LONDON — The time was bound to come when France and the rest of the world would miss that old crook, Jacques Chirac, but who could have guessed that it would arrive so fast?

Only three months have passed since Chirac reluctantly relinquished the presidency — he was last seen sulking (or maybe just hiding from various judicial investigations) in Biarritz — and already he begins to look good. If only because his hyperactive successor, Nicholas Sarkozy, seems so strange.

There has long been a debate in France about whether the new president is really as shallow as he seems, or whether his shoot-from-the-lip populism — like calling the participants in last year's urban riots "scum" (racaille) — is a deliberate strategy to appeal to the prejudices of rightwing voters. It will never be settled beyond doubt, but the evidence for the "stupid" hypothesis is getting hard to resist.