One of the great pathologies of British politics, at least since the Fifties, has been our strange refusal to understand European integration. We keep telling ourselves that the EU is a transactional relationship, a “trade block”, a means of boosting our mutual GDP, of making it easier for British banks and German carmakers to do business. The entire post-Brexit referendum debate in Britain has continued to be conducted along such absurd lines.

Whenever bemused Europeans tell us that we are missing the point, that EU integration is a historic project to build a new civilisation, we cannot compute. We laugh nervously, stick our fingers in our ears, and go back to arguing about how the EU should focus on trying to semi-liberalise the market for purple widgets.

French énarques, who pride themselves on Cartesian rigour, have a theory for why Britain is unable to face facts. They believe that, as befits a conservative nation obsessed with evolutionary change, that hasn’t undergone a proper revolution since 1688, we are overly practical.

We are accountants and shopkeepers who cannot comprehend grand theories or abstract concepts: in effect, Brexit was a rejection of a philosophy we never understood. The French specialise in the general; we focus on the particular, and neither side understands the other.

That is why anybody who cares about politics should read Emmanuel Macron’s speech on the future of Europe. His agenda is striking: he wants more new bureaucracies, a centralisation of the setting of taxes, an EU-wide minimum wage, European military integration and much else.