President Nicolas Sarkozy has given the impression that competition is a dirty word in France. In June, he alarmed supporters of Europe’s single market by insisting that the European Union drop an endorsement of “free and undistorted competition” in the revised text of its constitutional treaty.

Railing against the ideologues in Brussels who blindly followed the free market faith, he asked: “As an ideology, as a dogma, what has competition given Europe?” Mr Sarkozy was at it again last week in a speech to the European parliament. “Europe should not be alone in the world in making competition a religion,” he said.