THE 19th-century mansion on the chic left bank of Paris, with its tiled floors and sweeping stone staircase, was for decades an iconic part of French Socialist history. François Mitterrand arrived there in 1981 to celebrate his victory as the first Socialist president of modern France. Ségolène Royal, the party’s presidential candidate in 2007, waved valiantly to crowds from the building’s balcony after her defeat. Late last year, however, the cash-strapped party had to sell its grand headquarters and find new premises in a modern office in an unfashionable suburb. The episode serves as a cruel metaphor for the ailing party.

Last year, a party that has supplied two Fifth Republic presidents and nine prime ministers was rudely rejected at the ballot box. Its presidential candidate, Benoît Hamon, came in a humiliating fifth place with just 6% of the vote. At the legislative elections that followed the party was almost wiped out, losing 90% of its deputies and ending up with just 30 seats out of 577. Supporters swung instead either to Emmanuel Macron’s new centrist party, La République en Marche (LREM), or to Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left France Insoumise. Fully 47% of those who had supported the Socialist candidate, François Hollande, in 2012, voted for Mr Macron in 2017.

Since then, the party has bled talent. Manuel Valls, the (Spanish-born) prime minister under Mr Hollande, has quit the party and now sits with LREM in parliament. He is said to be considering a run for mayor of Barcelona, the town in which he was born. Mr Hamon, meanwhile, has left to set up his own political movement, Génération.s, whose use of the modish point médian, or middle full stop, is doubtless a nod to the young metropolitan types he hopes to attract.

Battered and financially fragile, the Socialist Party has tried to pick itself up. It is moving to new premises, in Ivry-sur-Seine, south-east of Paris. In March it held a leadership election, picking Olivier Faure, a 49-year-old longtime party hack, who has promised a Socialist “renaissance”. He does have some interesting ideas, including backing a plan to introduce a pilot experiment for a universal basic income in 13 Socialist-run regional departments.

Mr Faure is hoping that the party can yet benefit from second thoughts on the left about Mr Macron, who served as a minister in Mr Hollande’s government but was only briefly a member of the Socialist Party. This month the president’s approval rating dropped by fully 12 points among those who have previously voted Socialist, according to a poll by Elabe, while it edged up by four points among those who backed the centre-right. Mr Macron has been tagged the “president of the rich” for his tax cuts for business and the wealthy, a perception he tried to counter on June 13th with a speech promising more generous health reimbursements to all. Mr Hollande, who has published a book reflecting on his spell in office and is suspected of planning a comeback, retorted on a French TV show recently that this epithet was not fair. Mr Macron, the former president quipped, visibly amused by his own joke, is the “president of the very rich”.

Originally founded by Jean Jaurès as the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO), in 1905, the Socialist Party has been behind some of France’s landmark social legislation, from the first mandatory paid holidays in 1936 to the legalisation of gay marriage in 2013. Yet today it is crushed by Mr Macron’s mighty LREM on one side, and Mr Mélenchon’s firebrands on the other. The most vocal opposition to the government these days comes not from the traditional mainstream parties on the left or the right but, in line with European trends, from the populist extremes.

Mr Faure has struggled to breathe. His speeches and interviews seem to leave little impression. A mere 10% of those polled have a positive image of him, a figure that rises only to 15% among left-wing voters—a quarter of Mr Mélenchon’s score. The Socialist Party is seen as tired and outdated. Trade unionists accuse it of “treason” for imposing a deregulation of the labour market in 2016. At a rally in Paris this spring Mr Faure, jeered by unionists, had to be escorted to safety. A party with a great history risks consigning itself to the past.