In a clever chapter on “Vanishing Madeleines,” he laments the decay of the world-renowned symbols of French life. "Foie gras is imported from Central Europe and snails from as far away as Taiwan. That essential element in traditional French hygiene, the bidet, is now installed in fewer than 10 percent of new bathrooms." Berets? Only three factories in France still make them—a tenth of the number before World War II. Baguettes? "As people grow richer and more urbanized, they eat less bread. A century ago, the average French person consumed 219 kilograms a year.... In the 1990s it fell below 60 kilos. Parisians now average only 36 kilos a year." Cafés? Three thousand close each year, half of them in Paris, as patterns of life change and people do less drinking. In another chapter, he bemoans the vanishing of the country’s rural roots as villages wither and their customs die out: "The annual killing of the pig and the use of every morsel down to the ears and tail for food has been supplanted by preserved cold cuts in cellophane from the local supermarket."

But here the argument becomes contradictory, even circular—because if anyone shares Fenby’s solicitude for these local customs, these symbolic hallmarks, it is the French government. It pours out subsidies for agriculture, for small-town living, for those who bake baguettes in the traditional manner. It nests daily life in regulations intended to encourage people to patronize small grocers and eat fresh bread. And those regulations and subsidies, in turn, are a large part of what drives Fenby and other critics of French exceptionalism round the bend. His ideal—a modern France, fully integrated with the Continent, no longer in the grip of lobbies and special interests—would be a France losing ever more swiftly the things that mark it off from the rest of the world. The book has other weaknesses as well. Fenby laments the number of scandals in high places, the lack of turnover in political office, the gap between the well off and a resentful underclass, the strain of integrating racial minorities—but he never compares the French experience with that of other countries. What nation has figured out what to do about its underclass? An otherwise gripping chapter on Jean-Marie Le Pen and his National Front ends with the party’s "implosion," undercutting the author’s argument that the Front’s persistence signals deep trouble in the electorate. A section on Francophobia is little but a collection of lame jokes and nasty newspaper headlines. Elsewhere, the problem is pure rummage: Fenby loves lists, and he has an odd habit of rattling off a long series of unconnected onesentence items on a theme, for all the world like someone reciting the results of a Nexis search.

France on the Brink finally hits its stride in the last four chapters, when it settles down to a straightforward narrative account of the last three presidents of the Republic: Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, François Mitterrand, and Jacques Chirac. Here is grist for Fenby’s contention that high-level French politics is ingrown and arid of ideas. He follows the career-long hatred between the Socialist Mitterrand and the neo-Gaullist Chirac—each of whose overriding political goal was to keep the other from power— and tracks Mitterrand’s cynical flip-flopping between left and right. "If one constant ran through Mitterrand’s long career," he writes, "it was his ability to disown his beliefs of yesterday." Arriving at the great conundrum of recent French politics— why, in 1997, a faltering Chirac called new elections that lost him his huge parliamentary majority and forced him to appoint socialist Lionel Jospin as prime minister— Fenby offers little in the way of new reporting to clear up the mystery. Plainly, though, he is as suspicious of Jospin’s efforts to invent a French "third way" as he is of previous governments’ temporizing. France may well be due for another set of rude shocks to its beloved way of life. Surrounded by countries buffeted by similar forces, and committed to that engine of change, the European Union, it has nonetheless held out longer than its neighbors. Its many fans—Fenby indubitably among them—still hope for a miraculous solution, one that lets France retain its distinctiveness without lapsing into insularity. Nothing better demonstrates the continued aura of French aplomb and self-confidence than the faith that France will find this salvation.