When Notre Dame burned, something in the flames seemed to speak to the combustibility of our age. Nothing is for ever, the fire said, even those edifices – stone or institutional – that we assume will always be there. In almost every democracy, there are similar forces of backlash and disaffection. The anger is diffuse and the discontents vary, but there is a general agitation that seems to boil down to the feeling that someone should do something.

At the moment, France seems to have crystallised this phenomenon in a way that other democracies might draw both warnings and lessons from. Will François Bayrou last longer as prime minister than Michel Barnier? Perhaps. But the basic impediment remains: the country is politically split roughly into thirds (and the “left” is split among itself), with the end result that creating a majority for anything is almost impossible.

A recent study entitled French Fractures revealed some familiar paradoxes: 40% of people are very satisfied with their lives, 55% say they are experiencing financial difficulties, 73% think “things were better before”. And yet, the average European (and this holds for France in particular) is better off than they were before by almost every possible metric: health, education, income, leisure, freedom. Despite that, democracy everywhere is judged harshly: it remains widely popular as an ideal, but a median of 59% say it’s not working as it should.

Clearly, there is something about modern life that the data is not capturing: a break between the governed and their governance. The world has become too complex for any individual to fully grasp, and it’s moving so quickly that it seems beyond our collective ability to control.

The average European born in the early 1700s entered a world where it took roughly 22........

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