Letter from Paris: The theme is as old as the Romans and crops up through history with persistent regularity. A decade ago a book about "the fall of the American empire" was a huge success in the US. This autumn France was seized by its own bout of déclinisme, thanks to the economist and historian Nicolas Baverez.
Mr Baverez's book, La France Qui Tombe (France is Falling), has remained on the best-seller list since early September. "I was surprised by the effect it had, and by the violence of some reactions," he said in an interview. "I've received piles of mail, all of it positive, but the reaction of the polticial and media establishment has been very negative."
The decline of France, real or imagined, has been debated on virtually every radio and television programme. The Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, reportedly hates Mr Baverez's book. Yet when given the opportunity to debunk the careful accretion of facts and figures demonstrating two decades of diminishing economic and political influence, Mr Raffarin is silent.
How could he refute Mr Baverez's statistics?
Economic growth has fallen from 3 per cent in 1970 to 1.8 per cent this year; gains in productivity from 4.2 per cent annually to 1 per cent. France is the only developed country where unemployment has averaged 9 per cent for a quarter of a century, and 26 per cent of French young people - the highest rate in the developed world - are jobless.
Deficit spending has risen from 23 per cent of GDP in 1980 to 62 per cent this year. "The loss of control of French public finances is total," Mr Baverez writes. He quotes Frédéric Bastiat's 1848 definition of the State as "a fiction through which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else".
Mr Baverez sees only one way to reverse France's decline: reform, reform, reform. "Europe cannot do it for us," he says. The US, Britain and now Germany have made the effort, he notes.
Reducing the highest taxation in Europe, abrogating the 35-hour working week (which translates into a 2 per cent annual reduction in the number of hours worked by French people) and tackling the health system's €30 billion deficit are "urgent measures" recommended by Mr Baverez.
Reform would thin the ranks of France's 5.1 million civil servants, he says, but that would be the result, not the beginning.
Mr Raffarin was appointed by President Jacques Chirac after he won an astounding 82 per cent of the vote in the May 2002 presidential election.
Mr Baverez says that the presence of the extreme right-wing candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen, on the ballot was the consequence of resistance to change among France's "inward-looking, gerontocratic political class, all of whom come from the top levels of the civil service".
Mr Raffarin's UMP party holds 399 of 577 seats in the National Assembly and enjoys the support of the Senate and most local governments. The lesson of the first round of the presidential poll, in which right- and left-wing extremists gained more than a third of all votes, was learned, Mr Raffarin promised.
His government had a mandate to reform, and reform it would. The heavy-set former public relations officer was even called "France's Margaret Thatcher".
A year and a half later, there's not much of Mr Raffarin's reforming spirit left. He braved strikes and demonstrations last summer to impose a partial reform of the pension system. But the premature deaths of 15,000 old people during the heat wave in August started the government's plunge in the opinion polls.
The crisis showed, Mr Bavarez says, "that instead of a government, France has a psychological help unit, quick to empathise with the victims of its incompetence".
Now the government seems afraid of its own shadow, backtracking on even the most timid measures. Mr Chirac made fighting cancer a top priority of his second term, so the price of cigarettes was raised twice this year.
But a street demonstration by tobacconists sent a fright through the Prime Minister's office. There will be no further price rises for four years, and the State has promised €150 million in aid for tobacconists.
The social affairs m'inister leaked the news that the government would do away with the Whit Monday holiday next year, to help finance care for old people. After a public outcry, Mr Raffarin announced an arrangement so complicated that no one knows whether they'll have the day off. And the Education Minister abandoned a proposed law on the status of universities after protests from students and teachers.
It was a sure sign of decline when French diplomats went on strike for the first time in history on Monday. Paris maintains the world's second-largest diplomatic service on a shoestring budget.
The Foreign Ministry's paper supplier stopped deliveries because of late payments. Staff were asked to use both sides of every sheet, and the European Affairs Minister had to buy her own notepads.
