In 1964 François Mitterrand caused a political sensation by publishing a savage attack on the institutions of France’s Fifth Republic, founded a few years earlier by Charles de Gaulle. In the high-flown prose that was his trademark, the aspiring Socialist party champion argued that the country’s institutional set-up was excessively – and dangerously – dependent on one man.

While saluting the personality of France’s wartime hero, Mitterrand damned the constitution de Gaulle had rewritten. This gave the president enormous executive powers, neutered parliament and checked the independence of the judiciary. The daily exercise of such arbitrary power undermined the very institutions that underpinned the state, Mitterrand argued, leading to a “permanent coup d’état”, the title of his polemic. (Not, it should be noted, that Mitterrand chose to operate much differently when he acquired supreme power himself.) “Gaullism lives without laws. It advances by intuition. From one coup d’état to another it claims to be building a state while ignoring that it has only succeeded in glorifying adventure,” Mitterand wrote.