Today is Fête du 14 juillet in France. Or more to the point "Bastille Day" in English.

This is the day France celebrates storming a largely empty prison, freeing a heptad of lunatics and convicts (among them an aristocrat), committing a few establishing murders for the Republican cause, and giving Republicanism its Archimedian point. It also ushered in the French political institutions of street misrule, rioting and mobbing and thuggism, so vital to contemporary political life in France.

Our earlier posts, here and here, recount the history of the Bastille and its sorry Republican end.

Center stage is Jack's annual television interview with the nation, a sort of mid-year state of the Union. And what a year it's been! And what a state!

HARD TIME
Third Term? Or The Hoosgow?

THE MAN WHO DESERVES A RED CARD
It Is Plain That Jacques Chirac Has Wasted His 11 Years As President

PARIS July 13, 2006 (Economist) - [A] yearning for somebody to rescue France from its melancholy hangs in the political air. After 11 years in the presidency, Mr Chirac has come to embody the country's political inability to renew itself. In politics for 41 years, he is the only serving politician who has belonged to governments under every fifth-republic president since de Gaulle. His popularity has collapsed. According to TNS Sofrès, a pollster, Mr Chirac is now the most unpopular French president since its polling began in 1978. Libération put it well this week: “For a month, France has been dreaming with Zidane. This morning, it wakes up to Chirac.”

It is a measure of their despondency that the French have begun to write the president's political obituary. Franz-Olivier Giesbert's trenchant account of Mr Chirac's past 20 years, “La Tragédie du Président”, has been a bestseller for months. The author is merciless: “By cowardice as much as by blindness, he persists in pursuing policies which, for over 20 years, have been leading the country to ruin.” A satirical documentary, “Dans la Peau de Jacques Chirac”, is showing in cinemas. Le Monde recently called on the president to resign.

Certainly, the record of the past decade has been meagre. Mr Chirac was elected in 1995 on promises to cut taxes, to curb unemployment and to “mend the social fracture”. Yet, under his watch, France has slipped out of the world's top five economies. Its public debt has swollen from 55% of GDP to 66%; unemployment has never dropped below 8%. At the start of Mr Chirac's reign in 1995, France was paralysed by strikes against reforms, and governed by an imperious, unloved prime minister, Alain Juppé. Now, towards its end, France has seen 1m-3m people on the streets in a student-led protest against labour-market reforms, and is governed by the imperious, unloved Mr de Villepin. A president who promoted the construction of a strong Europe, to counter-balance America in a multi-polar world, failed to persuade his own people to vote for its new constitution in last year's referendum.

The disappointment is bitter.

Chapeau, la France !

* Today's date (or alternately, Quintidi, 25ème Messidor) had le calendrier républicain survived.

PFFT (What is this?): France survives another year 2½ | Rayonnement français 0

Come see my tribute to the Gauls.