“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” — Samuel Johnson

Yesterday, Prime Minister François Bayrou stood on a chair and placed a noose around his neck, calling for a vote of confidence in his government on Sept. 8. It is all but certain that he will not obtain a majority, and his government will fall, because all the parties of the left as well as the Rassemblement National on the far right have announced that they will withhold confidence. So why did he do it?

Some commentators hold that Bayrou has always seen himself in the image of Pierre Mendès France, a model of fiscal probity and one of the rare politicians who put principle above power. Others believe that he hopes the prospect of yet another round of chaos as a deeply divided legislature cannot agree on a budget or a new prime minister will give a sufficient number of deputies reason to defy their party leaders. Still others see a cynical political maneuver: Bayrou, who has always believed that France can hope for no better president than himself, looks forward to the day six or twelve months in the future when the economic crisis precipitated by the legislature’s refusal to approve his austerity budget will permit him to say “I told you so” and present himself as the country’s savior.

The consequences have been immediate. France’s borrowing costs, which had already risen to the level of Italy’s, have spiked, and stocks have fallen. Mélenchon, already parading Bayrou’s head on a rhetorical spike, is again calling for Macron’s. Olivier Faure, anticipating chaos, has announced that the Socialist Party will back the nascent Bloquons Tout (Let’s Block Everything) movement but that he personally won’t be in the streets because … reasons (it’n not the place of a party leader, we don’t really know who wants to block everything or what they’re really after), demonstrating yet again that he is the decisive leader and penetrating political thinker and strategist that the left needs if it is to revive itself (irony alert!); Marine Le Pen is salivating at the prospect that yet another political impasse will somehow induce Macron to appoint Bardella while persuading deputies of the center-right that the time has finally come to capitulate to the extreme; and, last as well as least, Lucie Castets, who emerged from obscurity as the bearer of hopes for left-wing unity precisely because no one had ever heard of her is once again eager to unite the left around her still indistinct profile.

Such is la rentrée 2025, which promises to be good fun for a while until Bloquons Tout makes good on its threat, as if everything were not already blocked by the irrevocably divided National Assembly and the utter divorce between the political class, as always absorbed in its kabuki, and the pays réel, more morose than ever.

A personal note: I’ve started a Substack called The Sense of an Ending in which I contemplate what is happening in the United States. It makes for gloomy reading, but I try to bring a bit of detachment from the day-to-day catastrophes and to take a longer, more contemplative view of what it all means to a person of my generation and background. Check it out. You might find it interesting.