"A shock into reality for France"

Keith Spicer, Citizen Special [subscription only]

PARIS - Hysterical, irresponsible and laughably, hopelessly retrograde.

Italy? No, Italians just held a peaceful, regime-changing election that proves their representative democracy works. France? Thanks to endless marches, strikes, blockades and occupations, France's leftist elites have succeeded in portraying France around the world as a mob-rule joke. Rightist leaders, indulging in daggers-drawn rivalries, legislative flip-flops and deafness to public opinion, have only enhanced this image: France is Disneyland with foie gras.

Now that, once again, the "street" has defeated an elected government (on its youth-employment law), what's the scorecard of bad and good in this unpredictable country?

The bad comes with a double history: 17th-century Jean-Baptiste Colbert's belief in state intervention in the economy, and Karl Marx's theory of class war. Result: a national religion distrusting individual initiative and presenting the state as the only salvation.

Two French institutions cause most of the damage. The most destructive is the Ministry of Education. Former Socialist minister Claude Allegre, who, like most reformers here, quickly bit the dust in 2000, called it the Mammoth, and its more than two million employees the Red Army. With self-serving policies and hyper-centralized administration, the Mammoth is viscerally hostile to change. Its ambient ideology is glorification of the state and its educational policies.

Well-taught science and math aside, curricula reek of this conservatism. Open-mindedness, experimentation and innovation are seen as dangerous. No wonder a recent poll showed 76 per cent of kids 15 to 24 wanting to be public servants. No wonder over a million of the most resourceful and talented under-35 French find opportunity abroad.

Young people here, as in other European nations, are terrified of living less well than their parents. But unlike youth elsewhere, they literally believe -- thanks to the Mammoth (and their parents) -- that the state owes them a living. Immediately and forever. A life without risk.

Like children denied expected favours, they throw tantrums -- and get away with it. France is the only country where students smash property, commit street crime and sing the Communist Internationale to defend bourgeois privilege. But they are just following the example of their elders, including many teachers.

The other immobilizing institution is the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA). Finishing-school for the political and administrative elite (Siamese twins), ENA sends out graduates with a commendable spirit of public service. But they also come with a we-know-best smugness and only a skimpy knowledge of real-world economics.

Virtually every leading French politician and high official today is an enarque, as graduates style themselves. They all seem to be each other's old classmates. This makes for incestuous attitudes, a sameness of outlook: the state is good, and the state is us. The private sector is "capitalism" -- crass, inferior and exploitative.

At best, most old enarques are hesitant about the market economy. Post-war generations now in top jobs nearly all went for state-enterprise jobs: Air France, Electricite de France, Gaz de France, and others. President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, both enarques and supposedly moderate rightists, often sound like left-wing ideologues.

Any hope on the horizon? Lots.

The past two months of street drama may have shocked the French into at least thinking harder about how the hated market economy (36 per cent approval in France) creates jobs. Scandinavian labour solutions of "flexicurity" now get attention. The new plain-talking employers' group boss, Laurence Parisot, is building bridges to the unions -- both sides being desperate for new answers. And many younger ENA grads are looking to private industry to learn how the world works.

Even while denouncing "big capitalism" and globalization, France is brilliant at using both in its national interest. The CAC 40 Paris stock-market basket, now soaring, includes some of the best-run companies in the world: l'Oreal (cosmetics), AXA (insurance) [Ed. debatable], Alcatel (high-tech, joining Lucent), Sanofi-Aventis (pharmaceuticals), Societe Generale (banking), Schlumberger (oil and gas equipment), Saint-Gobain (building materials), EADS (aerospace and defence), Michelin (tires), and a score of others.

French business schools (INSEAD, ESSEC) and the no-nonsense Grandes Ecoles of science and technology are packed with top students who study, not demonstrate. French engineers continue to shine around the world, including in Silicon Valley.

French productivity shames most other countries. Millions of French people in small businesses fight bureaucracy to make independent livings. Millions volunteer to help society in countless organizations outside the state: Nobel-Prize-winning Doctors Without Borders, food-for-the-poor Restos du Coeur and hundreds of domestic volunteer groups prove the French don't wait for the nanny-state.

It's hard today to see a French renaissance. But it's there, in the 97 per cent of the French who didn't demonstrate these past weeks. Who didn't smash, set fires, blockade, strike or bully. With presidential candidates on left (timidly) and right (bluntly) promising real change next year, France has the fundamentals to rebound.

My bold.

France's unemployment rate is at 10% (est. 2005) and probably on the rise.

Related, and here and here .....

"....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."