...Here's Philippe Douste-Blazy, a neophyte just sworn in as foreign minister, going off 10 minutes later about how the world, by French definition, is a multipolar place with Europe serving as a counterweight to the United States. No matter that France, in rejecting the European Union's constitution, has lost any claim to defining the EU's mission or European primacy, and the rest of Europe wants to take a pass on permanent confrontation with the Americans.

No matter that in the Arab world, there are just traces now of France's onetime conceit that it held a special place of influence among Western countries. The French are totally removed from the Israel-Palestinian peace process, and in Lebanon, they follow the U.S. lead. As for Africa, Blair has left Chirac in the dust to become the embodiment of the industrial world's concern for its well-being.

Say all this in a gulp, pronounce the forbidden d-word for decline, and if you're French, you can be labeled a defeatist or an agent of the awful Anglo-Saxons. Still, the situation has become so obviously loopy that Nicolas Sarkozy, a politician never troubled before by French pretensions but who wants to be the next president, seems to think it worth the risk of pointing out.

He said on Sunday: "I can't get around the idea of France piling up the disappointments without stopping to ask if, just by chance, it's not us who are wrong and the rest of the world that's right. If everything the world does is bad and unfair and that everything we do carries the seal of total genius? I'm calling for a tiny little critical examination that won't hurt France's image at all."

Should that approach, like stillness, be beyond reach or official imagination on Bastille Day, a little general humbleness, call it modesty, just might do for starters.