..........."trente glorieuses" is the term coined by Jean Fourastie, a French demographer, to describe the thirty years of remarkable economic success enjoyed by France from the end of the war until the early nineteen seventies. Then it seemed to run out of steam and while the German half of Europe marched onwards and upwards, the French half slipped backwards and downwards.

There is nothing unique or remarkable about a country being a roaring success one day and a outright flop the next. Unfortunately for hapless citizens, thanks to their politicians, It happens all the time ... all over the world. But only in Europe is the maniacal insistence of leaders to remain joined at the hip to other nations with such proclivity for failure that if one economy goes pop, the rest, in varying degrees of severity, are automatically pulled down too.

After the war, France found itself elevated into the position it had coveted for hundreds of years - master over Europe. The French post-war leaders in the twentieth century, unarmed and without reinforcements, had succeeded where previous rulers, such as Louis XIV in the eighteenth and Napoleon Bonaparte in the nineteenth, both with massive armies and plenty of reinforcements, had failed.

But French propensity for burgeoning government expenditure, continually enlarging an already enormous public sector, flooding enterprise with bureaucracy, red tape and taxes, proved too much a burden for the growth rate to be able to continue indefinitely and it inevitably started to flag.

The sluggishness regrettably turned out to be much longer lasting than the buoyant trend, to the extent that in November 2012 an Economist cover story described France as "The time bomb at the heart of Europe".