Yet to love France is not to be blind to its history, and one of the crippling consequences of its history is its dependence on over-ideologized politics. A tendency to reward polarization and to denigrate pragmatism as somehow ignoble has plagued France since at least 1789. Two weeks ago, in the first round of the Presidential election, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left candidate, received, almost to the decimal point, the same twenty-plus per cent of the vote that the Communist Party once did. The appeal of far-left ideology, with its idealist cast, is, to the French, particularly to French youth, a cultural constant.
