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France faces the future.

March 30th 2006

“THE French constitute the most brilliant and the most dangerous nation in Europe and the best
qualified in turn to become an object of admiration, hatred, pity or terror but never indifference.”
Thus did a young Alexis de Tocqueville describe his motherland in the early 19th century. His
words still carry a haunting truth. Over the past few years, as other western democracies have
shuffled quietly along, France has by turns stunned, exasperated and bemused. This week's massive
one-day protest, drawing 1m-3m people on to the streets, was no exception (see article). This
particular stand-off, between the centre-right government of Dominique de Villepin and those
protesting against his effort to inject a tiny bit of liberalism into France's rigid labour market, may
be defused. The Constitutional Council was due to rule on the legality of the new law on March
30th. But the underlying difficulty will remain: the apparent incapacity of the French to adapt to a
changing world.
On the face of it, France seems to be going through one of those convulsions that this nation born of
revolution periodically requires in order to break with the past and to move forward. Certainly the
students who kicked off the latest protests seemed to think they were re-enacting the events of May
1968 their parents sprang on Charles de Gaulle. They have borrowed its slogans (“Beneath the
cobblestones, the beach!”) and hijacked its symbols (the Sorbonne university). In this sense, the
revolt appears to be the natural sequel to last autumn's suburban riots, which prompted the
government to impose a state of emergency. Then it was the jobless, ethnic underclass that rebelled
against a system that excluded them.
Yet the striking feature of the latest protest movement is that this time the rebellious forces are on
the side of conservatism. Unlike the rioting youths in the banlieues, the objective of the students
and public-sector trade unions is to prevent change, and to keep France the way it is. Indeed,
according to one astonishing poll, three-quarters of young French people today would like to
become civil servants, and mostly because that would mean “a job for life”. Buried inside this
chilling lack of ambition are one delusion and one crippling myth.
The delusion is that preserving France as it is, in some sort of formaldehyde solution, means
preserving jobs for life. Students, as well as unqualified suburban youngsters, do not today face a
choice between the new, less protected work contract and a lifelong perch in the bureaucracy. They,
by and large, face a choice between already unprotected short-term work and no work at all. And
the reason for this, which is also the reason for France's intractable mass unemployment of nearly
10%, is simple: those permanent life-time jobs are so protected, and hence so difficult to get rid of,
that many employers are not creating them any more.
This delusion is accompanied by an equally pernicious myth: that France has more to fear from
globalisation, widely held responsible for imposing the sort of insecurity enshrined in the new job
contract, than it does to gain. It is true that the forces of global capitalism are not always benign, but
nobody has yet found a better way of creating and spreading prosperity. In another startling poll,
however, whereas 71% of Americans, 66% of the British and 65% of Germans agreed that the free
market was the best system available, the number in France was just 36%. The French seem to be
uniquely hostile to the capitalist system that has made them the world's fifth richest country and
generated so many first-rate French companies. This hostility appears to go deeper than resistance
to painful reform, which is common to Italy and Germany too; or than a desire for a strong welfare
state, which Scandinavian countries share; or even than a fondness for protectionism, which
America periodically betrays.

The limits to change by stealth

A common feature unites France's underclass rioters and the rebellious students, as well as the
election of the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen into the run-off of the 2002 presidential election. This is
the failure of the French political class over the past 20 years to tell it straight: to explain to the
electorate what is at stake, why France needs to adapt, and why change need not bring only
discomfort. This failure has bred a political culture of reform by stealth, in which change is carried
out with one hand and blamed on outside forces—usually globalisation, the European Union or
America—while soothing words about protecting the French way are issued on the other. After a
while, the credibility gap tears such a system apart. The French voted for Mr Le Pen in part because
they were fed up with the stale mainstream political class. The banlieues exploded because
unemployed minorities were fed up hearing that they did not belong. The students and trade unions
are in revolt because they do not trust the government to protect them.
Part of the blame for this lies squarely with President Jacques Chirac. He has presided for nearly 11
years, during which mass unemployment has never budged below 8%, France's wealth per person
has been overtaken by both Britain's and Ireland's, and public debt has jumped from 55% of GDP to
66%. The liberal instincts he once betrayed as a reformist prime minister in the mid-1980s have
long since evaporated. His support for the prime minister's new jobs contract has been tepid at best.
His chief preoccupation seems to be to avoid shaking the conservative French consensus, and even
that unambitious objective has been missed. It is a measure of how wasted his presidency has been
that one of his own ministers, Nicolas Sarkozy, and a 2007 presidential hopeful, can today make
speeches that deplore “two decades of immobility” and call for a “rupture” with the status quo.
But the president is not to blame alone. Nobody on the French left dares to challenge the prevailing
paleo-socialist wisdom, and Ségolène Royal, the most popular of the would-be presidential
candidates, was roundly derided for confessing faint admiration for Britain's Tony Blair. On the
right, Mr de Villepin at least had the courage to try to counter the logic of job protection, but
elsewhere has scarcely demonstrated an embrace of open markets. Perhaps the closest France has to
a new-generation leader prepared to try to reconcile French public opinion with globalisation is Mr
Sarkozy. This week he declared that France could no longer “maintain the illusory barrage of a so-
called model that each day shows itself to no longer work, nor protect anything or anybody”. But
even Mr Sarkozy has proved a hard-core national protectionist when it comes to special pleading by
French industry. All the while, he and Mr de Villepin's obsessive rivalry over the succession
continues to sap France's ability to get policy right.
History will judge France harshly if its political class fails to find the courage to help the country
equip itself for the 21st century. More than that, France's turmoil has implications beyond its own
borders. An uncertain France is an uncertain partner for its allies, both in Europe and beyond.
Within the EU, having rejected its draft constitution last year, the French no longer seem to know
what they want. They still seek to project their influence through Europe, but will have difficulty
doing this while they are so consumed by internal strife at home, and while they still struggle to
come to terms with Europe's internal market. Can countries like Ukraine or Belarus be blamed for
wondering what Europe can offer them while France, a founder member, is so unsure itself? The
worry is that the more that France struggles to define a role for itself in the world, the more it will in
turn be tempted to fasten on its social model as its raison d'être, and so cling to a discredited creed.
The choice belongs to France. A bold effort at renewal that could unleash the best in the French? Or
a stubborn defence of the existing order that will keep France a middling world power in economic
decline? The latter would inspire neither admiration, nor terror, nor hatred, nor indifference, just
pity.