No, imo, it does not make sense to argue that Krugman's fiscal advice was right for France and the Eurozone in the 2010s. Those large deficits in the 2010s set the stage for today's looming fiscal crisis. The high debt/gdp ratio today is the footprint of all those large deficits, in spite of the French government's low funding costs at the zero lower bound in the 2010s. Those large deficits certainly did not spur enough growth for France to simply grow out of the high debt/gdp ratio, contrary to what was advertised. Economists who were attacking "Eurozone austerity" in the 2010s should have realized that once the ECB stopped buying government bonds on a massive scale, the debt would be marked-to-market and bond yields might spike. That's exactly what's happening. All of the extra fiscal capacity is gone. And there is little spending room left for the core functions of the state (defense, education), which is crowded out by the growing interest expense and transfer payments (including pensions). Below I plot the net supply of French government bonds to be absorbed by the market (defined as net issuance minus Eurosystem/ECB purchases). Those are the bars. Look at the red bars. Real yields were low when the ECB was buying more than issuance. In any case, the fiscal lesson is that yields in bond markets jump, but the debt/gdp ratio is a slow-moving variable.