Students of the Labor Party will enjoy a story from Monday’s Guardian about factional warfare in the French Socialist Party. Its annual summer school has put the full range of ideologies on display, from pro-market reformism to unreconstructed Marxism.

There’s a strong thread of British (and specifically Blairite) one-upmanship in the article. Imagine the glee with which they cite this quote from the Socialist mayor of Mulhouse: “We’re still debating Marxist ideology, for God’s sake. Blame it on 30 years of intellectual laziness, and the arrogance born of the assumption that France will always and automatically lead the way in progressive politics.”

Nonetheless, the Socialists have got a real problem. Deep divisions over the EU constitution are just a reflection of more basic differences. Although its factions are similarly Byzantine, the ALP, like most other social-democratic parties, has come to accept the market system. But the French still have their holdouts. As one of them said, “We will never accept that the market knows better than the state”. Former president François Mitterrand was able to drag them some distance towards modernity, but since then no-one has had the standing to impose a coherent line.

The flip side of the Socialists’ problems is that the French Liberals, the UDF, are moving away from their historic role as loyal sidekick to the centre-right UMP (as Le Monde reports in French). UDF leaders are throwing out hints of co-operation with some elements of the Socialist Party, which might just add to the latter’s disunity.

Like Australia, France for many years has had a rigid, class-based party system, left vs right with very little in between. If they can change, maybe we can as well.