It is Nicolas Sarkozy's survival as a political force with heathen ideas about how France can escape its Holy Writ (chanted both left and right) of non-solutions to an existence that's added endangered civil peace to its constants of no growth and no jobs.

 

If there was a single subtext unifying the political establishment during the early days of flame and street battling here, it was the idea that the riots could become the black mark of death on Sarkozy's presidential ambitions in 2007.

 

The rickety, squabbling left leapt to the kill, calling his in-your-face vocabulary incendiary to the Arab and African Muslim immigrants on the streets of France's housing projects. This, while the Jacques Chirac/Dominique de Villepin front, Sarkozy's feigned allies in the government, let him dangle as a fall guy for the troubles.

 

Now, a couple of weeks later, and after incomplete success in putting down the unrest - as interior minister, Sarkozy holds direct responsibility for the police, security and aspects of immigration policy - he continues, basically intact, as the country's one-man, self-projected political alternative.

 

It turns out that the French approve of his approach to the troubles by a 56 percent to 40 percent margin. More than 70 percent also agreed that last Wednesday's declaration of a state of emergency was the right way to go. And a poll on Sunday designated Sarkozy (ahead of Villepin and the rest of the country's politicians) as the man best able to cope with the issues surrounding the rioting.

 

In fact, Chirac's office, trying to prop up a president described as groggy and anesthetized-looking by members of his own party, wound up claiming by the end of the week that the tough stuff and curfew decision was really the boss's handiwork.

 

All that says this for now:

 

Sarkozy has not lost a handhold on an electorate that could make him president. His assertion that the French social model has become a sham functions as a workable political premise. And most significantly, he will not implode into an unelectable bigot or traitor to Frenchness when he insists immigration from North Africa and Black Africa means both specific French demands on those immigrant communities, and new thinking here on race, culture, and religion as elements of integration.

 

That's to say affirmative action, direct cash-support for Islam to bring potentially fundamentalist congregations out of cellars and abandoned garages, and some voting rights for foreigners.

 

Sarkozy's landing on his feet has hardly overjoyed the political class. The reason: because it suggests the riots show there can be answers acceptable to the French - from vast job market and economic reform to positive employment quotas for Muslims - that might overwhelm la pensée unique, or the all-dominant, one-track political thought process that preserves the failed French social model.

 

But this isn't an idealistic, white hat vs. black hat struggle for France.

 

At the points where Sarkozy collides with populism, expediency, or the execution of shoot-from-the-hip proposals that have more to do with packaging than content, his limitations jar.

 

Example: his headline-making order to expel foreigners arrested for rioting stands little practical chance for application under the strictures of French immigration law.

 

At his most facile and overbearing, Sarkozy can seem like a pitchman selling the greatest French idea since frozen croissants.

 

In a long television appearance late last week as the riots calmed, he went plain simplistic on their cause.

 

Of course, there were "the structural reasons" of 40 years of other politicians' failed programs. But essentially, Sarkozy focused blame on a small minority of hoodlums who, he said, through drug-dealing and extortion, and now rioting, created a climate of such fear that it banished all hope from the housing projects.

 

This tack took an easy, voter-friendly pass on the overall responsibility of French racism, largely directed at the Arab population. And it swerved away from the issue of how some of the Muslims living in France resist or reject assimilation.

 

Still, this tactic provided Sarkozy with a seemingly successful counter to what many hoped would kill him politically.

 

On television, he explained away his use of a word with an arguably racist undertone racaille - literally, rabble, or less decorously, scum, as limited to the minority of thugs he said were the cause of the riots.

 

At their outset, both the left and Sarkozy's opponents within the Chirac neo-Gaullist party (Sarkozy is its president) relished the premise that they could create a link between the unrest and what was portrayed as Sarkozy's verbal explosion of disrespect for the underclass.

 

Rather than the rioters, Sarkozy was the prime target of the Socialists, who would sooner talk about stock options than affirmative action, a concept scorned by France's political liturgists on the left as well as the right.

 

At the same time, Villepin, Chirac's prime minister and Sarkozy's presidential rival inside the government, sicced a junior cabinet minister of Algerian origin on him. Azouz Begag told the media that referring to racaille raised the level of tension - until he was shown to have used the word himself in an article he wrote for Le Monde.

 

But 10 days later, Sarko could celebrate his survival (and even his continuing ascension) on television by saying racaille four times in an hour. My word counter registered one reference to affirmative action.

 

This ratio mirrored the intent of Sarkozy's television performance: a high proportion of self-justification and a more subtle offering of you're-off-the-hook moral and psychological comfort to the French as "all good people who want peace." By comparison, the single passing mention of affirmative action (nothing was said identifying the country's near-petrified statist economic model as an essential cause of racism and the riots) got zero elaboration.

 

In the end, the polls demonstrate Sarkozy has retained people's confidence. But when he had a national television audience and a chance to talk to France seriously about the riots and new solutions, he chose the safe explanation - it's a handful of thugs - and skipped the real stuff.

 

It was as if Sarkozy very deliberately chose to draw a curtain around what still can make up his unique place in French politics: an off-and-on willingness to talk about what is truly responsible for France's overall malaise and solutions for it that come from outside the discredited French model.

 

Saved from self-destruction for now, the pol in Sarkozy didn't dare disturb his accomplishment of the moment. There was not a hint he would be elaborating those truths in painful, practical detail sometime soon.