President Macron has likened his task of reforming the sclerotic French state to a “Copernican revolution”. It is a revealing, as well as a typically grandiose, comparison. Nicolaus Copernicus was the Renaissance-era polymath who placed the sun, rather than the earth, at the centre of the known universe. Emmanuel Macron is the renaissance man who, in a glittering speech in Versailles recently, placed himself at the centre of the French republic. He is the elected monarch of the nation: l’état, c’est lui. For the moment at least, Macron is the Sun King.

France is once again this week, as so often, engulfed by public sector strikes. Ninety-five per cent of the rail workers have rejected the president’s plans to open up the state-owned SNCF network…