Yesterday’s French presidential election is cause to honor a much-maligned country. Centuries ago, France helped usher in the Age of Enlightenment, produced a world-class revolution, ended the absolutism of church and state, and helped enshrine inalienable rights. Along the way, it gave America the Statue of Liberty and bestowed upon the world an unrivaled cuisine, sumptuous wines, 400 different types of cheese, and the very notion of joie de vivre.

The day after millions of French voters crowded the polls to choose between the son of Hungarian immigrants and an unwed mother of four, we should pause to celebrate France as a gift to civilization. If such an election is not proof of equality, fraternity, civility, and social harmony, I do not know what is.

We particularly need to celebrate France because some Neanderthal voices among our neoconservatives seem to believe that it is something of a backward nation, lethargic in culture, and part of what Donald Rumsfeld has offensively described as a weak and meek “Old Europe.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. France — and the Europe it belongs to — are vibrant, sophisticated, and wealthy societies. With a gross domestic product of $1.8 trillion, France ranks as the fifth largest economy on Earth, right after Germany and Britain, and before those of China and Italy.

And while America only dreams of energy independence, France has achieved it, implementing in the 1970s a strategy of generating power from nuclear facilities that it has since developed into an art. Today, France gets 70% of its own electricity from nuclear power and exports huge quantities to other European nations.

The country’s all-enveloping health and education systems rank as among the best in the world. To quote the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook: “France today is one of the most modern countries in the world, a leader among European nations.”

Basically, France is a country where a basic covenant of democracy — caring for one’s people — is the paramount article of faith.

The commitment has innumerable aspects, including paying families a state bonus with every new child; sending nannies to homes of working parents; maintaining cohesive, secular, and uniform educational systems — from kindergarten to university — and guaranteeing all citizens comprehensive health coverage.

France not only delivers, it does so free of charge at the same time it maintains one of the best standards of living on earth.

Many mock France’s mandated 35-hour work week and its limits on employment termination as obstacles to productivity. But such critics fail to recognize that these policies reflect not so much the desires of workers’ unions as those of French society as a whole, which favors family time, small businesses, and summers filled with vacations. Having fought two major wars in the past century, most of the French public believes that democracy must first be perfected at home before it can be imposed abroad. We may want to study that model.

To be sure, the adoption of what many French people derisively refer to as “savage capitalism” — layoffs, cost cutting, the exporting of jobs, and a lesser standard of welfare — would result in a higher living standard for many. But it was noticeable that for all their partisan vituperation, both presidential contenders, Nicolas Sarkozy on the right and socialist Ségolène Royal on the left, promised to leave the essence of this social contract intact.

The bottom line is that is works. Despite big business’s constant whining that France’s taxes and bureaucracy are driving it away, foreign investment is pouring into France. According to the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), France attracted direct foreign investment of $114 billion during 2006, just behind America and Britain, and ahead of China and Italy.

Since 2000, foreign investment in France has increased at annual rates of between 20% and 50%, according to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development statistics. Moreover, more tourists visit France every year than any country on earth.

Even France’s problems with its Islamic minority, which has been violent in the past, have a bright side. What these disaffected Muslims want most — what they rioted over — is to be fully French.

Where Muslims in Britain plot bombings in support of demands for an “Islamic caliphate,” the French social model is so attractive that Muslims there are fighting to be part of it. Of all the possible problems with Muslims, this is the one for a country to have.