Paris ? You can measure change in Moscow today by calculating the new luxury boutiques and garish casinos that the fast money boys have opened up since your last trip. In Berlin, the visitor’s first mental snapshot captures the latest glittering temples of international business rising in the former death strip around the Wall. In Paris, you take a national temperature most quickly by heading for a bookshop.

On the best-seller table lies “The Horrible Fraud,” a book that proclaims on its cover that “No plane hit the Pentagon” on Sept. 11. Author Thierry Meyssan repeats theories about Jews being warned to stay away from the World Trade Center on that day and about Mohamed Atta being framed by the CIA and by inference Mossad and the Carlyle Group. It is wholly preposterous and a smash here, thanks in large part to Meyssan’s appearances on French trash television.

Next to it is “The Horrible Lie,” in which two French journalists debunk Meyssan’s hallucinations. A single copy remains of “The Rage and the Arrogance,” an extended polemical tract in which Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci indicts all the world’s Muslims as accomplices to terrorism and followers of a savage, corrupt religion.

“They breed like rats,” Fallaci says, praising herself for having the testicular fortitude her male colleagues lack to tell the “truth.” A disapproving French reviewer notes: “This book has sold 1 million copies in Berlusconi’s Italy without arousing any indignation.” That’s Silvio Berlusconi, the conservative prime minister who has made his own lack of admiration for Islam apparent.

The French rush to debate what most of us pass over in indifference, disgust or acquiescence. Exposition, analysis and prescription are part of their nature, and traditionally part of their intellectual role in the world.

But they have not played that role effectively for some years now. Absorbed and to some extent paralyzed by internal political divisions and ethnic tensions, French governments have spoken in defensive, muffled cadences when they have spoken at all. French intellectuals, deprived of pitched class struggle as a rallying cry, have largely wandered off into fantasy worlds where they debate phantoms or wallow in paranoia.

Another recent book, more discreetly posed on a shelf of political science volumes, suggests that this could now change. It is “The Cry of the Gargoyle,” written by Dominique de Villepin, a published poet, President Jacques Chirac’s political right arm, a diplomat who worked and lived for four years in Washington and France’s new foreign minister.

His book bursts with energy characteristic of its author. It is a tumble of active verbs interspersed with acute examinations of the French sense of paradox. Writing at full gallop, de Villepin warns France that it must not yield to “the temptation of resignation that threatens a nation as torpor overcomes it. … For many abroad, the French funeral has already been held.”

But the last chapters of a nation torn in history between “revolution and reaction” have not been written, he maintains. The French are capable of everything, of being “vassals or rebels, courtiers or Mandarins” in a nation “founded on order, and on war … more interested in legality and solidarity than in liberty.”

He has more direct experience with Americans than any previous foreign minister. He comes to office determined to reduce the open friction that erupted between his Socialist predecessor, Hubert Vedrine, who needled the United States for being a “hyperpower” and “simplistic” in its thinking, and Secretary of State Colin Powell.

“The hyperpower problem is a false problem in today’s world,” de Villepin told me in his ornate office at the Quai d’Orsay. “The absence of power is the problem in world affairs. Look at the Middle East. Or take Russia. We need a strong Russia on the world scene. We are happy to see Russia working with Europe and the United States to achieve that.”

I asked if being a writer, and particularly a poet, was an advantage or a handicap in diplomacy, where language almost always masks or denies reality.

“Poetry and diplomacy both rely on the alchemy of paradox. We mix fear and hope, power and weakness, love and hate to find a way out of the impossible, to find a way through the brush exactly because it becomes thicker and thicker. Americans should understand that. They live in a country that has a dream, shaped by the Mayflower and Ellis Island.”

France’s new top diplomat ends with this thought: “There can be no successful diplomacy if it is not positive diplomacy.” Now there’s a revolutionary thought for the French foreign service.