The Secret Life of France (26 page)

In November 2012,
The Economist
took another swipe at France. On the cover were seven
baguettes
held together by the
tricolore
with a lit fuse protruding from the centre. The headline was ‘France and the euro: the time-bomb at the heart of Europe’.
*
The wording of the piece itself sounded very like a warning: ‘Unless Mr Hollande shows that he is genuinely committed to changing the path his country has been on for the past thirty years, France will lose the faith of investors …’

It was not the first time that the French government had been preached to by
The Economist
, which has been referred to by French commentators as the ‘
Pravda
of finance’ and the ‘little Taliban of liberalism’. This time, though, Hollande’s ministers responded with barbed disdain. ‘Honestly,’ said industry minister Arnaud
Montebourg
on Europe 1, French national radio, ‘
The Economist
has never distinguished itself by its sense of moderation.’ In an interview with French internet TV channel i-tele Hollande’s prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said, ‘You’re
talking about a newspaper that is resorting to excess to sell papers. I can tell you that France is not at all impressed.’

Used to defending his paper from accusations of being anti-French, John Peet, the Europe editor, took the opportunity to throw in another warning: ‘The point of this cover and the article is to encourage France. Other countries … have conducted many reforms. This is not yet the case in France.’
†

I can’t help sensing an embedded
Schadenfreude
in these regular reprimands, and of course the stifled cry that goes with it: It’s not
fair
!

Why
should
France continue to enjoy a lavish health service, an impressive infrastructure and a high-quality, free education system when everyone else is hacking away at their welfare states in order to stay afloat in the global market? Why is she, with all her debt,
still
the world’s fifth-biggest economy, the sixth-biggest exporter and the fourth-biggest recipient of foreign direct investment in the world?

Despite this, two days later, as if in answer to
The
Economist’s
prayers, the credit-rating agency Moody’s stripped France of her triple A rating. Already downgraded to AA+ under Sarkozy by Standard and Poor’s, France sucked it up: it was neither a big surprise, nor a big catastrophe.

Perhaps not, but something has to give. The French system is not kind to the spirit of enterprise and many of
those young people who have managed to come through their education with any entrepreneurial ambitions at all are leaving the country in droves. Ella is gearing up to go back and work in London next year in order to kick-start her chosen career in film production. Her boyfriend, who has no ties to the UK apart from her, is thinking of going too. He works for a smallish finance company specialising in mergers and acquisitions, and since Hollande’s tax reforms, which included a rise in marginal capital gains rates to as high as 60 per cent, he says the market is frozen. The last to be hired, he expects to be the first they let go, and if that happens London is where he will look for a job.

A conservative estimate puts the number of French people living in London at 300,000 (the population of Corsica) but it’s probably closer to 400,000 and when Hollande introduced his ‘exceptional solidarity contribution’, a tax of 75 per cent to be applied for two years on all income in excess of one million euros, more would certainly have crossed the Channel. Indeed, the Brits welcome them with open arms and, of course, irrepressible gloating.

‘When France sets a 75 per cent top income tax rate we will roll out the red carpet,’ David Cameron announced at the G20 summit in Mexico in June 2012. ‘And we will welcome more French businesses which will pay their taxes in Britain … That will pay for our public services and our schools.’

European Affairs Minister Bernard Cazeneuve responded
somewhat tersely on Canal+: ‘What I can answer to this statement from the British prime minister is that there are French bosses who are patriots …’

Speaking at the Tory party conference a few months later, Boris Johnson offered a similar welcome, but in his own provocative style: ‘I am very keen to welcome talented French people. We say to the people, not since 1789 has there been such tyranny in France.’

I called Laurent when I read about the tax increases and asked him what he was going to do.

‘I’m on the train to Geneva.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m deciding between Belgium and Switzerland.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘Yes.’

‘So you wouldn’t leave?’

He laughed.

‘I know you’ve been trying to get me to move to England for about twenty years but no. I wouldn’t leave.’

Laurent is not concerned about the income-tax rise, or the downgrading of his country’s credit rating or indeed its gaping debt. I’ve never liked the liberal use that the British media makes of the expression ‘the Gallic shrug’, but I have to admit that Laurent is a master of it.

‘The figures for the British economy are worse than ours,’ he said. ‘It’s just that the markets are reassured by the UK having its own currency. If France fails, the whole of Europe fails with her.’

Laurent, who had voted Sarkozy in 2007, was one of the many centrists who were disappointed by his presidency. His right-wing posturing became increasingly repulsive to liberals like Laurent and it was not difficult for them to transfer their loyalties to a centre-left figure like Hollande. For one, François Hollande was one of the few politicians of his profile to have gone to Hautes études commercial de Paris (HEC), one of France’s top business schools. He would have been quite incapable of graduating from such a place without a good understanding of economics. In order to get elected he certainly had to reassure his rank and file with a veneer of socialist discourse but soon he set about reassuring the markets, and that was when the real shift came.

In July 2012, shortly after his election to the presidency, Hollande, as part of what he called a ‘competitiveness pact’, commissioned a report from Louis Gallois, former head of EADS (European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company). Gallois came back in November,
pinpointing
France’s astronomical labour costs as the first obstacle to competitiveness. It’s worth reminding the British reader that for a salary of one hundred euros, say, the French employee will take home eighty euros but the employer will have paid out one hundred and forty euros to cover social charges. Hollande took Gallois’s suggestions on board, as well as his recommendation that it might be time to have another go at tackling the taboo subject of job flexibility. Such attempts have always ended in disaster and mayhem but Hollande, with his air of austerity
and his spotless left-wing credentials, has turned out to be the man for the job. Immediately following the Gallois report discussions began between management and unions on the subject of more flexible labour laws. At last, on 9 April 2013, after a six-day debate in the National Assembly, the said law – renamed ‘the law on job security’ (as opposed to job flexibility) – was voted in by an overwhelming majority (250 votes to 26) while outside trade unions took to the streets and violently decried a law that they described in a communiqué as ‘criminal’.

So it was that with the acceptance of the Gallois report the dominant discourse shifted from
La politique de la demande
to
La politique de l’offre
, from the Keynesian economics of pre-Thatcherism to the supply-side economics of post-Thatcherism. In using phrases like ‘competitiveness pact’ Hollande is turning his back on his nation’s atavistic Keynesianism and towards a future more favourable to business.

Why did Sarkozy not drive all this fiscal reform? It was supposed to be the flashy, dynamic ‘Rolex’, as he was known, not the soft, flavourless ‘Gouda’ who would kick France into the twenty-first century. Surely a man like Hollande would prove a liability for anyone hoping to make any money in this country? He was, after all, the politician who in 2006, during a live debate on national TV with Sarkozy’s defence minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, said, ‘Yes, I don’t like the rich. I admit it.’

Later asked to justify his words, he had the presence of mind to quote the eternally consensual Charles de Gaulle
who at the end of his life admitted to André Malraux, ‘The only adversary I had was money, which never ceased to be a step ahead of me.’

Hollande is witty and quick off the mark, and his slip about the rich has not seemed to hamper his career in any way whatsoever. I’m amazed by this, and amazed that someone like Laurent does not hold it against him. I try to imagine how someone in the finance sector in Britain would react to a politician who admitted to disliking rich people.

Laurent points out that hostility towards the wealthy is the air we all breathe in France. The taboo here is not to dislike the rich but to want to
be
rich. He remembers a close girlfriend of his, one of the lovely creatures he brought with him to the Broken House, in fact, who once remarked how stinking rich someone was.

‘But it’s alright,’ she added. ‘He inherited
his
wealth.’ (Whereas Laurent only
made
his.)

‘How is that alright?’ Laurent inquired.

‘He hasn’t exploited anyone to get his.’

Laurent’s friend is a highly educated Parisian woman from a bourgeois intellectual family. Her remarks are pure ideology; an ideology that spans all classes because it is part of France’s very identity, her mythology, the fabric of her selfhood. How to change this unless by stealth? And who better to act by stealth than a left-wing politician who admits to disliking the rich along with everyone else?

Ella says that it was hard for her to own up to voting for Sarkozy in 2007.

‘All my friends, except for the few that I met at business school, are left wing. They’re all from relatively wealthy families working in the media, the arts, law, education, politics. No one I can think of has parents in business and they all vote as their parents do. When I say I voted Sarko the first time around they squeal with disgust.’

Disgust is the key word. For most French people, Sarko stank of money, or at least the desire for it; and not the right kind of money, either: new money. That is why his Rolex became his emblem.

I asked Ella why she didn’t vote for him a second time.

‘I just couldn’t. Not when he started flirting with the National Front. That was it for me.’

When in November 2010 Sarkozy launched his
so-called
‘national debate’ on the question of French identity it turned out to be the launch pad for a long-term strategy of purloining votes from the far right. The end result of this tactic was 18 per cent of the vote going to Marine Le Pen’s National Front in the first round of the 2012 presidential elections. In vain had people in his party warned him to stop banging on about immigration and halal meat every five minutes and to try to talk about policies. In February 2011 he launched another ‘national debate’ on the ‘place of Islam in France’, strong in the knowledge that a Franco-German poll on the subject had revealed a staggering 42 per cent of French people believed Islam to be a threat to the nation. In April 2011 he went ahead and banned the burqa.

Unlike the law of 2004, which had banned the Islamic headscarf (
hidjab
) in French state schools, the wording of the law against the burqa was deceptive and underhand. ‘No one may, in a public place, wear a garment designed to conceal the face.’ No mention this time of religion, or values, or of that sacred cow,
la laicité
. The campaign surrounding the ban was purposefully ambiguous and designed to suggest that this was not so much about Islam or French identity as it was about some undefined form of practicality. The campaign slogan ‘
La République se vit à visage découvert
’ can only be loosely translated into English as ‘We live the Republic with our faces uncovered/without a mask.’ It was not surprising in this context that a list of exemptions to the law had to be drawn up and would include motorcycle couriers, carnival revellers and people with bird ’flu. One could not help wondering, too, about someone like Lady Gaga.

I objected utterly to the ban because I didn’t see how you could fight the oppression of women who are forced to wear something by forcing them not to wear it. It just felt like another layer of oppression to me. Jack and Ella were of course in favour of the ban for, being predominantly French, they saw the burqa as a
symbol
of oppression.

On this, as on many things, we agreed to differ.

In his thirst for power, Sarkozy went too far to the right and lost his centre. His idea was to keep pressing the tender area of French Islamophobia in order to pilfer votes
from Marine Le Pen and then, at the last minute, move back into the centre. His own moral bankruptcy prevented him from seeing that France, for all her love of pleasure, is still a deeply moral nation where ideas are precious to whomsoever they may belong.