Unusually, the French are Happy
Mini Teaser: Lionel Jospin told a group of foreigners last summer that "it is a sociological fact that the French are always discontented with how they are governed." Yet polls show the French feel prosperous and confident in the future.
Last August the Paris newspaper Le Monde published a front-page
article, entitled "Quand la France s'amuse . . .", announcing that
the French were happy: "For the first time in a long time a strange
climate reigns in France, an ambiance of fête." The author attributed
this not only to victory in the Soccer World Cup but to a fall in
unemployment and general satisfaction with the national outlook. The
French, the article said, were actually enjoying their vacations.
This deserved front-page treatment. It was sensational news.
As the article also noted, thirty years ago last spring, in another
commentary in the same newspaper, the head of Le Monde's political
service, Pierre Viansson-Ponté, had famously warned, "Quand la France
s'ennuie . . ." ["When France becomes bored . . ."]. Shortly
afterwards, in the "events" of springtime 1968, France found a way to
deal with its boredom, with consequences that still persist.
At that time, the French were enjoying what they now call les trentes
glorieuses--thirty years of triumphant postwar growth. In retrospect
one might assume that they should then have been happy, but clearly
they were not. The political comment of the time described France as
"blocked", its political life stale and frustrating under Charles de
Gaulle's splendidly unyielding autocracy, the French discontented
with the immense changes that had taken place in their society.
The events of 1968 made them happy--those of them who believed that
imagination was indeed about to seize power--but disillusionment was
rapid and order was restored. However, the president, a wise man who
had described old age as a shipwreck, chose a year later to arrange
for himself a characteristically dramatic withdrawal from power, on
the occasion of his defeat in an unnecessary referendum on an
unimportant reform. (The novelist and Gaullist chronicler François
Mauriac called it "an unprecedented case of suicide in the midst of
happiness.") The general then died the next year, with panache. The
French were even more unhappy.
Their unhappiness was reinforced by the oil producers' boycott of
1973, for France la crise, which brought les trentes glorieuses to a
halt. Ever since, the French have considered themselves in permanent
crisis. La crise has provided an explanation for everything since
that has been worth complaining about.
Events thus conspired with a national disposition. In France,
pessimism is taken to be the only intellectually serious stance. To
express optimism about France's condition and prospects, and
certainly to express pride about France's accomplishments, would be
to display the vulgar boastfulness one might expect from Americans,
lacking the seriousness appropriate to a mature people.
This, of course, has little to do with the real convictions the
French hold about their nation, its modern performance, and its
prospects. The obligatory pessimism is, however, largely responsible
for the permanent confusion that exists abroad about the state of
affairs in France. Foreign journalists and specialists interrogate
French businessmen, economists, and political analysts about how the
country goes, and reflexively they are told that things could
scarcely be worse, any sign of positive developments an illusion,
France mired in archaisms. When businessmen are asked, they say that
the whole society is desperately in need of the enterprise,
ingenuity, open-mindedness, and economic freedoms of the United
States and Britain, the countries that have shown the way to a
radiant future (or so it was said until the events of recent months).
The foreign interrogators then publish what they have been told, and
the French are outraged and complain about a complot Anglo-Saxon to
denigrate their country.
Yet suddenly, last summer, they found to their astonishment that they
were happy. They thoroughly enjoyed their annual six-week holidays in
Provence or Brittany. France had won not only the World Cup but the
northern hemisphere's rugby championship (the Five Nations Cup). The
French-led Airbus consortium was selling more airplanes than Boeing,
and the Ariane space-launcher had 60 percent of the world's
commercial satellite orders. The American economic paradigm no longer
seemed all-conquering.
They were happy with their prime minister, Lionel Jospin, who during
the summer months reached levels of popularity in the polls never
before achieved by a prime minister of the Fifth Republic. They liked
his new government of "the plural Left" (composed of Socialists,
Communists, Greens, and nationalists of the Left--the so-called
Movement of Republicans led by the interior minister, Jean-Pierre
Chevènement).
The French were happy with their president. The conservative
ex-Gaullist Jacques Chirac won nearly as high a popularity score as
his Socialist prime minister. Even Mr. Chirac seemed to be happy.
Having ousted his own parliamentary majority from power in 1997, with
a disastrously overclever election maneuver--a tactically motivated
dissolution of parliament--Mr. Chirac has since radiated contentment
in the quasi-ceremonial function he has chosen to make of the
presidency.
He has correct and even cordial relations with the prime minister, to
whom he leaves the difficult decisions, making little trouble over
the "reserved" presidential authority in foreign and security
matters. He travels widely, pressing flesh, slapping cows on the
flank, and admiring prize pigs, seemingly campaigning for the office
he already has and didn't know what to do with.
He has distanced himself from the quarrelling survivors of the
shipwrecked Right, and cultivates younger politicians of the Right
instead, having seen that Mr. Jospin's success is due in no small
part to his having dissociated himself from the politicians who ran
the country under François Mitterrand. Most of the members of Mr.
Jospin's government have never before held cabinet office.
The French public has found that it likes the "cohabitation" of Right
with Left. Intellectuals and political scientists are offended by it
because it is not logical. There have been many proposals to reduce
the presidential term to five years, to coincide with the
parliamentary term. But the authors of the Fifth Republic's
constitution have been validated by public opinion, which likes the
opportunity provided by unbalanced terms to correct its mistakes, and
has found the checks and balances of cohabitation very
comfortable--all the more so as the outrageous corruption and abuses
of power of the Mitterrand presidency, as well as the past favoritism
and occult party financing of the Right, continue to be revealed by
the examining magistrates and police, no longer held in check by the
reciprocal complicities of the powerful and the passivity of the
press.
Bonaparte said that a good general is a lucky general. He also said
that "in war, moral considerations account for three quarters, the
balance of actual forces only for the other quarter." Both comments
may be applied to the prime ministership of Lionel Jospin. Sheer luck
made him prime minister. He was marginalized by the Socialist
leadership after serving as minister of education early in the
Mitterrand era. They recognized in his stiff, teacherly manner, and
his Protestant conscience, a fundamental incompatibility with the
kind of government they were running. Following the victory of the
Right in the 1993 legislative elections, which launched the second
cohabitation of the Mitterrand presidency, with Edouard Balladur the
prime minister, Mr. Jospin tried to withdraw from the Paris political
scene.
He twice asked Mr. Balladur's foreign minister, Alan Juppé (later
Balladur's successor as prime minister), to give him an embassy
appointment. (Jospin began his career in the diplomatic service, and
as is customary in France's high civil service, retained his rank and
seniority despite interrupting his foreign office career to enter
politics.) He suggested the ambassadorship to Prague. Juppé ignored
the request. At loose ends, without a posting, he occupied himself
with pulling together the demoralized Socialists. In the absence of
anyone else willing to sacrifice himself in the 1995 presidential
election, when Jacques Chirac's victory seemed foreordained, Jospin
put himself forward.
He did much better than anticipated, beating Chirac in the first
round of the vote, losing only in the second round when other
candidates had retired. That left him leader of the Socialist party,
but a party that seemed set for a long period in opposition. Then in
1997 came the Right's catastrophic miscalculation in dissolving a
parliament in which it possessed a 484 to 93 majority, and that had
sat only for three of the five years for which it had been elected.
President Chirac and Prime Minister Juppé had wanted a new five-year
mandate for their government, to guarantee the conservative parties'
power right to the end of Mr. Chirac's presidential term.
The dissolution was decided despite the fact that the Juppé
government's initial year in office had not been a great success.
Jospin took up the challenge, and led the Socialist party to a
plurality victory. The Left was back. The Right was left
thunderstruck, split, embittered, riddled with mutual reproach and
anger--and so it remains today.
The second manifestation of Prime Minister Jospin's luck was the
general European economic upturn that began at about the time he took
office. France was at the bottom of the economic cycle under the
Juppé government, and his orthodox monetarist measures for producing
economic recovery--budget cuts, restrictions on social expenditure,
privatizations of state enterprises--were imposed in a condescending
and technocratic manner that made little concession to the need to
win public sympathy and cooperation. This resulted in the
public-sector strikes of midwinter 1996-97, when to general surprise
the Paris public cheerfully roller-bladed, biked, and car-pooled its
way to work, demonstrating sympathy for the public transport and
other civil service strikers, and even for the nation's truckers, who
blocked the highways for better hours and more money.
After Jospin's victory, the country's unemployment rate began to
fall, and the economic growth rate slowly to rise. France now is
forecast to have the highest growth rate of the major industrial
countries in 1999. Investment is up sharply, as is consumer
confidence, and inflation is negligible, around 1 percent. The
national statistical agency, Insee, expects a net creation of 360,000
jobs this year, with unemployment, adjusted for population increase,
falling to 11.6 percent of the active population by year's end, down
from 12.5 percent last year.
Insee's October report said that GDP growth fell in the third quarter
to 2.5 percent from 3 percent, but it still predicted a final growth
figure for 1998 of 3.1 percent, which is the government's own
estimate. However, this reflects the high figures of the beginning of
the year, and the fourth quarter figure is likely to fall to 2.5
percent annualized, which suggests that the government's expectation
of 2.7 percent in 1999 may be overly optimistic. The budget for 1999,
seen by the Wall Street Journal as "pro-business", is based on the
2.7 percent growth forecast, although at the time of the Washington
G-7 meeting at the beginning of October the prime minister qualified
that by saying that it depended on Europe's "economic actors
continuing to bet on growth."
Insee's own projections also do not yet take into account the effect
that the September-October collapse of the dollar will have on French
exports. (By early October the dollar had fallen 17 percent from its
year's high against the franc.) Airbus has already characterized the
dollar's fall as "a disaster", although this will speed the
redenomination of Airbus contracts in the new European single
currency, which comes into use in January. The Belgian airline Sabena
has already asked to pay for future aircraft in euros, and other
European airlines are expected to follow suit.
The government is counting on growth to create jobs. At the
officially forecast rate of 2.7 percent GDP growth in 1999, enough
jobs will be created eventually to absorb France's unemployed. At a
2.5 percent rate, unemployment will be stable. Under 2.5 percent, the
rate of unemployment will again begin to rise from the existing
level--already the highest among the five leading industrial
countries.
The consumer confidence figure issued in October was significantly
higher than anticipated, indicating that the international crisis had
not yet shaken the domestic economy. This is also true elsewhere in
the euro-currency group and reflects a belief that the European
single currency will reinforce the strength and stability of the
European economy (90 percent of whose exports are within Europe), and
will continue to defend Europe against the effects of the world
crisis. An indication of this is that the crisis has produced no
speculation against any of the eleven currencies that will enter into
the euro.
Disposable income has also risen, thanks to a reduction in social
security taxes provided by the economics minister, Dominique
Strauss-Kahn (the first fall in social charges in fifty years).
Consumption rose again in September and is up by more than 9 percent
over September 1997. Confidence and disposable income imply
continuing consumer spending, an expectation reinforced by the fact
that the French public has resisted the lure of the stock market.
Less than 20 percent of household financial assets are in equities
and more than 40 percent in bonds. Yesterday's alleged archaism has
proven today's asset.
The 35-hour work week and the youth employment program, both of which
figured prominently in the Socialists' election campaign and are dear
to the leading figure on the government's Left, Employment and
Solidarity Minister Martine Aubry (Jacques Delors' daughter), are
generally thought unlikely to have a major effect on employment.
Both, however, have had positive consequences critics did not expect.
As the conservative newspaper Le Figaro has observed, the law
imposing a shortened work week on larger companies by the year 2000
has had the serendipitous effect of "accelerating the movement
towards flexibility." It requires company-by-company negotiations on
changed hours and as a result requires a general review of
long-standing work restrictions. Le Figaro concluded, "The heads of
enterprises are secretly delighted, the unions officially furious."
(Strauss-Kahn, the economics and finance minister--and Jospin's
presumed successor if the prime minister runs for president in 2003
and wins--said last summer that "our difference with the [market]
liberals is not that we believe in reducing working hours and they
believe in reducing the cost of labor. It is that we do not want to
deprive ourselves of either of the two.") The Jospin government has
already privatized more companies than the conservative Juppé
government did, even though it is in principle opposed to
privatizations.
The 320 company agreements on the 35-hour week that had been recorded
by early October produced a 7.5 percent rate of job creation in those
companies, higher than the government had demanded. As the 35-hour
week already exists in Germany, for all practical purposes, and is on
its way in Italy, it produces no particular competitive disadvantage
for the French with respect to their principal competitors and
markets, all of which are European.
The youth employment program is producing a social if not economic
return. By the end of the year it will have supplied 150,000
auxiliary policemen, teachers' aides and school monitors, sports and
social assistants in difficult neighborhoods, and people to go
shopping for old ladies or help in retirement homes, all with
five-year contracts based on the minimum wage (which in substance
would otherwise have been paid to them in unemployment benefits).
There is a Jospin "method." It consists of constant consultation and
discussion inside the government and much use of outside studies and
reports from specialists and university personalities. The utility of
the latter is less to evoke new ideas, since the views of the
specialists are ordinarily well known, as to implicate as wide as
possible a part of the intellectual and political community in the
Socialists' decisions, and to make use of their authority to build
popular support.
This method has been employed in immigration and nationality policy
reform, policy change on social charges on wages and employers, in
what in U.S. parlance would be called welfare reform, in legislation
on new technologies, including Internet commercial practice and
privacy, and a score of other issues. A Council of Economic Analysis
has been formed, composed of economists from the Right as well as the
Left.
The intent of all this has been to mobilize opinion from the
"bottom-up" (the English expression is used) rather than instructing
it from the top-down, as was the case in the previous governments. By
bringing a wide variety of views into the debate, decisions when
finally taken allow all parties to feel that they have had a hearing.
This is a new practice in France, accustomed to a Jacobin
authoritarianism and the "elected monarchy" of Fifth Republic
government, and so far it is a considerable success.
The method is so much of a success that a leading intellectual of the
Right, the novelist and commentator Jean d'Ormesson, recently asked
in a full-page article in Le Figaro, "Must one become a Socialist?"
He said that the factions of the Right were in such disarray, and
their debate so distorted by personal ambition and score-settling, as
to disqualify them as a serious political force. On the other hand,
he said, Mr. Jospin's government was of such intellectual quality,
and its principal ministers so clearly superior to their rightist
predecessors, that people like him who wanted to influence the
country's direction had perhaps no alternative to joining the
Socialist party, so as to influence it from within.
The crucial reason for the Right's disarray is the threat to it from
the extreme-right National Front (NF). The Front is less an electoral
danger to the "republican Right" (as the anti-NF parties are called)
as a coalition temptation; with the republican Right and Left fairly
evenly distributed, the Right, in order to win, is under pressure to
form alliances with the NF. This has already happened in the
aftermath of several elections to regional councils. The NF wins its
usual minority of some 15 percent of the popular vote, which with
proportional representation (the system used in regional elections)
can empower it to decide the outcome of the vote on regional
president. If the parties of the republican Right renounce National
Front support, the Socialists win, even though with a minority of the
popular vote.
The president's party, the ex-Gaullist rpr (Rally for the Republic),
firmly refuses any collaboration with the NF, but several centrist
politicians have accepted election to council presidencies with its
support, arguing that to give the presidency to the Socialist
minority is perverse (and undemocratic).
Thus the most important nationwide debate inside the Right is whether
"republican" candidates and even parties should accept "objective"
collaboration with the NF, which of course is exactly what the
National Front leadership wants. This is a factor demoralizing the
Right, and it threatens to break down the quarantine of the NF, which
until now has been imposed by the republican parties of both Left and
Right. It is a considerable victory for the strategy promoted by the
man most likely to become the next leader of the National Front,
Bruno Mégret.
A generational change is taking place in the National Front.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, a paratrooper in the Algerian war who founded the
NF, is a blustering racist and reactionary demagogue who relishes
scandalizing right-thinking people with crude but often adroit
comments on matters politically correct. When the star of France's
World Cup victory last summer proved to be a young man of Algerian
descent, and the French were congratulating themselves on the
multiracialism of a team that included players from France's
Caribbean and Pacific territories, Le Pen toasted the hero of the day
as "a true son of Algérie Française"--literally true, since the
player, born in France, is the son of a "Harki", a member of the
Algerian auxiliary force that fought alongside the French army
against Algerian independence, and who subsequently found refuge in
France.
However, Mr. Le Pen's crudity limits his appeal to the moderate and
middle-class conservatives whose votes the party must win and hold if
it is to become a lasting national force. He is now in his seventies,
and the battle to succeed him pits a figure from the reactionary
Catholic traditionalist movement of the late Archbishop Lefebvre
(condemned by Rome) against Mégret, a young and educated rightist
radical. The ideological competition is between a representative of
the old and familiar populist, Pétainist, anti-Semitic,
anti-immigrant margin of French opinion, and an educated and
intellectual fascism that wishes to use the party for its own
ideological ends.
Fascism is a much-abused term. Le Pen is commonly called a fascist
because his program is racist, nationalist, and xenophobic, and
because he says such things as that the Nazi death camps were a mere
"detail" of the Second World War. This does not make him a fascist in
a historically useful sense of that term. He is much closer to the
late Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi than to Benito Mussolini,
or to the pre-war Jacques Doriot, the closest France has had to a
native fascist leader.
Bruno Mégret is a graduate of two of the most important of France's
institutions of elite scientific education, the École Polytechnique,
where he graduated eighteenth in his class, and the eminent
engineering school, l'École des Ponts et Chaussées. He then took an
M.S. at Berkeley. He is said to owe his interest in rightist notions
of order to his experience of the Berkeley of the 1970s. Returning to
France, he joined the French office for national planning. He was
recruited to a newly formed rightist discussion group, the Club de
l'Horloge (named for the clock in the room where it first met in
1974), established by young graduates of the National School of
Administration (ENA). It tried to bring high state functionaries,
academics, and business executives into discussions on right-wing
themes concerning race, north-south relations, and the philosophy and
nature of government. It advocated national preference to counter the
threat to France's national identity allegedly posed by immigration.
It flourished at a time when the domination of the Left over Paris
intellectual life had been broken by the belated publication of
Solzhenitsyn's works, and several groups jointly identified as the
"Nouvelle Droite" were attempting to re-establish a coherent
intellectual Right. Among the themes of this movement were an
intellectualized racism, neo-paganism, a commitment to elitism, and
an interest in eugenics and ethnology. The "warrior" values of the
northern "man of the forests" were favorably contrasted with the
alleged passivity and submission of Christians and Jews, monotheist
"peoples of the desert."
Fascism, in short, was not dead in France, which was difficult for
Americans and the British to appreciate. Ideological debate in the
United States is never about anything really serious, but Europe
remains a dangerous place. Shortly after Norman Podhoretz had put
Ronald Reagan into the White House, he and several other prominent
American neoconservatives proposed to travel to Paris to share a
platform with representatives of the Nouvelle Droite, assuming that
all were fellow-travelers on the same road. The late Raymond Aron
fortunately heard of this and, horrified, headed the Americans off.
Bruno Mégret is the first product of this movement (otherwise now a
faded force) to become a significant political figure. If he succeeds
in imposing himself on the National Front, he can give a novel
anti-democratic direction to a party that, however unrespectable its
views, still functions within the framework of democratic politics
and debate.
The NF has until now been an amalgam of traditional themes:
Poujadism, xenophobia, nationalism, anti-Semitism,
anti-"Europeanism", anti-Americanism, anti-modernism, and nostalgia
for Algérie Française. It is a movement of uncoordinated prejudice
and provocation that has inherited the function of political and
social protest that the Communist Party abandoned when it became part
of the first Mitterrand government in 1981.
Mégret believes in "ethnic rootedness" and racial elites, and opposes
the "métissage généralisé des races humaines." He thinks
"cosmopolitanism . . . an illness of the spirit which acts on a
nation in the manner that aids does on the human body: it destroys
the immunities which protect it from undesirable foreign bodies." He
would limit the number of immigrant children admitted to French
schools and would challenge the naturalizations of foreigners that
have taken place since 1974. All this amounts to is a program likely
to give pause to the Frenchman who votes National Front because he is
angry that North Africans occupy his old neighborhood, allegedly have
stolen his and his children's jobs, and whose own children are rowdy
or delinquent. He is unlikely to have framed his plight in terms of
"cosmopolitanism", or of the struggle of Aryan warriors of the forest
against the men of the desert. Present or past Catholics (the
Lefebvre movement is very important to the existing NF) are unlikely
to sympathize with their party's new leaders' recommendation of a
virile paganism. (A national poll in June found that 68 percent of
the French oppose discrimination in employment between the French and
immigrants with legal residence. Sixty-seven percent oppose
discrimination in social housing. The same percentage says that
unemployed immigrants have the right to remain in France and receive
social benefits. Only a quarter of those asked favor sending
unemployed legal immigrants back to their own countries.)
The Nouvelle Droite has always been a marginal intellectual movement,
and Mégret's bid for National Front leadership is an attempt to
appropriate a populist movement of social and political protest whose
existing motivations have little to do with Nouvelle Droite ideas.
The mayonnaise is unlikely to take. For that reason, a Mégret
takeover of the National Front seems more likely to reduce its
influence than increase it.
The future of the National Front is far more likely to be decided by
the employment figures of the next few years. There are no more
foreigners in France today than there were in 1931 (6.4 percent of
the population; and of the 3.6 million "foreigners" currently in
France, 740,000 were born in the country). However, North Africans,
the main target of National Front hostility, are more easily
identified than the Spanish, Italians, Poles, and Jews of earlier
immigrations, and are mostly Muslims, while the earlier immigrants
were mostly Catholic.
Europe is likely to take the immigration issue away from the National
Front by internationalizing it. The EU nations other than Britain,
the Scandinavians, and Greece now are part of the so-called Shengen
space, inside which there is free passage without immigration
controls. Immigration control is the responsibility of individual
member countries with respect to arrivals from outside the Shengen
area. Thus it has become necessary to integrate and regularize
immigration policies across all these countries. The former
conservative prime minister, Edouard Balladur, has suggested that
this makes it possible to re-admit the National Front into an
all-party international debate over immigration, thereby limiting its
national appeal by internationalizing the argument.
The children of the North Africans invited to France in the 1950s and
1960s to supply labor for the country's growth during les trentes
glorieuses are educated and employable. The French state school
system is still a high-prestige, high-competence system that really
educates children. The problem is that there currently are not enough
jobs for these children. A culture of unemployment has begun to
develop in immigrant suburbs where fathers have been pensioned off,
or have lost low-level jobs and exist on state benefits, whiletheir
sons and daughters cannot find work.
In mid-October what began as good-natured national student
demonstrations demanding more money and teachers for the schools, a
more or less seasonal phenomenon, took a sinister turn. Bands of
young people from the ghetto suburbs infiltrated the demonstrations
not only to smash up shops and cars but to attack the mainstream
demonstrators, stealing their leather jackets, paraboots, backpacks,
and portable telephones. The student organizers were left in anger
and tears, but also in shock at the seeming nihilism of this eruption
of violence from the suburban ghettoes.
If France's immigrant unemployed can be put to work during the four
years that remain to Lionel Jospin's government, a fundamental
national problem will be on its way to solution. If that does not
happen, France will join Britain and the United States in possessing
not only an unemployed class but increasingly an unemployable one,
with all that implies for social peace--in a country that has the
habit of turbulence.
Lionel Jospin told a group of foreigners last summer that "it is a
sociological fact that the French are always discontented with how
they are governed." This autumn there were Paris transport strikes,
protesting vandalism and violence on suburban trains and buses. There
were student strikes, calling for more funds for school equipment.
Superficially, the French were resuming their customary grogne, or
complaining. Jospin's honeymoon seemed over. Yet, as the national
statistics indicated, the French felt prosperous and confident in the
future (especially because of the forthcoming monetary union--a very
important factor in European attitudes today).
Most surprising, the French still are happy. Devoted to narcissistic polling, the Sofres organization went forth in late September to determine how the French now feel. Ninety percent say they are very happy or mostly happy. (Only 61 percent think that other Frenchmen and women are happy - evidence of the necessary pessimism.) Why are they happy? They are happy because of their families - 75 percent. They are happy because of love - 46 percent. Because of their work - 37 percent are happy because they like their jobs. What would do most to make them unhappy? Illness (73 percent), unemployment (52 percent), fear for the future of their children (51 percent). Solitude, the lack of communication among people, makes them unhappy (27 percent), as does the condition of the poor in France and in the world (26 percent).
It is an interesting list. It is perhaps a unique one. Which other peoples say they are so happy today? An old German expression said "happy as God in France." Who would have thought it still true? Not, surely, the French themselves.
William Pfaff is author of The Wrath of Nations and Barbarian Sentiments, and a syndicated columnist for the International Herald Tribune.
Essay Types: Essay