It is some consolation for Americans who are dismayed by the drift and disarray of their own administration that things are even worse in Europe, most of whose governments are now squalid spectacles of chaos and corruption. The weakness of the Western response to Iran’s threat to annihilate Israel is in part, at least, a reflection of the enfeebled state of the European political elite.

In France, Prime Minister de Villepin is fighting a losing battle to cling onto his job, having failed to convince voters that he is innocent of accusations that he conspired with President Chirac to smear their arch-enemy, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. All three of the government’s leading politicians are implicated in the Clearstream affair, which revolves around the use of the intelligence services to investigate false allegations of corruption by an anonymous source.

Mr. Sarkozy has sworn to destroy those responsible for the smear campaign, declaring: “When I shoot, I shoot to kill.” It would not take much to give the coup de grace to Mr. de Villepin, who has been a dead man walking ever since he backed down last month in his confrontation with striking students and labor unions over a new law to cut youth unemployment.

But the Interior Minister, who stands head and shoulders above his rivals, is aiming for a bigger target than the aristocratic, dandified prime minister. Mr. Sarkozy wants Mr. Chirac’s job. Cynics suggest that Mr. Chirac still hopes for re-election when his term expires next year, because as head of state he enjoys immunity from prosecution. If Mr. Chirac, who is 73 and has suffered at least one stroke, were to follow the example of his predecessors, Francois Mitterrand and Georges Pompidou, by dying in office, he would avoid the humiliation of a corruption investigation and trial.

Mr. Sarkozy, however, looks increasingly likely to deny Mr. Chirac the luxury of a third term. It had been assumed that the rivals would do a deal: if Mr. Chirac did not run for a third term in 2007, Mr. Sarkozy would promise to protect him from prosecution. In the poisonous atmosphere created by the “French Watergate,” such a pact now looks less likely than a fight to the death – perhaps literally so, given the French president’s state of health. Yet Mr. Chirac is unscrupulous enough to drag his rival down with him, even if that would hand power to the socialists or fascists.

If French politics resembles a revenger’s tragedy, with corpses all over the stage, Italy is a comic opera. Prime Minister Berlusconi has taken three weeks to concede defeat to his socialist opponent, Romano Prodi, who won the election by a majority so small that he is now dependent on the Communists to stay in office. An unseemly squabble looms over the presidency, not to mention the near-certainty that the left will make another attempt to pursue Mr. Berlusconi through the courts, now that he is out of office, causing the already low reputation of Italian politicians is likely to sink still further.

Meanwhile, Italy looks like following Spain by descending into a war of attrition between church and state. In both countries, left-wing governments use anti-clericalism as a political substitute for socialism. Their secularist ideology is not confined to attacks on the Catholic Church, but extends across the whole range of policy on moral issues. In the face of Europe’s demographic catastrophe, when the populations of nations like Spain and Italy are aging fast and will soon start to decline, governments undermine the traditional understanding of marriage and the family. The rights of gays, Muslims, and other minorities are given a higher priority.

Even the more conservative governments in Europe are weak: Germany and Poland, among others, are governed by fissiparous coalitions between incompatible bedfellows. Britain ought to be an exception. Tony Blair was reelected only last year with a clear majority. But he too has been suffering the tribulations of Job. Last week it emerged that his deputy, John Prescott, had been enjoying a long-standing affair with his secretary. Meanwhile, Home Secretary Charles Clarke admitted that over 1,000 foreign criminals had been released rather than imprisoned or deported; most are still at large. One Somali asylum-seeker who was not deported is wanted for the murder of a woman police officer. This scandal has tapped into two deep anxieties: immigration and crime.

To make matters worse for Mr. Blair, his Labor Party faces meltdown in local elections across England today. Ironically, the Prescott affair has done greater damage than the more serious Clarke scandal. Electors are outraged by reports that the deputy prime minister used facilities paid for by the taxpayer to entertain his mistress: The couple went straight from a memorial service for servicemen killed in Iraq to have sex in his official apartment. Mr. Prescott is a colorful former seaman who has survived squalls in the past – he threw a punch on camera during the 2001 election campaign – but this time he has excited disgust rather than jocularity. If the prime minister is forced to sacrifice either Mr. Prescott or Mr. Clarke, two of his staunchest allies, his own position will be weakened and the day of his departure may be hastened.

So Europe is not a pretty sight. Yet there are still brave individuals who uphold the best traditions of Jewish and Christian civilization in this continent. One of them has just died at the age of 82: Jean-Francois Revel.

Revel was one of the minority of post-war intellectuals who did not betray the promise of the liberation of France. At first he followed the fashion set by communists and their fellow-travelers, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, rather than liberal conservatives, such as Raymond Aron. But Paris and Prague in 1968 horrified Revel and turned him into a Cold Warrior and a passionate advocate of the United States.

The book that made his name was “Without Marx or Jesus: The New American Revolution,” which appeared in 1970 at the height of the Vietnam War. Slightly dated now, when Europeans vilify Americans as Christian fundamentalists, but at the time it was the polemic against Marx that mattered.

Revel defied the French consensus again in 1984 with “How Democracies Perish,” an influential book that warned against the “peace movement” that was then mounting demonstrations against NATO for the benefit of the Soviet Union. When the next wave of hysteria swept Europe at the time of the invasion of Iraq, Revel returned to the charge in “The Anti-American Obsession” (2003), which dissected the “causes and inconsequences” of the mass delusion that still threatens the unity of the West.

“No to terrorism. No to war,” the slogan chanted by millions of demonstrators across Europe, amounted to “No to illness. No to medicine,” he wrote. He coined the term “reversal of culpability” to indicate the way in which other nations attribute their own faults to the Americans: Germans and Japanese denounce “militarism,” the British “imperialism,” Mexicans “electoral corruption,” and the Arabs “abridging press freedom.”

Revel’s books, like the evils he addressed, are still highly topical. Though he was a prophet without honor in his own land, his memory should be kept bright in the United States. Nothing would do more for the reputation of France than if Derrida, Foucault and other false prophets were replaced on student reading lists by Jean-Francois Revel.