France's president has finally imploded

It was probably the final humiliation for the most unpopular president in the history of France's Fifth Republic.

In the wake of the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, President François Hollande announced a sweeping revision of the French Constitution. It would set clear guidelines for state of emergency measures in the wake of terrorist attacks and provide for convicted terrorists to be stripped of their nationality.

This latter measure proved controversial for reasons that, frankly, I find incomprehensible. If nationality is to mean anything, then it must mean that some offenses against it are so grave that some people can be thrown out of the national community. If anything counts, surely terrorism does. And it's in keeping with the Enlightenment view of the nation as a social contract — if you break the contract, you can be removed from it.

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Many on the left objected for the following reason: Some people would be left stateless, which they said was unconscionable. This is despite the fact that it would have only applied to those with dual nationalities.

In France, under article 89 of the Constitution, a revision requires a vote of each house of Parliament, followed by a three-fifth vote of the Congress, which is a session of both houses together. After France's conservatives allied with left-wing rebels in the French Senate to vote down the measure, Hollande concluded he didn't have the votes and canceled his planned constitutional amendment, blaming partisanship.

To say that this is a political humiliation is an understatement. It was his big response to the biggest terrorist calamity in French history, and it now lies in ruins. To push the measure through he angered half of his own side. His justice minister, highly popular with the left for her role in shepherding France's same-sex marriage bill in the face of mass protests, resigned in protest, leaving the door open to a primary challenge against Hollande. And he got nothing in return.

This is the latest in a long line of political defeats for a politician who has always seemed like the wrong man at the wrong time in the wrong job. Hollande only squeaked through a win against former French President Nicolas Sarkozy in a runoff, even though the incumbent was personally unpopular and the election took place in the pit of the euro crisis. Hollande then went on to appoint an incompetent prime minister and sheepishly accede to German demands to budget austerity, crushing the French economy even further. This was accomplished mostly through tax increases and accounting shenanigans, which left the country in the strange predicament of featuring both austerity measures and runaway spending, which now stands at an incredible 57 percent of GDP. Hollande had named his cabinet based on political considerations alone, handing out jobs to each faction of the French left, putting moderates and radicals together on the same team, and never adjudicating disputes, leaving them to work their grievances through the media.

In the end, Hollande did appoint the reformist and determined Manuel Valls as prime minister. Valls has been determined to push through an agenda that, on crime, immigration and regulatory reform, puts Hollande's government to the right of the Sarkozy administration. Those reforms may end up succeeding, but Hollande has angered at least half of his party, without seeing any surge in popularity from the right, which views him as incompetent and untrustworthy. Not exactly masterful Clintonian triangulation.

Beyond policy, the Hollande administration seems to be permanently improvising, focused only on soundbites for the latest news cycle or poll. Recently, Hollande secretly awarded the Legion of Honor, France's highest award, to Saudi Arabia's crown prince. When the Saudi government put out a press release about the award, the French press erupted in fury, both over the bestowal of the award to the heir of one of the most brutal, reactionary regimes on Earth and for the coverup. Beyond the merits, the fracas was classic Hollande in its combination of incompetence and disregard for principle. If you're going to give out an award secretly, then maybe make sure the other guys don't put out a press release? (And what, pray tell, is the point of a secret award?)

Thus with a small matter, and thus with the Constitution. Hollande will finish his term in 2017. If one thing is certain, it's that countless Frenchmen are impatient to see the back of him.