect and affection...

...France is a lot like an overrated poker player enjoying an amazingly long spell of successful bluffs with poor cards...

...and USSR look a bit less conspicuous at the head of the world arena and to have themselves that extra vote to spare in the occasional tight spot...

...Biographers of politicians note the addictive nature of power, how—as with compulsive poker players—the politician's most important goal can become simply to be able to continue playing, to make sure you still have enough chips to buy your way into the next night's big game...

...Villepin's vehement denials that he has political ambitions can be taken in France as strong evidence of having political ambitions...

...Their luck at being allowed to cling on to some glory doesn't console them...

...Whether this time Washington is finally irritated enough to make sure this is France's last hundred days in the big game remains to be seen...

...The parallels suggested by writing a book about the last three-month grab at power by Napoleon, arguably Europe's first fascist leader, would make statesmen—and voters—in most countries uneasy...

...All aspiring French leaders at some point must retreat into private contemplation, usually to write a small, whimsical book of exquisite scholarship...

...They dream of restoring France's "unfairly" lost grandeur through the sheer, incandescent cleverness these star students have been told all their lives they possess in buckets...

...If Britain is still up there, why not France...

...Everyone, including the French, knows it must end soon, but no one knows exactly when someone finally will ask them to show their full hand...

...For comparison, some nine hundred people graduate each year from Harvard Business School, yet one hundred people graduate from Paris's Ecole Nationale d'Administration, making it more than twice as exclusive by size of country...

...Their allies or rescuers got them that permanent seat for much the same reason that Stalin in the 1940s got Soviet province Ukraine full UN membership as an independent country (plus a temporary Security Council seat): to make the U.S...

...Villepin relishes exhausting his aides, keeping them up or waking them up in the small hours for policy discussions, Clinton-style...

...Goodwill toward Paris has been eroded again and again, only for the slate to be wiped clean each time by the short, collective memory of Washington politicians...

...A reputed workaholic, he describes his multifaceted lifestyle—editing books of his own poems, writing histories of Napoleon—in terms of staying awake, staying alert, staying ahead...

...France's allies defeated Germany for their own reasons, but also to the great benefit of occupied, beaten France, and these allies were the Soviet Union, the United States (splitting its contribution with another opponent, Japan, in the Pacific), and Britain, in that order...

...Jacques Chirac may be less obsessed than a decade ago...

...They are almost all products of one of the world's most exclusive educational elites...

...British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd in the 1980s naively said Britain still "punches above its weight in world affairs," as if punching above your weight were not extremely dangerous—canny powers try to accumulate gains by repeatedly punching below their weight...

...Villepin's manic maneuvers are, for his own future and for his country's, somehow to parlay a weak hand of cards into a winning hand, by staying at the poker table, staying in the game, and staying unpredictable, whatever it costs...

...It taunts them with the real global primacy they feel they might have had and are entitled to...

...French citizens still today fly into a rage if you suggest France has an inflated sense of its own importance...

...as you do at 2:00 A.M...