France’s cuisine is probably civilization’s finest creation, and its art, music and fashion aren’t bad, either. Yet the French people fall for every leftist scam that is pulled on them, notably in the second round of elections last week, and are far too prone to revere intellectuals who would best be placed in solitary confinement. Economically, this has caused the country to underperform even worse than Britain. It is perhaps worth examining this pathology in more detail.

It must be admitted that the 1789 French Revolution was not entirely irrational. The Ancien Régime was inept both economically and militarily, with the 1720 Mississippi Company/Banque Royale crash a particular blot on its copybook. The policies of both the government and French intellectuals (the physiocrats, who believed only agricultural output counted) were very unhelpful to incipient industrialization.

However, the Storming of the Bastille, which France celebrated yesterday, was an unpleasant farce – after 94 deaths in the fighting, only 7 prisoners were released, one of whom was the Marquis de Sade, hardly an example of unfair political incarceration. The 19-year-old (future) Lord Liverpool who witnessed it shared the Jeffersonian excitement at this unpleasantness, writing to his father: “Nothing would have tempted me to miss it” thus demonstrating that impressionable youths should at all costs be kept away from leftist rioting, lest it infect them long-term (in Liverpool’s case, it didn’t, of course).

As is well known, the French Revolution, having started unpleasantly, only got worse, with one of the sad ironies of the Terror of 1793-94 being its incompetent failure to guillotine Tom Paine, who richly deserved it but was spared by an administrative error. The Directory, which succeeded the Terror, had a pleasant comic-opera quality (La fille de Madame Angot is a very good one about it) but made some moves in the direction of a free market, which might have done some good. However, Napoleon Bonaparte, France’s next ruler, was an utter economic illiterate, who survived only by plundering conquered territories and reduced France by 1815 to an impoverished unindustrialized wasteland – in 1816, France had only 48 steam engines, compared with the 110 Britain had possessed in 1733.

France’s Restoration government was pretty good – contrary to the well-known quote of Talleyrand, who was in disgruntled opposition almost throughout their rule, the Bourbons had learned quite a lot in exile in Britain, most notably the benefits of industrialization and how to stimulate it. Alas, the Revolution of 1830 removed the benign Charles X, despite his major success in capturing Algiers only weeks before. That Revolution followed a standard French pattern of violent insurgency from leftist intellectuals, backed only by a radical Paris mob; even more than its successors it lacked support outside Paris, as evidenced by the succession of well-supported Legitimist revolts against the following July Monarchy of Louis Philippe.

Louis Philippe’s regime was considerably more corrupt than its predecessor, as well as being more statist, providing unnecessary public funding support for various railway projects, for example. As in 1830 however, the 1848 Revolution against it was wholly a matter of leftist intellectuals and the Paris mob. Notably, the June 1848 elections on a universal franchise resulted in only 10% of seats for the socialists running the government, with 65% for anti-Revolution “moderates” led by General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac and 25% for restoration of the legitimate Bourbon monarchy, now represented by the young Comte de Chambord.

Both stylistically (Eugenie was better looking than Josephine, Haussman’s rebuilding of Paris was better than the Arc de Triomphe) and economically, Napoleon III was a vast improvement on his uncle, making free market, free trade reforms that expanded France’s economy rapidly. He also signed the 1860 Cobden-Chevalier Treaty with Britain, the apogee of the global free trade movement. Unfortunately, in foreign policy he had some of his uncle’s ambitions without his uncle’s military capacity – hence the tragedy of the Franco-Prussian War and his removal from office.

The Third Republic marked a half century of violent French revenge fantasies against Germany after the loss of Alsace-Lorraine in the 1871 peace settlement, another move towards socialism and a low point in French governance – France was the most left-wing country in Europe before 1914. It had a chance to do better by restoring the Comte de Chambord as a constitutional monarch in 1873, but alas, the wretched Republic refused to abandon the tricolour flag, with its regicidal associations, and return to the fleur de lys. A reserved, highly moral man, Chambord was probably better off without the throne in a regime whose leaders were principally known for sleeping with each others’ wives and getting shot for it, sometimes by the wives, who also wiped out at least one editor of Le Figaro in 1914 (Mme. Cailloux was acquitted, on the grounds that it was a “crime passionel”).

France’s responsibility for starting World War I was murky but considerable, with a crucial July 1914 conspiratorial visit to St. Petersburg by President Raymond Poincaré. It is notable that the two most prominent anti-war leaders of 1914 were removed, Joseph Cailloux by being forced to resign after his wife’s gunplay and Jean Jaurès by yet another assassination on July 31.

Between the wars, Poincaré distinguished himself again by returning France to the Gold Standard in 1928 at one eighth the prewar parity, thus engaging in beggar-my-neighbor devaluation against the pound and dollar, which had returned to gold at the pre-war rate (the heavily undervalued franc and the low dollar prices to which it led resulted in a plethora of U.S. literary riff-raff in 1920s Paris). The trade destabilization this produced was a major cause of the U.S. 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff and the Great Depression in general. Following that depression and the Workers International government of Léon Blum in 1936-37 it was thus little surprise that France was in a poor position to resist 1940’s German tanks.

After another decade of government frivolity in the Fourth Republic of 1946-58, order and good government were restored in 1958 by Charles de Gaulle, who undertook a coup and proclaimed the Fifth Republic that France enjoys today. Constitutionally, de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic has some unique features; the two-round Parliamentary voting system that France experienced again recently was designed so that a conservative President such as de Gaulle himself could tilt the scales against the left. It never occurred to de Gaulle that in a more depraved age a “moderate” President could deliberately degrade the quality of French government by tilting the system against the right.

De Gaulle and his first two prime ministers Michel Debre and Georges Pompidou gave France a decade of excellent government, which pushed its economy well ahead of Britain’s – I was astonished when I first visited Paris in 1974 at how glistening and spotless it was compared to scruffy, decaying London. Among their other achievements was France’s nuclear power program, which overcame the usual illiterate environmentalist whining and today generates 80% of France’s electricity cheaply and without carbon emissions (if that matters) — it has thus left France invulnerable to the power cuts, blackouts and consequent degradation of living standards that will shortly affect Britain and the other EU countries. Pompidou succeeded de Gaulle as President and gave France another five years of good government until 1974, but après ça le déluge – French governments have grown progressively less competent and more left-wing, and more recently an uncontrolled influx of immigrants has degraded everybody’s quality of life.

The problem for France now is that the bills are about to come due and a new government of the left will make things much worse. With a debt to GDP ratio of 110% and a public sector deficit of 5.5% of GDP, France is in a significantly worse position than other countries, having been in a much better position as recently as 1980, when public debt was only 20% of GDP. Leftist proposals to return the retirement age to 60 from the (still too low) 64 to which Macron with great difficulty raised it, to institute a 90% income tax and to reimpose the wealth tax that Macron abolished, will all cause a well-deserved flight of capital that will destroy the economy and further impoverish ordinary French people. France desperately needs another de Gaulle, but its political system, statist governing philosophy and relentless state overspending make it highly unlikely that it will find one.

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)