Would a 14-year-old boy eat raw beef mixed with chopped onion and gherkin, grilled for an instant and served with potatoes deep-fried in duck fat? The answer was yes, amazingly, and from the moment that my elder son declared it the best burger he could remember, I knew we were going to have a good time in Paris. The French remain stylish, their food magnificent, the city’s architecture beautiful. Yet as we sat there in the restaurant on the boulevard Raspail, observing the arrogance of the waiters with amusement, I overheard a strange conversation at the neighbouring table. Some academics were having an extended lunch and speaking of ”the crime of Sarkozy”: everything the French president had done, or might do, was a “crime”. A cultural or intellectual establishment still exists in France that views the world through a prism of 1960s radicalism, and sees it as normal that its members should have spent their youth pulling up cobbles and throwing them at the police.

“Why do you mind President Sarkozy so much?” I asked a man wearing a fisherman’s jersey. He was called Luc, and was a social sciences professor. The problem seemed to be that the government was in the process of transferring Luc’s college from the city centre to an unfashionable suburb. And there was more: “There is no plurality in the political project,” suggested his companion, a woman with dyed orange hair. Luc took over. “The crime of Sarkozy is that for his election he co-opted the new technology.” I suggested that new technology was hard to find in Paris. “You can’t even use the internet unless you go to McDonald’s,” I said.