The abdication of a French president is no small deal. Charles de Gaulle, the hero of the French resistance, reformed the Constitution in 1958 to turn a formerly weak office into a supreme one, investing the presidency with the power and symbolism once associated with kings and popes.
Then he took the job himself, restoring unity and pride to a France demoralized and divided by colonial wars and unstable governments. Ever since, a country with a long and bloody history of popular and religious revolt has looked to its president to hold a fractious republic together.
None has failed as miserably at this task as François Hollande. The accidental leader French voters elected in 2012 out of fatigue with Nicolas Sarkozy's histrionics and nouveau riche tastes, Mr. Hollande promised to be a "normal" president. Fate and personality made him anything but.
Mr. Hollande's personal life has been messy. His ex-wife Ségolène Royal, who ran unsuccessfully against Mr. Sarkozy in 2007, engaged in a public feud with Mr. Hollande's long-time girlfriend Valérie Trierweiler – until he betrayed the latter with a young actress. Ms. Trierweiler wrote a tell-all book that depicted her ex as a snob who made condescending comments about the poor. The revelation in October that Mr. Hollande dined regularly with two Le Monde journalists and spoke disparagingly about almost everyone turned even his dwindling allies against him.
Mr. Hollande was hardly the first French president to have had a mistress. But his hapless management of his personal affairs became a metaphor for his presidential leadership.
Mr. Hollande, a Socialist who took office amid a continental debt crisis, was forced by the markets and European Union to pursue austerity policies that sent unemployment higher. His base considered it an unpardonable betrayal. A prominent leftist cabinet minister resigned in protest and began a campaign to oust Mr. Hollande in the 2017 presidential race.
He was not the only one. Sensing a sinking ship, Emmanuel Macron, a brilliant former investment banker and the architect of Mr. Hollande's economic and labour market reforms, also quit the cabinet last summer after launching his own centrist political movement to test the presidential waters.
On the cruellest test of his leadership, healing the country in the wake of repeated terrorist attacks that would have rocked any presidency, Mr. Hollande has lacked the necessary resolve. Unable to unite his own party over how to tackle radical Islam – he pushed for, then retracted, a proposal to strip convicted terrorists of their French citizenship – he focused on fighting IS abroad. But French voters remain far more preoccupied with the Islamic threat from within.
To his credit, Mr. Hollande was an early and indefatigable proponent of Western intervention in Iraq and Syria to combat Islamic State. He also sent troops to Mali to prevent IS from taking over the former French colony and remained a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin's lawless expansionism into Ukraine and military action to bolster Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.
Not that it mattered domestically. By the time a poll this week showed him capturing a humiliating 7.5 per cent of the vote in the first round of next spring's presidential election, it was clear Mr. Hollande faced a humbling choice – announce now he would not run for a second term or endure a bitter Socialist primary he would probably lose.
"As a socialist, because that is my life's undertaking, I cannot accept, I cannot resign myself, to the very dispersal of the left, its shattering, because that would deprive it of any hope of winning in the face of conservatism, or worse still, extremism," a subdued President told his people in a televised address on Thursday night.
His incredible and inevitable abdication does provide some hope for those on the centre-left that either Mr. Macron or Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls can now mount a credible challenge to Republicans' François Fillon and Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front.
Should neither Mr. Macron nor Mr. Valls succeed in bumping Mr. Fillon or Ms. Le Pen off the second and final presidential ballot, the French will choose next May between a strict social conservative and an anti-immigration crusader, each of whom would align foreign policy to suit Mr. Putin and reconsider, to the point of ending, France's membership in the European Union.
Such is the crossroads at which Mr. Hollande's failed presidency has left de Gaulle's republic.
Konrad Yakabuski