The years that followed were not easy ones for the French Left. Under Mitterrand, prime ministers came and went, each to little effect. One was even his former mistress. Later, in 1997, the Socialists were gifted a parliamentary majority by an inept Jacques Chirac, but when the decent if uncharismatic Lionel Jospin presented himself as the Socialist candidate in the 2002 presidential elections he was beaten into third place by the Front National's Jean-Marie Le Pen. Many on the Left preferred to indulge themselves by voting for Marxist candidates rather than for a man whose government had overseen a reduction in unemployment. When, in 2007, the Socialists fielded their first female candidate for the Presidency, Ségolène Royal, she fared not much better.

It was in this tawdry, self-obsessed world that François Hollande flourished and where — thanks in no small part to the sexual indiscretions of Dominique Strauss-Kahn — he rose to the top. If he possessed a skill, it was that of managing the warring factions of his own party. 

What followed — as is only too evident — was a massive confidence trick perpetrated upon a gullible French electorate. Posing as "Monsieur Normal" — a pose seemingly not dented by the fact that he had recently left the mother of his four children — Hollande managed to convince sufficient of his fellow citizens that economic austerity could be brought to an end by the single and simple expedient of taxing the rich. What those voters failed to notice was that Hollande was also telling them that he intended to honour France's obligations to the European Stability and Growth Pact by bringing down France's budget deficit. The great deceit was to pretend that there were no difficult decisions to be made.

No one perhaps could have anticipated the sheer scale or rapidity of the political disaster that was to ensue. From the day of Hollande's inauguration as president, when his plane to Berlin was struck by lightning, little if anything has gone right. One year in and Hollande is the most unpopular president of the Fifth Republic, with an approval rating of around 25 per cent. At the equivalent point of his presidency Nicolas Sarkozy stood at 40 per cent. In a parliamentary by-election north of Paris in March this year the Socialist candidate saw her vote decline by over 60 per cent in nine months.

The details of this precipitous decline have at times bordered on high farce. Only weeks after Hollande's arrival in the Elysée Palace, his new partner, the Paris Match journalist Valérie Trierweiler, successfully sabotaged the political career of Ségolène Royal in what looked like little more than an act of spite against the woman Hollande had lived with for over 20 years. Sarkozy's wife, Carla Bruni, was at least a class act.