Den Beste thinks so. He posits that the elite have concluded that rising unemployment, prohibitive govt workplace regulations, the aging workplace and lack of assimilation of Muslim immigrants fortell societal disintigration of the French welfare state with its priviliged position for the political elite.

Ralph Peters agrees in his Farewell France essay, although he see the US mending fences so to speak with Russia and Germany, as for France...
"The problem lies in the government bureaucracy and its supporting cadre of Parisian intellectuals. France is far from a meritocracy in the American vein. Rather, the ruling and chattering classes in France are inbred even by European standards. They go to the same small number of schools and universities, cherish the same tenured, state-funded positions, and live in the same Parisian neighborhoods. And they hate with far greater facility than they create.

These are the small men and women who cannot bear France's diminished role in the world, who lash out at America for championing the average citizen's right to opportunity (egalité - equality - only goes so far on the Left Bank), and who dream loftily of changing the world when they cannot even change the political prejudices they have held for half a century.

Now they and their champions, Chirac and de Villepin, have gotten a brutal comeuppance. France has lost authority, credibility and influence in 2003 almost as swiftly as the French lost their country in 1940. The paradox is that, in the long term, this humiliation of the Parisian elite may be a good thing for the common people of France despised by the ruling class.

-p