Iraq-friendly Foreign Minister closes lid on Chirac era

The book also records a compelling exchange between Kouchner and that other famous 68er, Danny "the red" Cohn-Bendit, on the future of Left politics for the post-1968 generation. Kouchner's development was to say no to totalitarianism of any stripe.

And, unlike many, Kouchner will never forget or seek to gloss over Saddam's genocide. In late 2005 he wrote the preface to the most comprehensive work on Saddam's crimes, The Black Book of Saddam Hussein: Two Million Victims.

No surprise, then, that Kouchner's first act on his first day as Foreign Minister - a Sunday - was to call a meeting of his Quai d'Orsay bureaucrats with the Urgence Darfour collective and to announce that he was working towards the deployment of a "hybrid" UN-African Union intervention in Darfur, a significant hardening of the French position.

Kouchner's first overseas trip, on Thursday, was to Lebanon, where he met Lebanese leaders and visited former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri's grave. "France, along with the international community, is determined to establish the tribunal to try the assassins," he said, and pointedly rebuked Syria.

Kouchner has been a consistent gadfly for French foreign policy and the reactionary and duplicitous Quai d'Orsay. Just think Rainbow Warrior. His appointment marks a significant change in the tone and character of French policy which will reverberate around the world. The Chirac era could not have been more convincingly repudiated.

We can only hope and trust Kouchner's instruction to his departmental officers henceforth to come to his urgently arranged weekend meetings without their ties will prove to be the least of their irritations.