Now, at last, France has outlived the divisions of 1940–44. They are history. Sarkozy, whatever he may make of his presidency, is free of the legacy of the war years, able to look ahead without referring to 1940. Though the choice of the Right, he rarely mentions de Gaulle, and the constitutional reforms he is putting through will tilt, if only slightly, the balance of power away from the executive towards the parliament. After 50 years, the Fifth Republic is being reformed. Some distrust Sarkozy’s authoritarian, Bonapartist tendencies. Others, comparing him to de Gaulle, remember how Victor Hugo derided Louis Napoleon as “Napoleon le Petit”, and see the Sarkozy regime, with its inclination towards the USA and economic reform, as reminiscent of the ­Second Empire.

But who knows? If his reforms do indeed redress the balance between the executive and the legislature in favour of the parliament, he may in time appear a more democratic republican than any previous president of the Fifth Republic. If so, the “regime of the parties”, so detested by Pétain and de Gaulle, despised also, though not publicly, by Mitterrand, may even return.