The most unlikely bestseller in France last year was not the winner of the Prix Goncourt by the nihilist Michel Houellebecq nor indeed something by the usual literary heavyweights. Most intriguingly, it was not really a book at all but rather an old-fashioned sort of pamphlet entitled Indignez-Vous!, which, priced at three Euros, sold an unprecedented 650,000 copies in a few months.

The text, by a 93-year-old Frenchman of German-Jewish origin, is effectively a polemic and a call to arms against a variety of injustices that, the author claims, are currently plaguing the French people. Amazingly, in the age of Facebook and Kindle, this ‘book’ became a word-of-mouth success, and