To mark the election of Francois Hollande as the second socialist president of France, we went to our closet and retrieved the Motsch Fils. It’s the finest hat we’ve ever owned, a supple brown fedora that is “garanti pur castor,” which is French palaver for guaranteed pure beaver. It is in the nature of beaver that it is so durable that, well, we’re still using the hat more than 25 years after we purchased it. The reason we retrieved it from the Sun’s hat rack today is that we could never have afforded it were it not for the election of Francois Mitterrand as the first socialist president of France.

The elevation of Mitterrand to the Elysee Palace precipitated a collapse in the value of the franc to the nadir at which we, a young foreign correspondent in Europe in the mid-1980s, were finally able to afford the finest of hats. We’d spotted it at the Motsch shop at 42 Avenue Georges V at Paris. The hat was priced at the once towering sum of 1,100 francs. But when we proffered a Reagan-era portrait of Benjamin Franklin, the man at Motsch responded, “Mais, oui,” and we walked out with our hat at what may yet stand as a record exchange rate.

Of course, those were the days when there was a franc. Measuring the collapse of France that is likely to be precipitated by the accession of Mr. Hollande is going to be more difficult now that there is no franc. The French government stopped redeeming the scrip once and for all earlier this year, and commerce is conducted in a marker called the euro. So it will be more difficult to separate out the failures of France from the rest of Europe. That will take place only over time. It will also be more difficult to separate out the successes of the other European countries, if there are successes.

There are no doubt those who will suggest that this socializing effect is the whole idea of the euro. But it has been able to survive as a construct mainly because we are in the era of fiat currencies and the dollar itself has no legal definition, either. It is hard to make a whole lot out of the collapse of the euro if the dollar has also collapsed. Nor can one say a whole lot about the future of the communist Chinese yuan. It is going to be hard to get a true picture of national strategies of political economy until there is a restoration, at least somewhere, of sound money.

DeGaulle understood this, a point we marked in an editorial last year recalling how the founder of the Fifth Republic once gathered 1,000 newspapermen into a press conference at the Elysee palace and called for a restoration of the international gold standard. Our own hope for President Sarkozy was that he might have hearkened to the Gaullist call for the gold standard as providing not only a way for France to lead but a standard that would allow smaller countries to find the same footing as larger ones.

Alas, in the end Monsieur Sarkozy proved not up to the task, and the possibility that he might pull off an upset victory — sketched by our erstwhile man in Paris, Michel Gurfinkiel — proved unattainable. So let us offer a tip of the Motsch Fils to the president-elect de la republique. It is a moment to remember that if the dollar and the euro are at the end of their days, one of the earliest and most durable currencies was the pelt of the beaver itself. If Mr. Hollande has any interest, we can point him to a suitable shop.