The EU, once the basis of projecting French power beyond its punching weight, has become a threat to the French bureaucrats who helped create it. Not many French pols understand—and even fewer will publicly explain—why it is that 93% of French émigrés are satisfied with their lives abroad, and one in four are willing to tell a pollster they never plan to return.

Anne Applebaum sees Europe, in the absence of a unifying Big Idea, becoming more like America—if there's no job in Buffalo, you move to Phoenix. And "Sarkozy is the first European politician to appeal directly to these new Europeans."

Consider his speech in London earlier this year, where he called it a "town that seems more and more prosperous and dynamic every time I come here," and "one of the greatest French cities," where tens thousands of Frenchmen live because "they are risk-takers, and risk is a bad word" in their homeland.