FRANCE: Lara Marlowe observes the acceptable face of French nationalism at Paris's victory ceremony
President Jacques Chirac claims to enjoy detective novels and martial music.
If it's true, Mr Chirac must have been in ecstasy at the Arc de Triomphe yesterday, where the Republican Guard played for over an hour, to mark the 57th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany.
There may have been too much talk of Nazism, fascism and the second World War in the presidential campaign that ended with Mr Jean-Marie Le Pen's defeat on May 5th. Perhaps historic parallels prevented France from addressing contemporary problems in a rational way.
But millions of French people too young to remember the war, many of whom feel no particular affinity for Mr Chirac, experienced his re-election as a liberation. There was a special joy in yesterday's ceremony.
Mr Chirac had much to be happy about. He has at last - if only temporarily - rid himself of the yoke of "cohabitation". He and his éminence grise, the former prime minister, Mr Alain Juppé, hand-picked an unassuming politician named Mr Jean-Pierre Raffarin for what Libération calls "the torture chamber of the Republic" - the prime minister's office. Until Monday, Mr Raffarin's claim to fame was having saved the traditional baguette from industrial production by supermarkets.
When the new Prime Minister appeared in public for the first time with the re-elected President at the Arc de Triomphe, he walked a subservient 20 paces behind Mr Chirac.
Ms Michèle Alliot-Marie, the new Defence Minister, also made her first appearance, reviewing the troops in a black trouser suit. Immediately after the ceremony, Mr Chirac dispatched her to Karachi, where 11 Frenchmen who were building a military submarine for Pakistan were killed in a suicide attack, possibly carried out by al-Qaeda.
Mr Chirac was eminently presidential, reviewing military cadets from his camouflaged command car while army snipers kept watch from the rooftops of the Place de l'Etoile.
"He's so good at this," the reserve officer beside me murmured as Mr Chirac worked his way through the reserve units disbanded since the fall of the Soviet Union. Conscription ended last year. The French armed forces are barely half their Cold War numbers. But Mr Chirac, who holds the rank of colonel in the cavalry, still charms the military.
During the Fourth Republic, they used to call laying wreathes on the tomb of the unknown soldier "inaugurating chrysanthemums". The socialists would like to relegate Mr Chirac to ceremonial duties for the next five years. He is determined not to let them.
The future of the French presidency hangs on next month's legislative elections. An outright victory by Mr Chirac's centre-right "Union for the Presidential Majority" is the only outcome that would allow him to play the role defined by Gen Charles de Gaulle when he founded the Fifth Republic. If the socialists take the National Assembly, or if Mr Le Pen makes good his threat to fragment the legislature so that no one has a clear majority, it could mean the end of France's two-headed system of government. France is the only EU country where a president elected by universal suffrage wields executive power. Campaigners for a sixth republic say there's no reason why France should be ruled like the US, Mexico or Brazil, instead of a European, prime ministerial system.
Beneath the names of Napoleonic battles carved on the Arc de Triomphe, Francois Rude's sculpture of La Marseillaise lunges with a bronze sword. This is how peoples remember their history - grandeur, glory, domination. The white of nobility and the red of revolution waved side by side with the blue of the army in the huge tricolour suspended under the arch. But the fashion these days is against elites, against the monarchical presidency. Rhetoric on right and left emphasises "collective will" and "local power".
A group of second World War veterans, their chests covered with medals, carried regimental banners towards the metro station. They were originally Polish, Czech and Italian, but all live in France now. "Where are you from?" I asked one. "I'm a European," he answered proudly.
"You can't imagine Piccadilly Circus on the May 8th, 1945," Mr John Konirsch (76), said. He was born in Prague, fled to Britain when the Nazis invaded and joined the British army. "People were dancing and singing - we couldn't believe it was finally over." Mr Konirsch became a tailor, married a French woman. "France was so nationalistic in 1945," he recalled. "Now it's much more European."
But what about the display of nationalism we'd just witnessed? Mr Konirsch saw no contradiction. "It's normal to remember the dead. Every European nation keeps its traditions - but it's wonderful; France and Germany won't fight anymore!"