Goodbye to la belle France?
The French seem to have the perfect lifestyle: long lunches, short hours, great food and plenty of ooh-la-la. But their new president is determined to make them work harder, faster, more efficiently - just like the British and Americans. Merde alors, says Stuart Jeffries
Enjoying it while they can - Sarkozy threatens an end to short weeks and long lunches. Photograph: AP
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Monday May 28 2007
We said in the article below that there is no minimum wage in the state of Alabama. While that is true, the federal minimum of $5.15 applies
It was perhaps the second glass of wine that did it. That, or the dessert of millefeuille aux poires. Or it could have been the blanquette, the bourguignon, the pot-au-feu or whatever Le Firmament in the Rue 4 Septembre in Paris's second arrondissement was offering as the day's special. Whatever. After lunch, I would stroll back to my office, shadowing my eyes from the 3.30pm sun, nod off at my desk over the lunchtime edition of Le Monde, to be awoken by my own snoring. Only then, with the proper morosité of a grumpy Frenchman, would I contemplate returning to work. Unless Nicolas from the economics agency across the courtyard came round and asked if I wanted to have a quick beer, which I often did. I had gone native: I didn't live to work, but worked to live. And live well.
France, when I worked there at the turn of the millennium, seemed a marvellous place. The Protestant work ethic had been refused a work permit and, if one occasionally had a sense that this decadence had something of the last days of the Roman Empire about it, no matter: this was the way to live. Certainly, if you were middle class and in a secure job, the country had it all. It remains substantially the same. There is still the 35-hour week, for a start, even if new president Nicolas Sarkozy has derided it as a "general catastrophe for the French economy".
There is something called making "le pont", which means that if a national holiday falls in the middle of the week, French workers will take off enough days before or after it to extend it all the way to the nearest weekend. Not since Edward Heath's three-day week have the British managed to work so little. And there is none of this American rubbish of two weeks' leave a year in France either: Paris, in particular, is massively depopulated from Bastille Day (July 14) until September as the French head off for at least two months of well-earned eating, drinking, romancing and dozing.
(Of course, to get from Paris's chic arrondissements to the "autoroute du soleil", the Midi and their second homes, those Parisians drive past the horrible flats of the poor citizens of the French capital's banlieues, past people who cannot afford such refined pleasures and are increasingly and understandably seething about the inequalities of Gallic society - but let's not spoil the story.)
Then there are the extraordinary public services. Not only does France have the fastest and most efficient trains in the world, but a system of means-tested state childcare that even today makes me green with envy. The poorest French parents can send their children to a state-run creche from 8.30am to 6.30pm for free, while colleagues on similar salaries to mine send their two toddlers to a creche at a cost of €800 (£500) a month, which is inconceivable in Britain. Partly as a result of this humane system, not only does France have one of the highest birthrates in western Europe but also one of the highest proportion of women in the workforce. In France, too, you can cheerfully send your child to the nearest state school without poring over school league tables and boring all your friends with your grasp of the relevant Ofsted report.
True, the French pay for such services with higher rates of direct tax than the British electorate appears to tolerate, and the state sector does seem to be populated with people who do not do very much (yet do it very fragrantly), but the fact that the French have chosen such a civilised, civilising state over the barbarities of the US, and delivered good public services with a quality that shames their British equivalents, only shows their commitment to making the revolutionary values of liberty, equality and fraternity real. Or, at least, so it seems if you can blind yourself to the massive problems of unemployment among young people and the poverty and alienation of those French men and women from ethnic minorities.
When I worked in Paris, French men who were better groomed than I would ever be would tell me that they ate better, drank better and made love better than I, le pauvre anglais, ever would. And, of course, they were right. They were also more arrogant and considered it their right to drive wildly while drunk. But I forgave them at least the former.
The biggest difference of all between France and l'outre-Manche (ie the UK) or l'outre-Atlantique (ie the US) remains the pursuit of sensual pleasure, a thing that the Anglo-Saxon business model seems to have foolishly ignored. True, it is the American constitution that makes formalistic reference to the "pursuit of happiness", but it is the French nation that concentrates, and substantially, on pursuing pleasure and then savouring it properly. They do not need to be reminded by their constitution that they have a right to do so.
That cultivation of pleasure, so exotic for us and so contrary to how we live in our ill-dressed, ill-groomed, fast-food fetishising, sexually incompetent, binge-drinking culture, is why so many foreigners are seduced by France. In her new book French Seduction, the Paris-dwelling American art historian Eunice Lipton eulogises the sensual delights of French food: "In markets, indoors and out, peaches, pears, apples, roasting chickens, barbecuing pork, silver, white, red, and blue fish from all the rivers and seas of France, heave themselves at you. Flowers of every size and colour dare you to touch them, bury your head in them. Sour and intimate aromas thicken the air in the cheese shop, as ancient odours of churning milk come strangely close to bodily smells." She couldn't have written those words about any Anglo-Saxon country.
To do the bounty of France's agricultural production justice, you would need to spend time savouring it. And the French do; what's more, they regularly tell the rest of the world that this is how one ought to take ones' pleasures. The same applies to sex. Virginie Ledret, a London-based journalist, whose book Les Pintades à Londres is an affectionate study of the tastes of young women in the British capital, concludes that her English friends don't know how to do it properly: "They make love à la hussarde [hell for leather]. It'll have to be explained to them it doesn't have to be that way." Possibly in a series of remedial illustrated lectures at the Institut Français.
It is this France, so beloved and reviled by outsiders, that Sarkozy, if we are to believe his rhetoric, is going to abolish. The horrifying prospect is that the French, so eminently hateable and enviable for producing the world's most calorific food and yet remaining thin, for being so chic that they make even the most put-together Anglo-Saxons look like sacks of spanners, for selling arms to dodgy regimes and then piously criticising Bush's "coalition of the willing" on - the gall! - moral grounds, will throw away the things that make them special for that most boring thing: economic productivity. After his election to the Elysée on Sunday, Sarko, sounding not so much like a Frenchman as a joyless Puritan stepping off the Mayflower, grimly announced: "The French people have decided to break with the ideas, behaviour and habits of the past. I will rehabilitate work, merit and morals." Nicolas, baby, please don't! Please don't take the belle out of la belle France. Please don't make yourselves like us. You won't like it.
We love you amoral philandering Frenchies who don't bend the knee to the Protestant work ethic with all its grisly ramifications. Today, my lunch was last night's pasta eaten from a Tupperware container at my desk. Tinned tuna. Sorry-looking capers. Ancient olives. Look at this dismal box filled with la malbouffe anglaise [crap English food], Sarko. I didn't even have time for a post-prandial bit of how's your father or bob's your uncle, still less a decent haircut. Is this what you want for France? Because if you imitate le monde anglo-saxon, monsieur le président, that's what's going to happen.
"It worries me that the first people to congratulate Sarkozy were Bush and Blair," says Agnès Poirier, a French journalist who divides her time between London and Paris, and whose book Le Modèle Anglais, Une Illusion Française (The English model, a French Illusion) derides the notion that Sarkozy will serve France well by copying the UK or the US. "These people shouldn't be his friends or his inspirations. But they are."
Indeed, Poirier's book could be useful holiday reading for Sarkozy as he holidays en famille on Malta before starting work next week, unleashing what some fear could be a second French revolution - one that will shake the country out of its dogmatic slumbers and into a grisly new world, where coffee is not savoured at pavement tables while making sexy chit chat, as it should be, but sucked from drink-through lids as you race from one job to another, possibly shoving a horribly cooked burger down your gob as you do so.
Poirier points out that in the 1720s, the French philosopher Voltaire exiled himself in Britain and found a dynamic, innovative society that juxtaposed itself suggestively with France's crumbling ancien regime. If only the French had adopted our business model in 1785, the tumbrils might have not seen so much action in the ensuing decades. She points out that today many French people, Sarko included, think as Voltaire did then: that France must reform itself along British lines in order to remain afloat.
Poirier agrees with Lipton that the French are bitterly upset by what has happened to their country, that la gloire française has lost its lustre. "The French can't understand what's happened," writes Lipton. "They used to have the best country in the world. Now you can't get a DSL line installed in less than three weeks or a new chip for your cell phone in less than two. They never noticed things like this before or cared, but now they know it's faster in London or the United States or Germany. Or India! France is falling behind."
But Poirier counsels that the French must not throw the baby out with the bath water: in seeking to make France great again, to speed up its broadband links, make it compete with India, and all the dismal-sounding things it must do if it is to become economically successful, Sarkozy must not make France Anglo-Saxon. He must realise that the Anglo-Saxon system would destroy everything that France stands for, says Poirier. "That system is not just economic. To adopt it would destroy our manner of looking, of eating, of thinking, of even loving, ultimately in a way that would touch France's soul. Sometimes for the better, mostly for the worse.
"Doing so would produce a France that was fundamentally unjust, one that is divided between the rich and the poor in a way that is anti-French. The point about France, since the revolution, is that it has been a kinder society than Britain or the US, one that looks after its citizens, especially the pensioners and other vulnerable members of our society. Destroying that republican model, as I fear Sarkozy wants to do, will destroy what makes us unique and makes some people admire us. Not only that, it would destroy the society that made him, as a man from an immigrant family, possible. It would kick away the ladder he climbed."
Indeed, this is a common post-electoral refrain to be found among French columnists this week: Sarkozy will create a country as inegalitarian as the US or the UK, where class divisions are more sclerotic than ever.
What is especially fascinating about the results of the French presidential election is that it is the relatively comfortable old rather than the uncertain and afraid young who voted for Sarkozy's revolution. The so-called internet generation of 18- to 24-year-olds voted 58% for the socialist candidate Ségolène Royal, while Sarkozy benefited from what some commentators have described as a "wrinkly landslide": 61% of voters in their 60s and 68% of the over-70s chose Sarko over Sego in the second round of the presidential election.
What this reveals is a marvellous example of Gallic hypocrisy: those older French people on good pensions after secure careers in well-remunerated, possibly public, posts, many of them, no doubt the soixante-huitards [veterans of the 1968 riots] whose radicalism is as unimpeachable as it is venerable, sought to encourage young French people to expose themselves to what they never face - the chill winds of job insecurity and cuts in public services.
Whether Sarkozy has the bottle to do these things remains to be seen. "He said he would get rid of the 35-hour week, and then [shortly before the election] he said he won't," says Stephen Clarke, francophile Englishman and author of A Year in the Merde and Talk to the Snail. And there is a very good economic reason for that. "If you cut an Englishman's working week to 35 hours, he would spend the additional free time flying to Bulgaria on an Irish jet. But the same thing in France means that a Frenchman will drive in a French car or travel on a French train to spend his leisure time in France. The money stays in France.
"France never changes," argues Clarke. "If Sarkozy decides to take on the unions he will face strikes. If he takes on the farmers, he will be a fool. He won't do any of these things, partly because he was in the last administration. It's all just rhetoric, designed to make him as much of an international star as Bush or Blair. That's what Sarkozy really wants."
But what of the threat of more riots among those who think that Sarko's promises offer nothing to them? What about all those burning cars? "Again, French people buy French," says Clarke. "Peugeot and Renault ought to be very happy when they see burning cars. It means that their sales are going to go up, which is good for the economy."
But what of those alienated graduates? According to a survey conducted by the Centre for Research on Education, Training and Employment (Cereq), of 25,000 young people who left education in 2001, 11% of graduates were unemployed in 2007. Unemployment was even higher - 19% - among those without a degree. "That is the main problem: young people can't get a decent job. That's why they rioted against the reform for the new contract for first jobs. But the moral is this: they rioted and the government backed down. That is what always happens in France and Sarkozy won't change it." What is their future under Sarkozy? "They'll probably go to London like they do now. I don't see any signs he going to do anything real."
In this, Sarkozy may be wise - if he seeks to remain popular and to have a sympathetic parliament in June's parliamentary elections. Lipton suggests that the French do not want too much change. "The French certainly don't want to be like the British or the Americans. Political differences among the French evaporate in their shared abhorrence of the liberal economies of Anglo-Saxon countries. Not to mention their condescension toward their taste. The French treasure their orchards and vineyards, their Bresse chickens and Charolais cows. And many would like to linger in their past and make all the foreigners go away."
But there is more at stake than that. France needs to exist as it does now as an inspiration for the Anglo-Saxons as to how we might live better. If France did not exist, the British and Americans would have to invent her (of course, we would be temperamentally incapable of doing so). If France stops being different from us, we might as well fill up the Channel Tunnel and stop dreaming of long lunches, longer weekends and affairs that have nothing to do with business: we won't need to go there any more because it will be just like here.
"That is right, and that is one of the reasons Sarkozy must be cautious," says Poirier. "We are different and that's great. Let's keep it that way".
America v France
How the two countries compare
Population
US: 301m. France: 61m
Life expectancy
US: male 75.15 years, female 80.97 years.
France: male 77.35 years, female 84 years
Median age
US: 36.6 years. France: 39 years
Working week
US: approx 46 hours. France: usually 35 hours
Population living below the poverty line (for two adults and one child)
US: 12%. France: 6.2%
Minimum wage
US: varies widely from state to state - no such thing in Alabama. France: €8.27
Usual retirement age
US: 65-67. France: 60
Prison population
US: 2 million plus. France: 50,500 plus
Number of murders a year
US: 16,692. France: approx 1,000
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