The images from France over the past two months have seemed hellish enough – mounds of rubbish, sometimes on fire, serving as backdrop for violent clashes between some of the more extreme protest groups and body armour-clad riot police. Enough for my parents to repeatedly ask over FaceTime if it was really OK for me to be out and about in my neighbourhood, which borders a main protest square. (It was, I assured them each time, just France being France: the overaggressive nature of the confrontations and the dismissive and “arrogant” government response simply the self-fulfilling result of everyone assuming this was just how things would unfold.)

Of course, France isn’t a literal paradise. It has had four decades of structurally high unemployment; a lost decade of stagnating incomes after the 2008-09 financial crisis; lower levels of social trust than its happier northern European neighbours (made worse by Emmanuel Macron’s use of article 49.3, which forced the legislature to choose between passing the unpopular retirement reform or holding new elections); a population shifting away from rural towns towards urban centres; and a slow, rolling recognition of its relative decline on the global stage.