Sixty million malcontents
At the beginning of the Third Republic, a humorist said: ‘France has thirty million subjects, plus the subjects of discontent’. For those who lived through May 1968, seeing the police demonstrating in the streets while Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Alain Krivine sit coolly in the European Parliament is a scenario as unlikely as the attacks on the World Trade Center. Albeit different, the political consequences are no less serious.
In the short term, what this shows is the failure of a policy which, alone in the developed world, continues to give priority, in terms of employment policy, to systematic increases in the number of civil servants and to public subsidies for private recruitment – even when the state of the national budget means that it can be financed only by borrowing! The tax-rich periods of 1998-2000 were not used to improve the conditions of the police or prison warders, but to increase the number of civil servants, even where there were enough of them, to recruit young people under youth contracts and to help firms to finance the 35-hour week. As soon as the economic situation changed, and tax revenue was less easy to come by, our leaders discovered to their horror that you cannot have your cake and eat it. It would be better to have well-trained and well-paid public employees, in greater numbers where they are really needed, than to increase the numbers of minor civil servants on the cheap and across the board. This is one of the major failures of the Jospin government.
In the longer term, the pathological inability of French society to manage its collective choices other than by social psychodrama is worrying. It had already become standard practice for us to be only democratic country in which every morning’s news bulletins included an ‘industrial forecast’ with a list of the day’s strikes. Then, little by little, strikes were superseded by demos, especially after the end of 1995. Two years ago, spurred on by the failure to take any action whatsoever against farmers, employees in dispute and anti-globalisation protesters lacking media coverage took matters a stage further by sabotaging the tools of their own or of others’ trades. And now the forces of law and order are themselves refusing to toe the line, parading in the streets and making everyone’s day by refusing to book offenders. A spectacle normally reserved for developing countries. Or under-developed countries …
It is high time that the French stopped deceiving themselves.
No, there is no ‘buried treasure’ which would enable the state, with one wave of a magic wand, to play Father Christmas to all groups of workers.
No, there are no ‘acquired rights’ which hold good even when the economy is not working.
No, strikes, violence and unlawful action do not make it possible to secure the future of firms or professions in any lasting way. Even in France.
No, the French cannot hope to be more successful than everyone else by retiring five years earlier and by working, every year, five weeks less than they do.
No, there is nothing to be gained by constantly deferring radical solutions to unavoidable problems such as sickness insurance and pensions. Doing so will make reforms even more painful.
Other countries have managed this process through negotiation and democratic choices. Are we cursed always to be more short-sighted and less courageous than they are?
Alain Lamassoure, 11 December 2001