Last week, France’s executive duo — President François Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls shuffled the French cabinet, getting rid of the economy minister, Arnaud Montebourg, after he publicly criticized the government’s fealty to German-imposed austerity measures. Emmanuel Macron, a business-friendly former Rothschild banker and 36-year-old political prodigy, has been anointed his replacement.

With this kerfuffle, the Socialist Party has been split into two factions — one supporting the bitter medicine of slashing government spending prescribed by the European Central Bank and Angela Merkel’s government in Germany, and the other joining a growing chorus warning that austerity is precisely the wrong remedy for the euro zone’s current economic malaise. Mr. Hollande has said that his government will not waver from the course he laid out in a speech on Dec. 31: a responsibility pact where business, in exchange for corporate tax cuts, promises to create jobs. But the pact won’t take effect until 2015. Meanwhile, unemployment, which Mr. Hollande promised to bring down this year, has hit a high of 11 percent.

French manufacturing has contracted for four consecutive months. Economic growth for 2014 has flatlined at nearly zero, forcing France to scrap deficit-reduction targets pledged to the European Union.

On the domestic front, a Socialist government at odds with much of the party will have a harder time pushing through legislation on clean energy, terrorism and aging. While ridding the government of Mr. Montebourg’s strident protectionism is not necessarily a bad idea, stubbornly hewing to the austerity line dictated by Berlin and the European Central Bank is likely to prove as disastrous for France as it is proving for Europe as a whole.