Over on Crooked Timber, Maria Farrell is being haunted by the sheer gaul of them, and consequently expressing her irritation with France and the French, not just

[f]or falling asleep at the wheel in 2002 and letting back in to the Elysee a fraud who has no vision for France, no values apart from expediency, and whose number one professional objective was using the office to stay out of jail.”

But also for pretty much everything else imaginable – so go read her post.

Of course, Maria is hardly the only one whose reaction to the more confusing consequences of contemporary, self-perceived French exeptionalism is irritation. Here are two quotes, which, I think, go a long way in explaining the causes for this feeling.

?The French have no monopoly on intellectual pretensions, or on muddled thinking. They may not even be more likely than other people to combine the two. There is, however, something special about the way the French political class discusses economics. In no other advanced country is the elite so willing to let fine phrases overrule hard thinking, to reject the lessons of experience in favour of grandeur.?

Paul Krugman, American Economist, The Accidental Theorist (1998), p. 35

?The most perplexing question about contemporary France is this. If, as champions of economic liberalism argue, France embodies all the vices of an over-sheltered, welfare-cushioned, state-stifled, centralised, quaint and archaic European model, then how does it manage to be such a vibrant and prosperous place??

Sophie Pedder, in The Economist, June 5 1999, ppF3