The figures on growth look equally bleak. During his election campaign Hollande repeatedly suggested that he would be able to convince Brussels and Berlin to change course. Not only did he overestimate his own powers of persuasion (and presumably underestimate Angela Merkel's determination) but he also failed to grasp the gravity of the crisis afflicting the eurozone. The reality is that there has been no growth in the French economy for the second consecutive year. With GDP and household consumption set to fall, not only can France not meet its obligations to Brussels on deficit reduction but the only way it can move towards that goal is to raise taxes and cut public expenditure. Even the government's own newly created High Authority for Public Finances has criticised the optimism of its budgetary forecasts. Indeed the situation is so bad that, in February, the Minister of Labour, Michel Sapin, went so far as to suggest that the French state was effectively bankrupt.

With the tax burden already standing at around 46 per cent of GDP, Hollande's room for manoeuvre is very small. Soaking the rich is no longer an option as France's Constitutional Court has ruled that the proposed tax rate of 75 per cent on incomes above €1 million a year is unconstitutional. In addition to increases in VAT, therefore, the government now estimates that 70 per cent of the cost of deficit reduction will be met by cuts in public spending. Where these cuts will be made has yet to be fully identified but the universality of child benefits looks a likely target, as does France's generous pension provision. In each case election promises are being broken.

But one case more than any other illustrates the failure of Hollande to meet the expectations of his voters: that of the two Arcelor-Mittal steel blast furnaces at Florange in eastern France. On February 24, 2012, mounted atop a truck, Hollande promised the workers of these two plants that, if closure was threatened, the state would come to their rescue. Having rejected the proposal of his minister of industrial renewal, Arnaud Montebourg, that both plants should be temporarily nationalised — Montebourg also indicated that the company's head, Lakshmi Mittal, was no longer welcome in France — the government embarked upon a process of negotiation. At the end of April 2013 Arcelor-Mittal shut down both furnaces.

So the impression has been one of drift and indecisiveness, of a president and a government bereft of ideas and of ministers out of their depth.