And why not a bid by Jean-Pierre Raffarin, increasingly at ease as Mr Chirac's prime minister?
Both he and Mr Raffarin have failed to make a compelling case for their reforms.
Nor, Mr Raffarin has conceded, is it likely to shrink much before next year.
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But so far Jean-Pierre Raffarin's government has shown little readiness to give much ground.
Better, perhaps, to let the dead horse that is Mr Raffarin take another flogging.
In the French parliament, Mr Raffarin received warm applause for an impassioned speech warning against early war.
Mr Raffarin said that the threat of a biological attack by terrorists made access to vaccines imperative.
His new message is that he wants to push that government, headed by Jean-Pierre Raffarin, to its limits.
Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin insists that French law specifies that marriage can only be between a man and a woman.
Unfortunately, Mr Raffarin's government has barely got past the first item on this reform agenda, and already the electorate has had enough.
In France, Mr Raffarin's government has made a start, with proposals to make employees pay more, over a longer period, towards their retirement.
Later on Wednesday, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin will attend a religious ceremony to honour the victims' memory at the American Cathedral in Paris.
In France, the newly elected right-wing government, with Jean-Pierre Raffarin as prime minister under President Jacques Chirac, has more privatisation options than most.
Under Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the previous centre-right prime minister, reforms of both public-sector pensions and public health-insurance were pushed through despite demonstrations and strikes.
France's prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, said that he would refuse to back down but gave ground in a separate dispute with striking teachers.
"A military intervention today, when all the chances for a peaceful solution have not been explored, would divide the international community, " Mr Raffarin said.
War would "cause a wave of incomprehension and suspicion, " Raffarin said.
But the worst problem for Mr Raffarin is that reform will in practice be painful for everyone, including those who approve of it in theory.
Unhappily for Mr Raffarin, that does not mean victory is pre-ordained.
France's Raffarin law strictly regulates the creation of new retail premises.
Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the previous prime minister, never recovered his credibility after thousands died while ministers were on holiday during a heatwave in the summer of 2003.
Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the interim Prime Minister, has, as expected, been asked to form the new Government: his calm, unfussy and low-profile approach has won widespread approval.
Almost as soon as it came to power, the Raffarin government caved in to a series of strikes by France's 55, 000 family doctors that had started under its predecessor.
Jean-Pierre Raffarin, France's centre-right prime minister, had originally decided to sacrifice this public holiday after the summer canicule (heatwave) in 2003, in which 15, 000 people died, many of them elderly.
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So sensitive is the matter that Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the French prime minister, and Nicolas Sarkozy, his finance minister, postponed a meeting on industrial policy this week with their German counterparts.
But even this is not something that Mr Chirac's present centre-right government, under Jean-Pierre Raffarin, has been in any rush to dismantle: its reforms have loosened the rules, not overturned them.
France's President Jacques Chirac has already pushed his prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin , to fall on his own sword, replacing him with the loyal and statist Dominique de Villepin .
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