Dominique de Villepin, France’s poet-cum-prime minister, may be reassessing his pledge to turn France around in 100 days. But the prescription he has followed to pull his country out of its economic doldrums, including employer tax breaks, flexible contracts and stirring rhetoric, has lacked a vital element: humour.Shortly after taking office, the poet prime minister harked back to his hero Napoleon Bonaparte, who escaped from exile and spent 100 days reviving defeated France before being defeated again, after assuming office on June 1.

It is Britain, with its near-full unemployment and carefree consumers, to which many French now look with envy. Though the two have long shared the “British disease” of endemic strike action, France has proved immune to one export: the ability to laugh at one’s dire straits. In the 1970s Britain was the sick man of Europe, bailed out by the International Monetary Fund. Even then, By candlelight among the power cuts, Brits laughed about their tarnished national treasures: British Leyland and its leaky cars, and British Rail’s creaking trains. France, by contrast, now seems to feels sick, Mr de Villepin saying he has “one of the last chances to save the French social model”, and seems too weak to evenlaugh.