La France vue d'Angleterre

Le Guardian, journal de référence anglais d'orientation centre-gauche, signe un article, certes caricatural (très anglais comme vision...), mais qui contient néanmoins des vérités...

 

Voici de longs extraits, pour le texte intégral, voir le site internet du Guardian:

 

Goodbye to la belle France?

The French seem to have the perfect lifestyle: long lunches, short hours, great food and plenty of ooh-la-la. But their new president is determined to make them work harder, faster, more efficiently - just like the British and Americans. Merde alors, says Stuart Jeffries

 

It was perhaps the second glass of wine that did it. That, or the dessert of millefeuille aux poires. Or it could have been the blanquette, the bourguignon, the pot-au-feu or whatever Le Firmament in the Rue 4 Septembre in Paris's second arrondissement was offering as the day's special. Whatever. After lunch, I would stroll back to my office, shadowing my eyes from the 3.30pm sun, nod off at my desk over the lunchtime edition of Le Monde, to be awoken by my own snoring. Only then, with the proper morosité of a grumpy Frenchman, would I contemplate returning to work. Unless Nicolas from the economics agency across the courtyard came round and asked if I wanted to have a quick beer, which I often did. I had gone native: I didn't live to work, but worked to live. And live well.

 

France, when I worked there at the turn of the millennium, seemed a marvellous place. The Protestant work ethic had been refused a work permit and, if one occasionally had a sense that this decadence had something of the last days of the Roman Empire about it, no matter: this was the way to live. Certainly, if you were middle class and in a secure job, the country had it all. It remains substantially the same. There is still the 35-hour week, for a start, even if new president Nicolas Sarkozy has derided it as a "general catastrophe for the French economy".

 

There is something called making "le pont", which means that if a national holiday falls in the middle of the week, French workers will take off enough days before or after it to extend it all the way to the nearest weekend. Not since Edward Heath's three-day week have the British managed to work so little. And there is none of this American rubbish of two weeks' leave a year in France either: Paris, in particular, is massively depopulated from Bastille Day (July 14) until September as the French head off for at least two months of well-earned eating, drinking, romancing and dozing.

(Of course, to get from Paris's chic arrondissements to the "autoroute du soleil", the Midi and their second homes, those Parisians drive past the horrible flats of the poor citizens of the French capital's banlieues, past people who cannot afford such refined pleasures and are increasingly and understandably seething about the inequalities of Gallic society - but let's not spoil the story.)

 

Then there are the extraordinary public services. Not only does France have the fastest and most efficient trains in the world, but a system of means-tested state childcare that even today makes me green with envy. The poorest French parents can send their children to a state-run creche from 8.30am to 6.30pm for free, while colleagues on similar salaries to mine send their two toddlers to a creche at a cost of €800 (£500) a month, which is inconceivable in Britain. Partly as a result of this humane system, not only does France have one of the highest birthrates in western Europe but also one of the highest proportion of women in the workforce. In France, too, you can cheerfully send your child to the nearest state school without poring over school league tables and boring all your friends with your grasp of the relevant Ofsted report.

 

True, the French pay for such services with higher rates of direct tax than the British electorate appears to tolerate, and the state sector does seem to be populated with people who do not do very much (yet do it very fragrantly), but the fact that the French have chosen such a civilised, civilising state over the barbarities of the US, and delivered good public services with a quality that shames their British equivalents, only shows their commitment to making the revolutionary values of liberty, equality and fraternity real. Or, at least, so it seems if you can blind yourself to the massive problems of unemployment among young people and the poverty and alienation of those French men and women from ethnic minorities.

 

When I worked in Paris, French men who were better groomed than I would ever be would tell me that they ate better, drank better and made love better than I, le pauvre anglais, ever would. And, of course, they were right. They were also more arrogant and considered it their right to drive wildly while drunk. But I forgave them at least the former.

 

(...)

 

It is this France, so beloved and reviled by outsiders, that Sarkozy, if we are to believe his rhetoric, is going to abolish. The horrifying prospect is that the French, so eminently hateable and enviable for producing the world's most calorific food and yet remaining thin, for being so chic that they make even the most put-together Anglo-Saxons look like sacks of spanners, for selling arms to dodgy regimes and then piously criticising Bush's "coalition of the willing" on - the gall! - moral grounds, will throw away the things that make them special for that most boring thing: economic productivity. After his election to the Elysée on Sunday, Sarko, sounding not so much like a Frenchman as a joyless Puritan stepping off the Mayflower, grimly announced: "The French people have decided to break with the ideas, behaviour and habits of the past. I will rehabilitate work, merit and morals." Nicolas, baby, please don't! Please don't take the belle out of la belle France. Please don't make yourselves like us. You won't like it.