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, 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 morosite of a grumpy Frenchman, would I contemplate returning to work. I had gone native: I didn’t live to work, but worked to live. And live well.
France, when I worked there, seemed a marvellous place. The Protestant work ethic had been refused a work permit and, one occasionally had a sense that this decadence had something of the last days of the Roman Empire about it. 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. 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 are increasingly and understandably seething about the inequalities of Gallic society.)
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. The poorest French parents can send their children to a state-run creche from 8.30am to 6.30pm for free.
True, the French pay for such services with high rates of direct tax and the state sector does seem to be populated with people who do not do very much, but the fact that the French have chosen such a civilised, civilising state over the barbarities of the United States, and delivered good public services with a quality that shames the British, 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 men and women from ethnic minorities.
But the biggest difference of all between France and l’outre-Manche (the UK) or l’outre-Atlantique (the US) remains the pursuit of sensual pleasure, a thing that the Anglo-Saxon business model seems to have foolishly ignored.
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 George W 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 Elysee last 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.
“It worries me that the first people to congratulate Sarkozy were Bush and Blair,” says Agnes Poirier, a French journalist who divides her time between London and Paris, and whose book Le Modele Anglais, Une Illusion Francaise (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.
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 regime. 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 happened to their country, that la gloire francaise 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 cellphone 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.”
In seeking to make France great again Sarkozy must not make France Anglo-Saxon. He must realise that the Anglo-Saxon system would destroy everything that France stands for, says Poirier.
“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 …”
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 (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 in the second round of the 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 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.”
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 … And many would like to linger in their past and make all the foreigners go away.” — Â