One hundred and twenty years ago, the French President, Patrice MacMahon, made the same error, but a short memory is not enough to explain President Jacques Chirac's folly. What could have possessed a leader whose prime minister was the most unpopular of the Fifth Republic to ignore opinion polls, dissolve parliament and call a snap election? At least MacMahon had the excuse of trying to regain his parliamentary majority. Until it lost half of its deputies in the June 1st poll, Mr Chirac's centre-right coalition enjoyed an amazing four-fifths of the parliamentary seats.
The June 1st election was the defining event of 1997. It has utterly changed French politics through the end of the century, and probably well into the next one. All of the presumptions of the French right - that the Socialists were "used up" by 14 years of rule by Francois Mitterrand; that the left had not recovered from the financial scandals of his second, 1988-1995 term; that capitalism had conquered socialism - were proved wrong. In a six-week campaign, Mr Lionel Jospin made a miraculous comeback for himself and his party.
By calling the election nearly a year before he need have, Mr Chirac let himself in for five years of "cohabitation" with the left. Previous experiments in power-sharing - from 1986 until 1988 and again from 1993 until 1995 - took place in the run-up to presidential elections, with an end in sight. But the prospect of a five-year "cohabitation" has sapped the President's power, and Mr Chirac's sporadic attacks on the government - over defence cuts, the creation of 350,000 government jobs for French youths and the proposed 35-hour working week - give the impression he wants to remind the world he's still there. Procedure in this war of nerves is well established: Mr Chirac criticises government policy on a trip abroad or at the Wednesday Council of Ministers. Mr Jospin gives an acid rebuttal, and the two men then attempt to present a unified front - until the next time.
The President could - in theory - dissolve parliament again in 1998. But the centre-right is in a shambles. Mr Philippe Seguin, the new leader of the Rally for the Republic (RPR), the party Mr Chirac founded in 1976, has failed to reunite the Gaullists, and when Mr Seguin announced before Christmas that he was shortening the party's name to "Rally" (Rassemblement in French), commentators noted that the dropped letters "PR" stand for President of the Republic.
French governments are made or broken in their first six months in office; Mr Jospin still enjoys a nearly 60 per cent approval rating. If he can maintain this charmed existence, the Socialist leader stands a good chance of winning the 2002 presidential race.
In the shorter term, opinion polls indicate that next March's regional elections will be a replay of last June's legislative elections: the left should score high, the extreme right National Front will gain ground and the centre-right will lose again.
The right is desperately searching for cracks in the other cohabitation - that of Mr Jospin with Communists, ecologists and the radical left in the government. Although they disagree on major issues such as immigration and European integration, Mr Jospin has so far managed to control his allies in what he calls the "plural majority", mainly by consulting them at length before doing whatever he wants.
A year ago the mood in France was black. The country had just been through a crippling, 12-day lorry drivers' strike. To qualify for EMU in 1998, the then prime minister, Alain Juppe, said the country would have to sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice. The government offered no hope of reducing the nearly 13 per cent unemployment rate, and France's inability to compete in a globalised economy loomed like a monster.
The French economy has improved only slightly, but the gloom has lifted. Mr Jospin managed to end this year's lorry drivers' strike after only five days. A few weeks later, the Japanese firm Toyota announced it would build a factory employing 2,000 people in Valenciennes. Mr Jospin's answers to unemployment are mainly cosmetic, but at least he gives the impression of doing something. On Europe, the Prime Minister tells the French he wants monetary union, but not at any price. The string of conditions he attached to EMU during his campaign gave Germany the jitters, but after the June Amsterdam summit, he quietly went about fulfilling the Maastricht criteria with the same application as his predecessor - but without any mention of sacrifice. EMU is now taken for granted in France, and the domestic focus has shifted to new laws on immigration and the 35-hour week, to be completed early in 1998.
In a landmark article published in the review Debat and in Le Monde two months after his death last July, the French historian Francois Furet attributed the left's victory to an illusion on the part of the French that they could "separate democracy and capitalism . . . when they together form a single history". Thus the Socialists promised to maintain the French social protection network, reduce unemployment and qualify for EMU, in apparent defiance of economic laws. The election represented the victory of demagoguery, Mr Furet wrote.
So great is their love of illusion, Mr Furet concluded, that "the French keep asking for more demagoguery, but they suspect falsity - and that is what may give the new Prime Minister a margin of action". Furet described France's obsession with its own specialness, with its public sector and welfare system as a form of autism, and "a mystery to the world at the end of this century". The right's brutal attempt to bring the French economy into line with a capitalist world may have been technically sound, but it was politically disastrous. Mr Jospin has so far managed to reconcile what a Socialist MP calls "the tension between principles and the possible". For years to come, that will be his greatest challenge.