When Jean-Pierre Chevenement regained consciousness after a 55-minute cardiac arrest and three-week coma last autumn, he said it was "a republican miracle".
Republican, like the storming of the Bastille, the Marseillaise, red wine and the baguette. Republican, like Jean-Pierre Chevenement himself, France's Interior Minister and the head of the Citizens' Movement (MDC), a small party long allied with the Socialists.
Mr Chevenement carries far more political weight than the MDC's eight seats in the National Assembly would indicate. He has been the most vocal opponent of EMU on the French left, and his tough line on immigration and crime make the Jospin government more palatable to right-wing voters.
Always known for his franc- parler, Mr Chevenement resigned as defence minister in 1991 rather than sanction the Gulf War against Iraq. He is called a leftwing Gaullist (a contradiction in terms), and insists that his Left is "the republican Left" - as opposed to the "high-minded Left" of his cabinet colleagues.
The interior minister took only a tooth brush and disposable razor to the Val-de-Grace Hospital where he was to have had a routine gall bladder operation last September. His allergic reaction to the anaesthetic drug curare was a fluke, and his miracle recovery made him France's Lazarus.
Doctors feared Mr Chevenement might suffer brain damage. Au contraire, when the minister emerged from his coma, he dazzled visitors with quotes in Latin.
While still convalescing, Mr Chevenement delighted well-wishers in Belfort, the eastern French town of which he is mayor, by announcing in the local dialect: "The good Lord didn't want me. The devil either. That's why I'm back."
His hair had turned white, but Mr Chevenement's severe visage and manner were transformed. France's miracle survivor was jovial with the television reporters who sought him out on a Breton island, patting his ribs and saying he was "going to put on some beefsteak".
On the 4th of January, Mr Chevenement returned to work. He glowed when Prime Minister Lionel Jospin told him, "I missed you," using the familiar "tu", in a cabinet meeting.
That is when Mr Chevenement began, in the words of the leftwing daily Liberation, "dispensing lessons to the entire world".
No one is sure whether the affection of the Prime Minister went to his head, whether his brush with death made Mr Chevenement impervious to political danger, or whether the doctors at Val-de-Grace put a strange drug in his drip.
A workaholic, Mr Chevenement took advantage of his forced vacation to draft a 30-page report to the Prime Minister.
In it he discussed Corsica and juvenile delinquency - part of his brief - but drifted into the integration of immigrants, which falls under the minister of solidarity and the junior minister for cities. His criticism of the justice system was seen as an attack on the justice minister.
In the meantime, Mr Chevenement told the education minister how to run his ministry, publicly advocated sending under-age criminals to detention centres far from home and suggested suspending welfare payments to their families.
The British Labour government has taken such measures, but the "high-minded Left" was horrified at language it found worthy of the extreme right-wing leader, Mr Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Word leaked out of stormy cabinet meetings where - humiliation - the right-wing President Chirac had to mediate among left-wing ministers.
Mr Chevenement's use of the 19th century French term sauvageons ("little savages") to describe the young people who burn cars in immigrant neighbourhoods prompted outraged statements from at least three other ministers. But within days, the newly revived word entered wide usage.
Jean-Pierre Chevenement was out of control. For the past two weeks, Mr Jospin has been forced to backtrack on his interior minister's pronouncements, and is expected to side with the justice minister at a meeting of the Interior Security Council this afternoon.
Open hostilities between Mr Chevenement and Daniel Cohn-Bendit - whose parties are supposed to be allies - have added to the notoriety of both.
Mr Cohn-Bendit, the former student leader of May 1968, and a German Green, is leading the French Greens' list for the June European election.
Editorial writers heard anti-semitic echoes in Mr Chevenement's dismissal of Mr Cohn-Bendit, who is Jewish, as "a representative of globalised elites" whom the French Greens "went to find in Germany".
Mr Cohn-Bendit counter-attacked, saying that "playing the xenophobic, anti-boche card during a European election campaign is a shameful scandal". Enough, Mr Jospin said. Assez. Stop.
Mr Chevenement was invited to Sunday lunch to hear the riot act. Mr Cohn-Bendit tried to make peace, publicly inviting the interior minister to dinner. But it may take another miracle to rein in the irrepressible Mr Chevenement.
"I choose my dinner companions so that I will not be bored," he snapped. "And it seems to me that [Daniel Cohn-Bendit] does not shine with originality."
