One reassuring thing about France is its consistency down the years: trains still run mostly on time, coffee in the land of cafes remains undrinkable, and, whatever the season, the intellectual class continues to supply elegant variations on the same theme: France is always about to collapse.

The present mood feels familiar – and fatalism, of course, is a habit in France. At a recent dinner among friends in Paris I was treated to a typically balanced menu: great food and mood, paired with apocalyptic forecasts. After nine years of Emmanuel Macron’s right-leaning rule France stands at the abyss, one guy said, as he cut the head off an asparagus. The country hovers somewhere between civil war and financial bankruptcy, another added, cooling her forehead with a glass of cold white wine.

Under the grey Paris sky, blurring into the city’s zinc rooftops, there was little agreement about much. Yet one year before the 2027 presidential election, French people seem to have arrived at the same conclusion: the far-right National Rally (RN) will conquer the Élysée Palace for the first time.

“France has a talent for depression,” author Michel Houellebecq once said, before adding, with characteristic ambiguity, “I resemble France.” It was perhaps also an acknowledgment of how spectacularly wrong Houellebecq has often been about French politics. He gave Macron no chance of beating Marine Le Pen in 2017. In his novel Submission, he had the nerve to imagine a fundamentalist Islamist party winning the 2022 presidential election – this in a country where Islamophobia is........

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