JACQUES CHIRAC was basking in ecstatic praise from virtually all of France yesterday after his Monday night pledge to defy America and veto a war against Iraq.

Only a few grumbles from the business world and a squeak of dissent from his own conservative camp marred a symphony of tributes for President Chirac and his redemption as a man of destiny after a long and chequered political career.

Only Joan of Arc was missing from the rollcall of heroes, from Charles de Gaulle to Charlemagne, to which M Chirac was likened.

“In the eyes of the world he has attained the kind of stature that Mandela won in Africa,” La Croix, the Roman Catholic daily, declared.

Le Figaro called M Chirac a “white knight of peace, champion of all the oppressed of the Earth” and suggested that he might win the Nobel Peace Prize.

The talk from Paris dinner tables to works canteens was about pride in France leading the field in a moral cause. The mood, spurred in part by old Gallic reflexes against the “Anglo-Saxons”, reflected the belief that M Chirac had put France back on the map.

“Maybe Chirac stumbled into this, but the old dodger has finally done something great,” was a common refrain among intellectuals who had long regarded him as an unprincipled opportunist.

Le Monde, which until elections last year had led the campaign to expose M Chirac as corrupt, hailed the “nobility” of his cause in defending the international order against “the neo-imperialist Americans”. Libération, another perennial opponent, the left-wing daily, marvelled at the way in which he was leading the world towards his vision of a multipolar, international order in the face of superpower hegemony. Serge July, Editor of Libération, said that M Chirac’s intransigence was aimed at saving America from its own “fatal unilateralism”.

With the wind in his sails as never before in 35 years of high politics, M Chirac is in no mood to compromise over a new UN resolution, his aides said. Nor is he likely to rush to help Tony Blair, whom he views as an irritating rival and an adversary of the old EU core, which France dominates with Germany.

A few doubters did air qualms about a US backlash and the damage to Europe. La Tribune, a business daily, said that France’s veto was not justified by any national interests and it would look impotent when Washington launched its war. “France’s influence in the Security Council would be annihilated . . . It would inflict a terrible blow to the (UN) organisation whose role it wants to consecrate,” it said.

While the Socialist and Communist Opposition showered praise on M Chirac, Olivier Dassault, an MP in his UMP party and a boss in the family aerospace and media firm, said that thousands of businesses could be ruined by an anti-French reaction from the US.

But few are publicly questioning the likely cost of the biggest fight between Paris and Washington since the Suez Crisis of 1956.

M Chirac said on Monday that in Europe, the big split over Iraq could turn out to be healthy. The EU had been built from adversity. “Every crisis has ended up reinforcing the European process,” he added. He also sought to soothe American anger by stating that he would not block American transit through French airspace in the event of war.

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