Not long after this domestic crisis made the headlines, France's most famous actor, the inebriate Gérard Depardieu, announced his intention to take out Belgian citizenship in protest at planned tax rises. That Hollande's Prime Minister, the lacklustre Jean-Marc Ayrault, chose to describe this gesture as "pathetic" did little to dissuade Depardieu from subsequently accepting a Russian passport from Vladimir Putin. Seeing the star of Cyrano de Bergerac dressed as a Russian peasant has done little to enhance the self-esteem of the culture-loving French.

Nevertheless, recent evidence suggests that a narrow majority of the French electorate still see Hollande as both honest and likeable. It is in his lack of other qualities that his problems lie. A poll published in Le Monde to coincide with the end of Hollande's first year in office showed that 27 per cent of its sample thought him competent; that only 20 per cent believed Hollande knew in which direction he was going; and that a mere 18 per cent judged him capable of uniting the French. Worse still, a meagre 14 per cent were of the opinion that he possessed authority.

In short, in the eyes of the French electorate, Hollande lacks leadership, his government is ineffectual and amateurish, and both have consistently underestimated the problems facing France now and in the future.

Of the latter, the most pressing are unemployment and the lack of growth. One of Hollande's few purported successes has been to secure agreement between the leading employers' organisation and trade unions on a series of measures designed to restore the competitiveness of the French economy but this, unsurprisingly, has done nothing to prevent unemployment rising by over 350,000 in a year to what are now record levels at over 10 per cent of the workforce. Scarcely anyone believes Hollande's promise that unemployment will start to come down by the end of 2013.