FRANCE has adopted a posture of pained superiority in the face of the torrent of Anglo-Saxon invective flowing its way. Its dismissive tone reflects the view that President Chirac is a rock of sanity while Tony Blair has landed his country in a mess by blindly following the Americans.

“Tony Blair should only blame himself,” Le Figaro said yesterday. Commenting on “Blair’s Iraq Failure”, it added: “In his enthusiasm for the battle between good and evil, he forgot that the bridge between Europe and America cannot be one-way only.”

Mr Blair’s idea of a six-test ultimatum for Baghdad was widely derided as a hopeless ploy by a man in distress. “The British are desperately trying to find elbow-room for themselves and the Americans are refusing to give it to them,” a French diplomat said.

One of those tests — the demand for Saddam Hussein to confess on Iraqi television to hiding weapons of mass destruction — prompted mirth in the Foreign Ministry. But MChirac says that he wants to “avoid polemics”, and has ordered his team not to add to British discomfort.

Seen from Paris, Britain’s dilemma is a side-show, albeit a ghoulish one. The real clash is between two great nations and world views — the French and the American.

On one side is the “White knight of peace” (M Chirac), with his trusty chevalier, the dashing Dominique de Villepin, the Foreign Minister. On the other is the fundamentalist cowboy President attended by “Dr Follamour” (Dr Strangelove), the French nickname for Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary.

Although the feud has become personal between Messrs Blair and Chirac and Messrs Straw and de Villepin, at least they know each other and share roughly the same culture and language. “With the Americans, it is a total dialogue of the deaf,” said a diplomat. France is convinced that, although the US will win the war, it has established itself as champion of an alternative world order to US domination. The resort to crude French-bashing in the US and Britain adds to France’s conviction that it has won the argument.

The reaction to Britain’s UN move reflected the mixture of regret and schadenfreude in Paris over Mr Blair. Le Monde said that the Prime Minister “has been roughly treated by his American ally, who has refused him a chance to extract himself with a credible proposal”. Le Figaro said that he was “caught in a tempest” with little means of escape. It also admired “la fougue” — stylish fighting spirit — of the Prime Minister in adversity.

The contrast in cross-Channel moods is well illustrated by images of the relaxed and beaming M Chirac, his popularity in the stratosphere, alongside the haggard-looking “Poor Tony Blair”, as le Monde called him. Capping French glory was the news yesterday that babies in the Arab world were being named “Chirac”, in tribute to the “peace-warrior President”. In 1990, they were being called Saddam, and more recently Osama.

French hardliners are barely able to hide their satisfaction at seeing Mr Blair brought down a peg after years as a thorn in French flesh and pretender to European leadership. M Chirac believes that the crisis has served as a lesson for the EU on the need to stand on its own, with Paris and Berlin at its core.

Even the few French who fear that M Chirac has gone too far believe he has given a good riposte to the British “arrogance” allegedly displayed when Mr Blair’s team told British media before the summit in le Touquet last month that the French President would join the Anglo-American side “after a bit of stroking”.

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