If that were all, perhaps the matter could be adjusted. But this is about power: It is about who rules Europe, or rather whose rules will rule Europe in the decades ahead.
France is basically a Club Med country with some northern features (historically often found among the Huguenots and Jews, out of which communities many of its most successful business leaders have come). It wants a "political" economic system for Europe, one in which political pressures can ensure the kind of steady devaluation of the euro that Italy, Spain, France, Greece and Portugal used to enjoy with their national currencies in the good old pre-euro days. The only problem with this old system was that it gave too many advantages to the Germans, Dutch and others (in the form of lower interest rates). France wants to stick the Germans with a Latin currency and Latin rules for running it.
Germany, on the other hand, wants the Latin countries to live by northern rules: Keep the currency sound, the budgets balanced and let the chips fall where they may. There is zero, repeat, zero consensus in Germany to go Latin and give the euro into the hands of slick French and Italian politicians. Technocrats bound by rules, the Germans can accept: That is why an Italian technocrat is following a Frenchman at the head of the ECB. But that is also why the Germans are being such sticklers about ECB rules against bailouts and unlimited ECB purchases of sovereign bonds.
If there is a way to bridge the gulf between these two positions, nobody so far has found it. Neither side is willing to surrender, and no compromise can be found. This is why European summits end in one disappointing fudge after another. Neither side wants a meltdown, so both work together to produce some facsimile of an agreement that looks plausible but only papers over the irreconcilable differences between them.
Whose Europe will it be? In the past, nations have gone to war over exactly this kind of balance-of-power dispute. This time the issue happens to be currency. The EU is an attempt to develop a post-historical structure that can accommodate these controversies without bloodshed, but the hidden assumption has always been that there are no truly irreconcilable gaps between the interests of France and Germany.
There weren't, until the euro included both countries in a single currency zone that ultimately would have to be run by one set of rules. The question now is whether France will give the laws to Germany, as it did in the Napoleonic period and 1918, or whether Germany will dictate to France as it did in 1870 and 1940. The Germans are richer and more stubborn; the French are flashier and faster on their feet.
We shall see.
