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France's economic situation is dismal. Unemployment is at 10.6 per cent; Standard & Poor’s has downgraded the country's credit rating; manufacturing is dying. Ever since a recent cover of The Economist featured a bundle of French bread, topped with a lit fuse, there has been talk of a “baguette bomb.” The most pressing challenge facing President François Hollande is the budget deficit, which, at four and a half per cent, hovers stubbornly above the European Union limit of three per cent. Hollande, who campaigned on an anti-austerity platform, has promised to conjure thirty billion euros with a mixture of cuts and taxes. The government, like the Knights Who Say “Ni,” had demanded a shrubbery, and Depardieu had declined to furnish it. Minable was...