AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — As Europe struggles to move past the worst of its debt crisis, France has increasingly become a worry point in the recovery.

The economy has been hovering too long near stagnation, economists warned at an economics conference here on Sunday, saying that unless the government in Paris pushed more strenuously to improve growth alongside Germany, its performance threatened to weigh on the prospects for a wider recovery in the euro zone.

“The weakness of France is visible,” Bertrand Badré, managing director and chief financial officer of the World Bank Group in Washington, said in an interview on the sidelines of the conference. “It’s not that France and Germany should dominate,” he added, “but if we can’t find a way together it might be an issue.”

That theme was repeatedly invoked during the three-day meeting by Le Cercle des Économistes as top European policy makers and economists addressed what has become the most urgent concern about Europe: that for all the steps taken to put crisis-stricken countries on a path toward renewed growth, the recovery is still unfolding much too slowly.