Notre Dame rose again from the ashes – so too can France’s battered democracy | Alexander Hurst

With the country in stalemate, people have lost faith in government. But citizens' assemblies show one way forward

When Notre Dame burned, something in the flames seemed to speak to the combustibility of our age. Nothing is for ever, the fire said, even those edifices - stone or institutional - that we assume will always be there. In almost every democracy, there are similar forces of backlash and disaffection. The anger is diffuse and the discontents vary, but there is a general agitation that seems to boil down to the feeling that someone should do something.

At the moment, France seems to have crystallised this phenomenon in a way that other democracies might draw both warnings and lessons from. Will Francois Bayrou last longer as prime minister than Michel Barnier? Perhaps. But the basic impediment remains: the country is politically split roughly into thirds (and the left" is split among itself), with the end result that creating a majority for anything is almost impossible.