A Place in the Sun.

Suddenly, it's a point of pride to be French. Not European, mind you. Not a global citizen, certainly. But tricolor-waving, baguette-toting, looking-down-a-long-de Gaullean-nose French. And why? Because those who have tended to treat France as an also-ran in the global power game (yes, Germany and the United States) are suddenly confronted with the fact that the Gauls are--one hesitates to say this--almost as important as they think they are.

France's quiet and quite confident new assertiveness can be seen on several fronts just now. At the United Nations, Washington gripes about French resistance to its bulldozer resolution authorizing an attack on Iraq. But the Americans have known all along that the French were best able to finesse a diplomatic compromise with recalcitrant Russia and China on the Security Council--even if the result may, in the end, be closer to France's vision than the United States'.

But it's in the economic field, especially, that France really seems to be making its own rules--and stirring up Europe's political beehive. Since President Jacques Chirac and his prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, took office five months ago, they have followed a simple principle: France first. Do other countries want to cut down subsidies to French farmers and impose quotas on French fishermen? Forget it. (The matter was settled with Germany recently, overwhelmingly on French terms.) And when Raffarin (finally) made his first trip to Brussels last month, he might as well have said, "Read my lips." Lower the Eurotaxes imposed on food and drink served in French cafes, he demanded. Thanks to such national "egotism," moaned Le Monde in an editorial, France "is becoming the black sheep of Europe."

If so, Finance Minister Francis Mer doesn't seem to mind. Meeting in Luxembourg last week with 11 of his peers on the committee overseeing Europe's single currency, he rebuffed pressures to cut France's budget by 0.5 percent next year to comply with the European Union's increasingly shaky "stability pact." The no-nonsense industrialist showed his steelmakers' grit: raise taxes and slash spending, just when economic hard times would seem to argue for doing precisely the opposite? Jamais. "There are other priorities in France," he said, chief among them boosting growth--regardless of what others might think. In a stroke, France has changed the way Europe works, breaking from the culture of compromise and consensus that's governed the eastern Atlantic community for decades.

What's going on here? At a time when Frenchmen of every intellectual stripe are bashing the United States for "unilateralism," could a variant of the old Gaullist arrogance be showing itself? Not quite. For all the tough talk, France isn't making a strategic doctrine out of narrow self-interest. It's not about to pull out of the euro, let alone Europe. But there's no denying the flutter of anxiety (and, in some quarters, hope) that Paris's recent actions have sent through the Union--especially considering the context. Just last week, after all, the European Commission formally opened the door to 10 new members by the end of 2004. If this "big bang" is to work, the EU must dramatically change everything, from the way it makes decisions to how it spends its money.

French leadership will be key. Chirac has always wanted to climb into the driver's seat. But when it came to the great European Project (ever-closer union) France always worked in tandem with Germany. Now that partnership has frayed. The political bonhomie shared by the likes of Francois Mitterrand and Helmut ...