Three weeks into le confinement , the complete lockdown French authorities have imposed on the nation, TV viewers here tuned into the Queen’s address yesterday more out of curiosity than to find any kind of succour.

The nation is exhausted. A good deal of Emmanuel Macron’s response to the Covid-19 crisis has been deemed flawed. The President and the country’s health authorities simultaneously decreeing that masks were unnecessary for the general public and pledging to buy millions as soon as they could be sourced was rightly seen as inconsistent. So was the failure of the French health ministry’s bureaucracy, for weeks, to greenlight promising antiviral therapies while deaths rose by the thousands. Trust is at its lowest.

And yet, after a four minutes and thirteen seconds speech broadcast on all our news channels, France, a country that has forgotten neither Waterloo no Mers-el-Kébir, had been utterly won over. “Queen Elizabeth II Would Make Me a Monarchist,” Marion Van Renterghem, a seasoned former Le Monde reporter, who now writes for both L’Express and the Guardian, tweeted. “A model Chief of State. A class act.”