Fourteen hours. That’s how long French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu’s government lasted. Nominated only two weeks ago to form a new government, it would be unfair to describe him as anything more than a victim of France’s deepening political crisis. He is the third prime minister in two years – after François Bayrou and Michel Barnier – who has been incapable of overcoming France’s toxic political culture. Faced with significant deficits, sluggish growth, and geopolitical pressures, one could have hoped that French parliamentarians would have learned to work together to find common-ground solutions. But the last few years have revealed the exact opposite, laying bare the rot at the core of French politics.

For many, the current stalemate can be explained by the Fifth Republic’s un-parliamentarian nature. They are, to an extent, correct: the Fifth Republic was built to govern, not deliberate. One minister under Emmanuel Macron’s first presidency even went as far as saying that the role of a ruling-party MP is simply to ‘vote and (…) and to shut the f*** up’ (fermer sa gueule). But that explanation is incomplete and short-sighted.

The Fifth Republic was designed against decades of political volatility under two different parliamentary systems: the Third (1870-1940) and Fourth (1946-58) Republics. The Third Republic saw 101 cabinets and the Fourth 24, essentially due to parliamentary instability. From a historical perspective, France’s current volatility is not a unique outlier but, in fact, in line with national traditions. The source of the country’s struggles with parliamentary politics is far more profound than can be captured by debates about institutional arrangements.

In truth, French politics has long been driven by a spirit of confrontation rather than compromise. The French Revolution is the first of many revolutions and riots that have both enriched and plagued the country. As the French sociologist Loic Blondiaux recently explained, ‘in France, compromise is often considered a weakness’. French PM Lecornu even explained in his resignation speech: ‘I found myself in a situation where I was ready to make compromises, but each political party wants the other to adopt its entire programme.’

At the root of this culture of confrontation is France’s foundational political trait. It is a country smitten with ideology, one that prefers ideas to reality. It sometimes seems that France’s political elite feels more accountable to its intellectual elite than to its ordinary citizens. The origin of this mindset is longstanding: the French Revolution substituted one clerical class – the Catholic Church – with another – the Enlightenment intellectuals. But while the Catholic clergy pursued salvation in the next life, intellectuals wanted to remake the world in this one. The French Revolution, unlike the American Revolution, sought much less to reform the country than to create a new humanity.

Intellectuals do not generally aspire to engage with ordinary people; they prefer imagining them as simplified abstractions arranged within their preferred ‘isms’. As brilliantly shown in a recent book by Samuel Fitoussi Pourquoi les intellectuels se trompent (‘Why Intellectuals Fail’), they are often more prone to mistakes than the average citizen. They will commit to their ideas to the point of absurdity – either to increase their social standing among their intellectual peers or to validate at all costs their, rarely empirically established, theories.

Many French intellectuals denied Stalin’s and Mao’s atrocities until the very end of the 1980s. Even travelling to these countries did not help: when Simone de Beauvoir returned from a trip to Mao’s China in the 1950s, she published a 500-page book glorifying Maoism, stating that under the regime ‘freedom is a very concrete reality’.

With their clout over France still uncontested, it is not hard to see its corrosive effects on contemporary French politics. Politicians understand politics through the lens of neat ideologies, rather than as a complex field of conflicting interests. French democracy becomes a blank slate on which to impose one’s grand intellectual grand plan rather than a difficult but necessary process of dialogue and compromise.

No wonder that political parties have been unable to work with one another. Politicians, especially the country’s presidents, view themselves as the guardians of larger ideals that far surpass petty parliamentary discussions – their politics is one that aspires to remodel the country. Compromise can at best look like ignorance, or at worst like a betrayal of these ideals.

Alexis de Tocqueville once described France as ‘the most brilliant and dangerous nation in Europe, more capable of genius than common sense’. Tocqueville’s quote is prophetic in describing France’s present crisis. The country’s recent intellectuals have had a marked influence over global thought, as shown by the many students swearing – sometimes religiously – by Foucault’s theory of power relations or Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction. The contrast between this intellectual influence abroad and France’s inability to reach even the most basic political solution at home is, frankly, embarrassing. More than institutional rewiring, France needs to transform its political culture, away from grandiose ideals and toward common sense.

French politicians have over centuries been consumed by ideas and intellectual thought. Though many, myself included, feel indebted to my country’s prestigious intellectual culture, we cannot ignore its role in fostering a politics allergic to compromise. As the past few weeks have shown, French politicians prefer ideological purity over the impure and messy reality of politics. If they are to ever manage working with one another to tackle France’s many ills, they must ask themselves what they would rather sacrifice: their ideals or the French people.