Underwhelmed, grandstanding,

and soon to be overwhelmed. Up to their neck in it, actually.

Britain’s senior gadfly Michael Portillo is not a fan of France’s military adventure in Lebanon:

That gallic custom has been on display again over Lebanon. After the French had taken a vociferous lead in drafting the UN security council resolution that brought about the ceasefire, it was shocking to discover that France was offering just 200 soldiers towards a UN force of 15,000. Late last week, after wasting valuable time since hostilities ended nearly two weeks ago, President Chirac gave way. Having attracted the world’s scorn he raised his country’s offer to 2,000.

There is a cultural difference between the French and the British obvious in their diplomatic styles. The French believe that what they say is at least as important as what they do. They spin grandiloquent phrases and strike postures. Rhetoric is a way of life and if you point out it is divorced from all strategic reality that is thought to be nitpicking.
[...]
In reality he buckled because the Italians had offered to lead the deployment and the Americans had mischievously welcomed that bizarre idea. France could not bear the mortification of operating under the command of its southern neighbour — least of all in Lebanon, a country so strongly tied to the French by history and culture. Chirac’s sheer ineptness has brought him avoidable humiliation. Already held in contempt by America and disdained by the British, he has now advertised his unreliability to a wider global audience.
[...]
During recent days, as France has procrastinated, arms have been pouring in from Syria and Iran to re-equip the terror group. France’s failures of both diplomacy and nerve have made it less likely that the ceasefire will hold, and made the UN mission more dangerous.

He says with slightly more diplomacy what Nidra Poller deduced rather quickly about the predicament that the Élysée put their troops in.

The attempted co-sponsorship might have been an opportunity for France to assume a long-coveted honest broker role in the Middle East. France's privileged relations with Lebanon and the expectation that French troops would play a decisive role in the multinational intervention force weighed heavily in the equation. Interviewed on state-owned France 3 television earlier this week, Foreign Affairs Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy situated France's role in the conflict geometrically, at the pivotal midpoint between Lebanon and the Arab League, as well as Israel and the United States. Asked if French troops would participate in the multinational force, he replied, "pourquoi pas" [why not]?
[...]
Rising above these specific points, Siniora gives a panoramic vision of the conflict: Israeli occupation of Lebanese territories is the cause of this war; Israel is a pariah state that slaughters civilians and disrespects international law. Forcing Israel to withdraw will be a step toward a "final solution [sic] of the wider Arab-Israeli conflict, which has plagued our region for 60 years." No political solution is possible as long as Israel continues to occupy Arab land in Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights, and wages war on the innocent in Lebanon and Palestine.
According to this logic, Hezbollah can't be disarmed until the international community imposes that final solution to the problem of Israel's presence in the Middle East.
This is why French diplomacy, from the start and to this day, is irreconcilable with the American position on the conflict. Hezbollah intends to destroy Israel, Israel is determined to destroy Hezbollah. What does it mean to stand at midpoint between these two ambitions? In his solemn unilateralist speech, Chirac said that anything short of immediate cease fire would be "immoral." Reduced to the absurd, this would mean that the moral position is to let Israel half destroy Hezbollah and Hezbollah half destroy Israel.

With a handful of Sappers and a couple of Logistics units, Chirac has managed to devise the most economical way to step into a quagmire.