Charles Bremner - Times Online - WBLG

French home truths

While waiting for the monarch to address his troubled people, Le Monde has this afternoon come up with an authoritative French explanation of why de Villepin had to act to open the labour market. It answers a lot of the questions from the debate over the past week's postings on this site. In the piece Jean-Philippe Cotis, chief economist of the OECD and a former French Treasury civil servant, says that "the French employment system is the purveyor of  job insecurity".

Globalisation is not the explanation for le mal français, says Cotis. The first reason is the excessively high cost of employing workers with few qualifications. "The cost of low skilled labour can constitute an insurmountable barrier to employment." The lack of flexibility is another reason. Younger workers are poorly protected while over 35-year-old employees have too much security, says Cotis.  In addition, the French system for connecting the unemployed with jobs does not work, he says.

I know that someone will say that the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) is an Anglo-Saxon-dominated club. Paris attacks the Paris-based outfit for bias every time that it ranks the performance of French school children well below those of northern Europe. But the Cotis points are pretty clear.   

PS: Le Monde is betting that Chirac will break with his previous form of yielding to the street and will stand by de Villepin even if it means more turmoil.      

Waiting for Chirac

Surreal describes the state of France after more than a million students,  state workers and others vented their wrath against the Government's job plan and its supposed attempts to dismantle the welfare state. The unions made their point but failed to achieve major disruption to transport and the private sector largely ignored their call to stop work. 

So life goes on as normal. The tone for today's episode in the anti-reform jihad was set by the France Inter breakfast news, which gave time to Olivier Besancenot, a young Trotskyite star and presidential candidate. Besancenot, a messianic orator like Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister, called the people to arms in Spanish with a quote from le Che as France fondly calls the late Dr Guevara: "Hasta la Victoria, Siempre!", boomed Besancenot as France consumed its croissants. Nowhere to be heard in France this morning was Jacques Chirac, the man most responsible for landing the country in its present mess.

Like Guevara, the chief executive and head of state has taken to preaching the evils of international capitalism -- more dangerous than Soviet communism, he said last year. This helps explain why so few understand Dominique de Villepin's  capitalist reforms and also why Chirac has failed so far to tell France directly what he thinks of  his Prime Minister's youth job scheme or how he intends to calm the furore caused by his crusade.

France's uninspired revolt

Here is an early dispatch from France's revolutionary front as the country supposedly takes its wrath out on the Government over its youth employment law. Nothing much is happening.

Students are marching, some state workers have stopped work and no doubt by the end of the day, les casseurs and riot police will engage in the post-protest fights that enable US television to show "France in flames". This morning, though, the students' and unions' "day of action" seems pleasantly inactive. Paris is quiet as many workers have stayed home although trains are more or less running. Many schools are semi-closed, often not because teachers are on strike, but because they do not want to face the effort of commuting. The state radio has stopped broadcasting news and newspapers have not appeared because of a strike by the hardline CGT union that dominates the printing trade.  The Paris Métro is running 70 percent of its normal excellent service and mine was quiet.

A feeling of unreality is colouring this latest French revolt.

Language and arrogance

Some of the abundant comments on my last post show that my mild mockery of President Chirac's manifestation on behalf of French created some misunderstanding. Perhaps I should have made the disclaimer stronger:  The aim was not to gloat about the supremacy of English, as suggested by Sandrine, Nicole and others. The target was the president and the excesses of his campaign to promote the language. 

I heartily agree with everyone who notes that the world would be infinitely poorer if English became the only language. Like most of those who have taken the trouble to comment, my life has been enriched by learning other languages and acquiring the view of the world that comes with them. I have spent most of my adult years in non-English speaking countries (Russia, Mexico, Belgium and France) and French is the main language in my home. 

Rather than being a noble gesture in defence of French, I believe that behaviour such as Chirac's in Brussels does a disservice to the language.

Chirac contre l'anglais

There is something a little unhealthy about the way that the English-speaking world loves hearing about France's struggle to fend off la langue de Shakespeare. Every newspaper story on the subject guarantees chortles at breakfast tables from Sydney to Sidcup. The field is rich, what with language quotas in broadcasting and the 1994 law requiring French-only communications in business and advertising. That law, usually observed in the breach like so many French rules, produced its first conviction this month when a Versailles court  fined a General Electric subsidiary for issuing its staff with technical manuals only in English. It may be silly to try to legislate language, but, gloating aside, why should a country not seek ways to promote its language and the ideas that it conveys? Quebec has managed to keep its French alive that way.

Often, though, the guardians of Gallic linguistic purity are their own worst enemies and no-one sets himself up better for mockery than Jacques Chirac.

Dominique's noble stand

Dominique de Villepin is looking more like his idol Napoleon Bonaparte by the day. The French Prime Minister, who is a part time poet and biographer of the Emperor, seems to be setting the scene for an heroic stand against overpowering odds. His model is of course not Waterloo but Arcole bridge, the 1796 Italian battle in which Napoleon seized the flag and led his demoralised troops from near defeat to victory.

That can be the only explanation for de Villepin's rejection of attempts by his allies to soften the youth employment law that has ignited the student revolt and provided manna to the fading labour unions and squabbling Socialist opposition. In the latest episode, the resolve of the army is crumbling as the Prime Minister-Emperor raises his rhetoric to ever more lyrical heights.  "We are going through these difficult hours with serenity because we know that our decisions are just, necessary and useful for France," de Villepin told his parliamentarians of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP).  Many left the session unnerved by their leader's bravado and some are worried that the unelected Prime Minister who was once nicknamed Zorro, may be losing the plot. 

France marches on

Before replying to the lively to-and-fro on my last posting, here for those outside France is a dispatch from the front: On one side, the troops have scented blood and are spoiling for war.  On the other, the generals have vowed to stand firm but retreated to their tent worried about enemy strength and a monarch with no stomach for battle.

That sums up the state of play in the latest French psychodrame after the opponents of the Government's employment law proved their power in the streets over the weekend. The affair has now gone beyond a protest over a law and entered the domain of the irrational. There seems little prospect that the protesters will heed the call today from Renaud Dutreuil, Minister for Small and Medium Size Businesses, to "come to their senses and back to earth"

Aux armes, étudiants!

French has a useful though over-used expression: You don't shoot at ambulances (On ne tire pas sur l' ambulance). Thus, I have so far avoided making the obvious points about France's latest episode  of student revolt. They are too easy and inevitably anglo-saxon.

But reporting for The Times on the protests against the Government's youth employment law, it has been interesting to see how hard it is for a nation to break out of the stereotype in which history has cast it. If Dominique de Villepin, the very elegant Prime Minister, had wanted to stage yet another remake of that antique hit, the Bastille Show, he could not have done better.

Forbidden Grass

Walking across the Esplanade des Invalides in the rush hour this morning, I watched a gaggle of young rugby players practising on the broad grass expanse. They were civil servants were from the Foreign Ministry, headquartered on the Quai d'Orsay, which adjoins the esplanade. Dotted along the grass verge were signs proclaiming: "Ball games strictly forbidden".

Here, in the glorious heart of Paris, a rugby kick from Napoleon's tomb, was a good illustration of France's relationship with rules: They are there to be broken. France has so many rules, regulations, ordonnances and laws that even lawyers and judges complain that they cannot keep up with them, so why should the ordinary citizen.

A day out with Ségolène

Back from an audience in the Royal presence (today's Times). It's one thing following France's love affair with Ségolène Royal through the media and another spending time with the lady as she goes about her long-term campaign to become the first woman to occupy the Republican throne.

After a hand-bagging from Margaret Thatcher, the late President Francois Mitterrand once described the then British Prime Minister as having "the eyes of Caligula with the mouth of Marilyn Monroe." With a little softening, the image could also be applied to France's favourite Socialist. A day with Royal makes clear how much her male rivals are off the mark when they put her down as emotional and lacking in a statesman's stature. Some ruthlessness obviously lies behind the glamorous looks and the constant smile that has helped make her the darling of the media a year ahead of the election.

Enjoying French skies

For shrugging off the daily grind, there is nothing like taking to the sky with your own wings. Apart from the United States with its big tradition of citizen flying, there is nowhere like France for enjoying the pleasures of the air.

I was reminded of this yet again on Sunday morning, when, after a month pinned down by bad weather, I coaxed my old aeroplane off a muddy grass runway under a cold blue sky.  Overhead, a big Airbus  was hauling its passengers out from Charles de Gaulle airport just six miles away. Behind lay the outline of Le Bourget, the original Paris aerodrome, where Charles Lindbergh touched down in 1927 after his epic flight from New York.  Back in the southern distance, you could make out the Eiffel tower. 

Seven hundred feet below, the fields and woods were still in their winter brown as I took the corridor north to the Oise and the riverside villages that were painted by Van Gogh, Cézanne and Pissaro.    The great thing from the air is that you don't pick up the modernity. Even highways fail to blot the lie of the old landscape. The engine noise becomes a drone and the world looks peaceful below.

France looks the other way

Tall and eloquent, Dominique de Villepin looked every bit the Gaullist Prime Minister a couple of days ago as he hailed the Gallic "can-do" spirit and sang the praises of France's industrial might. He was dazzled, he said, by the "determination of France to move forward". An observer might have imagined that the Prime Minister and part-time poet was celebrating some new triumph, but the news was bleak. Unemployment, France's millstone for two decades, had risen again and Paris was under fire for trying to prevent foreigners taking over French companies, which M de Villepin calls "economic patriotism".

The Prime Minister was performing an exercise that has become standard of late for the French governing class: magical thinking.  This wishing away of reality has become the norm as Gallic morale has slumped under the blows of a world in which France's exasperating historic rivals, les Anglo-Saxons, seem to have all the answers.