Whatever became of France? Once the most beautiful, brilliant and civilised country on earth, it is now caught in a seemingly irreversible spiral of decline. The French know it — a survey last year found that 61pc believe the country is in decline — but they feel powerless to prevent it.

The mood is sullen, resentful and angry. Violence simmers just below the surface, as in the yellow vest protests four years ago. Those who dare to look behind the crumbling facade of the French state will find a nation in existential crisis.

The crisis has countless causes. At its heart, however, is the despair of a people who have been deceived for so long that they no longer believe anything their leaders say — even if they tell the truth. The mood is crepuscular, at times almost apocalyptic, as those who have been kept in denial come to terms with a present that mocks their hopes for the future. There is barely a glimpse of la gloire with which they associate the rapidly receding past.

Earlier this year, when the fate of France hung in the balance during the presidential election, Emmanuel Macron made short work of his rival, Marine Le Pen, by depicting her in their TV debate as Putin’s poodle. He was duly re-elected by a substantial majority.

Yet there was none of the jubilation that had greeted his first victory in 2017. This time the French no longer took their President’s promises seriously: he and his entourage were seen merely as the lesser of two evils. Within a month, his party had lost control of a National Assembly dominated by the far-Left and the far-Right.

Macron had been humiliated: a president in name only, his office deprived of the power and the glory that the architect of the Fifth Republic, General de Gaulle, had intended.

Since then, the ageing wunderkind has sought to regain the trust of his people by admitting what they all know: that their country is no longer the pride of European civilisation, but a nation ill at ease with itself, unequal to the task of preserving its own identity, let alone its revolutionary legacy as the global champion of the rights of man.

Much of France is in a perpetual state of panic or rage about uncontrolled immigration and its own profoundly alienated Muslim population.

Last week, in a televised interview, Macron defended his record on law and order after the sensational murder of Lola, a 12-year-old Parisian girl, but for the first time conceded an inconvenient truth: “If we look at crime in Paris today, we cannot fail to see that at least half of the crime comes from people who are foreigners, either illegal immigrants or those who are waiting for a residence permit.”

Even a year ago, Macron would have vehemently condemned such views from one of his Right-wing rivals. That he now says it himself is a sign of his desperation. For it implies not only that the French state has lost control of its borders, but that it is failing to integrate the rapidly growing proportion of the population whose origins lie in the former French colonies.

Paris is, after all, a microcosm of France. The lawless anarchy of the banlieues that surround the capital, amounting almost to low-level terrorism, is mirrored in almost every other city. The graffiti, vandalism and filth that disfigure the streets of Paris are ubiquitous elsewhere too.

The decaying infrastructure, the hideous monuments of avant garde “starchitects”, reflect the extinction of Parisian stylishness in art, dress and manners. And the conflagration that almost destroyed the Cathedral of Notre Dame in 2019 symbolised the collapse of Christianity in what was once a land more devoted to Our Lady than any other.