It happened to François Mitterrand in the run-up to the Maastricht Treaty on the European Union. It happened to Jacques Chirac a few years later and now it is happening to Nicolas Sarkozy. Successive French presidents have tried but failed to give the eurozone a layer of gouvernance économique beyond the present institutional setting.

Mr Sarkozy had planned to call a political summit among eurozone leaders during the French EU presidency that starts next month. But that is now off the agenda. Mr Sarkozy’s irresistible force has met the immovable object of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor.