PARIS — One of the world’s best health care systems is facing its severest test ever, and whether it succeeds will say much about the ultimate adequacy of a well-funded, well-equipped and broadly accessible national treatment plan.

If France’s experiment in confining its citizens — less rigorous than the Chinese, more precocious than the Italian, far more organized than the American — yields the hoped-for flattening of the curve, it would be vindication not just for the underlying system, but for a Western democracy’s organized effort to combat the coronavirus. The verdict is still weeks away.

President Emmanuel Macron has told the French, over and over, that the country is “at war.” On the surface, it is going into battle well prepared.

[Analysis: Coronavirus puts to the fore an improbable U.K. leader: Dominic Raab.]

France spends more on health than most of its developed-world peers, offers world-beating access to doctors at less cost, and encourages all its citizens, through universal government-funded coverage, to keep track of their conditions. It has twice the number of intensive care beds that Italy has.