This week has been a bonfire of French vanities. The Société Générale scandal has left the credibility of one of France’s most respected banks, its highly regarded chairman, Daniel Bouton, a classic product of the business elite, and the French capitalist system as a whole in ashes.

This seems, at least, the prevailing impression outside France. How could a country that has always denounced the brutal excesses of Wall Street capitalism have fallen prey to what it likes to call le capitalisme sauvage? After all, even with its new arch-liberal president, Nicolas Sarkozy, France has always boasted an enlightened, state-led system of economic and social management – the antithesis of free-market, Anglo-Saxon capitalism.