I got the hairy eyeball from fellow TV panelists when I said in 2019 that it was careless of the French to let Notre-Dame burn down. But the point was a serious one. In the aftermath, it was widely noted how French landmarks had already come to depend on foreign and domestic philanthropy for maintenance. Then came the glaring foreign millions on offer for restoring the cathedral. If you haven't noticed, recent months have been replete with stories of heirlooms being walked out of poorly secured French museums.
The first job of government is to provide an orderly and lawful environment for citizens to pursue their aims. A government devoted to meeting their every wish and want is bound to fail, because their wishes and wants are unlimited. When a government loses the ability to prioritize, it loses the ability to govern. France's has.
The current French moment has been on the bingo card for years, more so as the euro currency became an instrument for allowing France to burrow deeper into debt and dysfunction. I spelled out the inevitable in a headline two decades ago, "Shall We Eat Our Young?," for the intergenerational parasitism the modern welfare state has become. In a 2018 headline about France's newly elected president I said "Macron Is German Taxpayers' Last Hope" -- i.e., for those on the hook for the coming bailout, without which the common currency itself won't survive.
But now the euro must survive. Vladimir Putin saved it. Whatever elite sentiment existed for calling it a failed project, that elite sentiment is gone thanks to the Russian threat.
In a previous debt crisis, central banker Mario Draghi famously bought time with his "whatever it takes" promise -- i.e., buying time for today's crisis. Even Germany's un-house-trained AfD party has come around to admitting the euro is permanent. The far-right party long ago normalized itself in another way: It agrees with some centrist and conservative parties in Northern Europe that a bankruptcy process is needed to spare European Union taxpayers the impossible political lift of bailing out their impecunious southern neighbors.
It may surprise you that a process already exists, sort of, for allowing member states to invite a renegotiation with creditors. But it lacks hard triggers to let outsiders force change. Why? Because everyone realized it was already too late. If default were possible, default would be inevitable. The bond market would stop buying the debt of France, Spain and Italy, blowing up the European Central Bank's extend-and-pretend game.
Maybe there was wisdom in denial after all. France is too big to fail and also too big to bail out. That leaves only one realistic choice: France pulls itself together or takes Europe down with it.
There really is no other alternative, no matter the winner of next year's presidential election, likely rightist Marine Le Pen at a time when the French are enraptured by a two-part biopic of Charles de Gaulle, as if recognizing a need to revive a weakly flickering nationalist flame.
There is likely no alternative to self-help except France flaking out of the eurozone, seeing its living standard plummet, and seeing all those nice chateaus and paintings bought up by rich Chinese and Americans.
Or it can become North Korea on the Cote d'Azur, shutting itself off from the world in pursuit of a penurious economic self-sufficiency.
If Ms. Le Pen ends up next year in a runoff against left-wing riot abettor Jean-Luc Melenchon, she will likely win with a mandate -- first, for repression if necessary, though I imagine today's weekend anarchists may think twice if they see a grim-visaged representative of conservative, middle-class France coming for them.
Second, presumably, will come realistic acts to deal with the fiscal crisis. Steps that have eluded France, which once seemed the end of the world to French voters, will seem less so in the circumstance. Like raising the retirement age from 62 to 67, as other European states have done; like imposing steeper copays and deductibles for doctor visits and medical care. France can claim modest progress in negating employment regulations that disincentivize hiring, turning every worker into a ward for life. More is needed.
Other advanced peoples have endured these things. Is it really worth blowing up France and Europe to avoid them?
I come back to Notre-Dame. It surprised me at the time that the French people didn't look at the catastrophe and ask: What have we become? Obviously a France of spirit and aspiration exists, a France that wouldn't wish to remember itself, in the obnoxious phrase of a U.S. cartoon character, as a nation of cheese-eating surrender monkeys.
Admittedly it has been 10 years since I visited, but it is hard to imagine a people with the resources, history and taste of the French failing so ignominiously before the greedy-geezer problem that is coming for almost every Western state sooner or later, the U.S. included.
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