ungovernable

But the jihadist insurgency has continued, and has made much of the north and east of the country ungovernable.

Further afield, France is ungovernable, other parts of Europe nearly so.

But the president will have known for some time of the political challenges ahead and he is not one to give up without a fight - or another bid to stabilise an increasingly ungovernable France.

A government changes its behavior, he told me, when a country becomes ungovernable.

"It's better to look at what's causing people to be ungovernable," says Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who specialises in polarised democracies.