A deeply wounded, impoverished and divided Europe began to come back together after two world wars around the French-German reconciliation in the early 1950s. That epochal event eventually became the foundation of the European economic and political union — a 60-year old work-in-progress.
During most of that time, Germany was taken as the paragon of economic and political stability — a critically important counterweight to France's notoriously volatile body politic.
Those two countries made a deal — French agriculture in exchange for the free pass to Germany's powerful manufacturing industries — in order to move the European project forward. The deal still holds, but that uneasy alliance stumbled upon major difficulties posed by the last financial crisis, because Berlin and Paris have always been worlds apart in the way they could handle their fundamental economic, social and political challenges.
Despite efforts to keep the appearances, the ever fragile bilateral relationship began to fray ten years ago. France simply could not keep up with the discipline of public finances and income policies dictated by German taskmasters seeking an unconditional "schwarze Null," literally "black zero" (balanced) budgets — with a surplus bias.