In summer 2008 we found an apartment in Paris. But getting a mortgage was tricky. French banks wanted proof that we’d be able to keep paying no matter what. We showed them some shares. Shares can fall, they scoffed. Then a bank sent me to a cardiologist. He turned me inside out, and was already ushering me wordlessly out of the door when I asked him what he’d found. “It’s OK,” he mumbled. He wasn’t working for me. He was working for the bank, which wanted to know whether I might live long enough to pay off a 25-year mortgage.

All this struck me then as risibly cautious, an example of France’s fear of modern finance. But about a month after we got our mortgage, the global financial crisis struck. Shares plummeted. So did housing markets, but not in France. The French didn’t give subprime mortgages, and so now they don’t have foreclosures.

With hindsight, my checkup was an example of how right the French often are about the big issues of today. Sadly, hardly anyone outside France knows that. The death of French as a major language, and the collapse of foreign interest in France as anything but a resort-cum-food hall, has deprived the world of a great corrective to bad ideas.