At the core of Nicolas Sarkozy's campaign to be President of France last year was one strikingly counter-intuitive hunch. Conventional wisdom, across the French political spectrum, held that the country was so allergic to reform that to promise or attempt it was political suicide.

Quite the contrary, Sarkozy retorted: if only politicians could come up with and - importantly - take the trouble to explain credible ways to modernise France, they would find that the French were “impatient” for change so profound that it would amount to a “rupture” with the past.

He won big time - then spent the next few months testing French patience to the limit. The man who had waxed eloquent on the family, individual responsibility and “restoring the value of work” morphed into what we in Britain might call “a Page 3 president”.

He generated endless copy about his whirlwind courtship of Carla Bruni, flashy sartorial style and taste for high living, and little or none - other than for high-profile pledges of old-think state intervention to save this or that threatened factory - on the political and economic pages. His popularity did not just fall, it all but withered away. It is unlikely to recover soon. Sarkozy promised to revive purchasing power, but family budgets are more stretched than ever by higher petrol and food prices; he said that France would become richer if people worked harder, but it is limping towards recession and unemployment is back on the rise.

Yet just when he had been written off as a lightweight - perhaps precisely because he had been written off - Sarkozy the radical has made a dramatic reappearance. In a few weeks this summer, in volley after legislative volley, he has taken aim at some of the most sacred cows in French social and economic life. If he keeps up this pace, he will indeed change the face of France.

The keystone is a law making it easier to set up in business, cutting red tape, freeing up the commercial sector by allowing retailers to negotiate directly with suppliers - which, incredibly, French law proscribed - and creating an independent competition authority. More flexible job contracts have been introduced to free up the labour market, and benefits curbed for jobseekers who reject more than two “reasonable” offers of work.

To tackle the huge pensions deficit, retirement age is to be raised by a year - explosive in a country where successive governments failed even to abolish unfair pension privileges for public sector workers. Sarkozy succeeded only after toughing out a nine-day transport strike. He has risked student mayhem by allowing universities more freedom not just to raise private research capital, but to choose which students to admit. He has even announced the privatisation of the ports, risking a French rerun of the British dock strikes. Sarkozy has also taken aim at the structure of the State. He is (cautiously) trimming the bureaucracy and (boldly) overhauling the military by axeing bases, cutting its strength by a fifth and shifting spending from support services to the front line - an open challenge to hardcore Gaullists suspicious of their President's rapprochement with America.

Then, last week, in a High Noon confrontation at the National Assembly he won by a single (defecting Socialist) vote constitutional reforms that limit the presidency to two consecutive terms and give parliament additional powers. Rubbing salt in the Socialists' wounds, parliament reformed the 35-hour week, effectively burying it by allowing firms to negotiate their own working-week ceilings. That may seem modest, even timid; but the implications are anything but. It strikes a sideways blow at the core of union power in France: the unions' lock grip on industry-wide collective bargaining. So why, instead of being rocked by the mother of all street protests, is France uneerily calm? Union leaders are muttering about autumn storms, but have decided to go on holiday first. Again, why? Maybe because, in the June “day of action” against scrapping the 35-hour limit in June, no one much seemed to care: even in the militant public sector, fewer than 5 per cent answered the strike call.

Maybe Sarkozy has hit them with so many reforms at once that they cannot agree what to attack. Maybe because, early on, he cajoled transport union leaders to accept a law requiring “minimum service” in strikes - a law he then promised to extend to teachers, thus pleasing parents. It is now harder to paralyse France.

Another factor is that the Socialist opposition is not merely rudderless; the crew is ripping up the ship's planks for bludgeons. But possibly it is dawning on France's traditional spoilers, accustomed to being cheered whenever they raise Cain, that they have lost the plot. Voters are still browned off with Sarkozy. But they support the reforms. According to opinion polls, they even want them speeded up. Sarkozy has made blunders galore and it is in his character to commit more. But if he proves right about the will to change, these will be footnotes to a great, if eccentric, reforming presidency.

Rosemary Righter is associate editor of The Times

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