France is a nation afraid. As students and trade unionists take to the streets in defence of the past, the elites look on with a weary fatalism. What you must understand, I heard a member of Dominique de Villepin’s government lament the other day, is that people “are fearful of everything”.

I thought it strange that a minister would speak in those terms about his own country, even though the comments were not for attribution. Here was a seeming admission of the failure of political leadership alongside a transparently lame explanation for the government’s retreat into protectionism. But France has been that sort of place since the voters’ rejection last year of the European constitutional treaty. Talk to the alumni of the nation’s grandes écoles and one has a sense of a collective nervous breakdown.