President Sarkozy has astonished his, not to mention our, countrymen by a display of — literally — naked aggression. This occurred on vacation at New Hampshire, where, clad only in bathing trunks and sunglasses, the man who commands one of the largest atomic arsenals in the world was tooling around Lake Winnipesaukee in a powerboat, when he steered toward a pram full of news photographers.

Leaping aboard their vessel, he grabbed a camera and harangued the offending snappers in French. His wonderful wife, Cécilia, a former model, acted as interpreter for her voluble husband. The American photographers beat one of the few retreats the yanks have ever made in front of the French, but not before taking pictures of a finger-wagging "Super-Sarko" that instantly went round the world. Paris-Match would have been proud of them.

Back in Paris the reaction has been predictable. Le Président de la republique should not lose his cool in public especially not in front of foreigners. And what is he doing in America, anyway, going where no French president has ever before vacationed? His socialist opponents suspect the whole incident is a stunt to reinforce Mr. Sarkozy's tough image. "You can't summon the media and then order them brutally not to do their job," one of them whimpered.

The fact is, our spies tell us, the French just don't know what to make of their new head of state. After 12 years of the unspeakable Jacques Chirac, whose treacherous and venal regime dragged the name of France through the mud, they elected Mr. Sarkozy 10 weeks ago, hoping that a tough-minded conservative would crack down on rioting Muslim immigrants who were being egged on by Islamist elements and at least manage their country's decline with a little more dignity.

It seems the Parisian elite, for whom cynicism is a second nature, mistook their man: they assumed that, like the rest of their politicians, Mr. Sarkozy did not mean a word he said. His admiration for "les Anglo-Saxons" was naiveté. They ignored the fact that he held an election rally in London, aimed at the hundreds of thousands of ambitious French voters who have emigrated there to escape the dead hand of the French state.

The irony is not lost on Mr. Sarkozy that his Hungarian father once fled to France to escape socialism. The elites put his refusal to adopt the explicitly anti-Israel (and implicitly anti-Semitic) rhetoric of French politics down to the fact that his maternal grandfather was born Jewish. And they waited for their eccentric president to drop his "American" habit of jogging daily and for France to go back to self-satisfied normality.

Well, zut alors. It seems that Mr. Sarkozy hasn't stopped jogging, and it is dawning on the French political class that things are never going to be quite the same again. Mr. Sarkozy hates the hypocrisy that requires public denunciations of America by people who privately enjoy many things about it. "There are 900,000 French who come to America every year," he said this week. "And I am just one of them."

Mr. Sarkozy is not just here for pleasure, though. Later this week he will visit President Bush at Kennebunkport, where no doubt they will tuck into the finest seafood this side of the Taillevent. The French president's attempt to reconnect with a leader whose recent demonization in France recalls that of FDR by the Vichy regime will enrage the bien pensants in Paris even more than the Elvis Presley songs on the presidential iPod.

Not that the two presidents even now see eye to eye on Iraq, or indeed on many other issues. Mr. Bush wants Mr. Sarkozy's support for tougher sanctions to slow Iran's nuclear program, while Mr. Sarkozy places greater emphasis on halting Sudan's genocide in Darfur. The reemergence of the European constitution, which French voters rejected two years ago, under the guise of a treaty, is another issue on which Mr. Bush will need to put some hard questions to Mr. Sarkozy.

What, he might ask, is a "non-imperial empire," as officials in Brussels now style the European Union? And wouldn't France be better off in an entente with America than to be swallowed whole by the Brussels ideology, at the end of which there will be no France? For the first time since General de Gaulle set his face against the Anglosphere in the 1950s, there is the basis for a constructive Franco-American dialogue.

The real test of the Sarkozy presidency will come when unpopular but necessary foreign policies coincide with unpopular but necessary domestic policies. Once Leftists and Islamists take to the streets, French governments rarely resist and, having once caved in, never recover. As interior minister, Mr. Sarkozy famously dismissed rioters two years ago as "racaille," a word that was, politely, translated as "scum." Sooner rather than later, he will have to confront not just a few paparazzi on a lake, but a challenge from a combination of Islamists and Leftists at home. Then we shall find out what Nicolas Sarkozy is made of — and whether the superhero can live up to his image.