When the French Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, came to power in June 1997, he said he wanted to govern differently. He had demanded "a right of inventory" over the Mitterrand years, and vowed to bring new energy to government.
Yesterday four new but failed ministers from the Jospin 1 team handed over their offices to historical "elephants" resurrected for Jospin 2. The Prime Minister suddenly looked like an old-style politician, abandoning his friends to make deals with his enemies.
After five months of political torment, the only thing that mattered, it seemed, were Jospin's chances of unseating Jacques Chirac in the 2002 presidential poll.
Jospin 2 is above all a campaign battle machine. Jospin has somehow failed to get the credit he deserves for turning the economy around and achieving important measures like the 35-hour work week and the Civil Solidarity Pact for unmarried couples and gays.
Reform of France's huge government bureaucracy is dead, and the country could face two years of paralysis in the run-up to municipal, parliamentary and presidential elections. That prospect has revived demands for a reduction of the presidential term from seven to five years. In May Chirac will have spent five years in office, and it's his call.
Under the circumstances Jospin's choice of his rival of two decades, the former prime minister, Laurent Fabius, for the key post of finance and the economy was a shrewd exercise in damage limitation. The forced departure of Dominique Strauss-Kahn last November (after he was accused of receiving phoney fees from a socialist student insurance fund) marked the beginning of Jospin's troubles.
DSK, as Strauss-Kahn is known, speaks fluent German and English and enjoyed an international reputation for intellect and economic liberalism. Fabius is seen as an able and credible replacement for DSK; a French Tony Blair, in the words of one French newspaper, a comparison that must make Jospin's teeth grind.
Although Fabius is nominally a socialist, his ideas have made him popular with the right and the business community, and the Paris Bourse shot up at news of his appointment.
Most of Fabius's ideas have been opposed by Jospin, and it is questionable whether the new Finance Minister will be able to implement them. Jospin is now in the uncomfortable position of cohabitation with two rivals, the rightwing President Chirac and his own Finance Minister.
If Jospin 2 succeeds, Fabius may try to take credit; if it fails, Jospin will be blamed and Fabius will be well placed to step in and take over.
Jospin's experience raises the question of whether reform is possible at all in France. It has highlighted a fundamental contradiction of French political life: that the French look to the state for everything, yet are in constant revolt against the system.
A quarter of all French employees are paid by the government. Nearly half of the economy is tied up in the public sector, and it takes little more than a whisper of the word "reform" to provoke mass street demonstrations.
Jospin 1 self-destructed because every public sector reform it attempted - social security, retirement, hospitals, education, radio and television, tax collection - was opposed by public sector trade unions.
Rather than take on one of his main constituencies, Jospin dithered and caved in. He could have taken advantage of a tax collectors' strike in the very week that income-tax forms were due to introduce the far more efficient pay-as-you-earn system. Instead, he ordered the outgoing finance minister, Christian Sautter, to abandon reform of the tax collection system.
Every one of Jospin's reforms reached an impasse. He does not want to rock the boat now, but to ensure that teachers, public servants and the alienated artistic community support him in 2002. Jack Lang, the colourful popular former culture minister whom he chose for the turbulent education ministry, will douse the flames, not innovate.
When Lang followed Jospin as education minister in 1992-93, the first thing he did was cancel Jospin's reform of the lycee system. Far from taking on government bureaucracy, Jospin 2 makes more of it, with the creation of new junior ministers' portfolios for "patrimony and cultural decentralisation" and "the economy of solidarity".
Except for the financial press, which slobbered over Fabius's arri val, left- and right-wing commentators alike saw Jospin 2 as a return to Mitterrandisme. Five of Jospin's eight new appointees served in Mitt errand governments. "Help, Mitterrand is returning!" exclaimed Le Figaro. Liberation published a giant cartoon of Jospin wearing Mitter rand's hat, scarf and coat on its front page. The new government, the leftwing daily said, "smells recycled".