After years of econo-racist put downs about France from wild-eyed libertarian, nutcases, a country with a great quality of life and a degree of balance, gets its revenge. France has narrowly avoided recession this quarter with the only growing GDP in Europe, outstripping both the UK and Germany.
Sure setting up a company is a nightmare in France, and it is living in its past, culturally. But it is not exactly Communist, with the word’s largest retail chain after Walmart, and living in a glorified museum isn’t so terrible. Workers are more productive in France than the US (GDP per hour worked), and you actually get vacation time. Its social healthcare system provides more comprehensive cover than the patriotically championed UK National Health Service and is twice as efficient as the US’s virtually non-existent one. The veiled racism (no pun intended) about the dangers of Islamification of France and of anti-Semitism, forget that there are more Jews in France than anywhere else in Europe (twice the Jewish population of the UK) and it is still the most secular nation in Europe, which is much more secular than the US. Most important of all, however, it is a country famous for food, wine and sex. Far more fun than working 50 weeks a year, eating fried food and being preached at.
France is a nice place to live. It will be interesting to see how long it is before half of the 200,000 French living in London question what it has to offer without money, and I give Loic Lemur 6 months before he returns from an agreeable, but ultimately parochial, Bay Area.
David, you don’t know what you’re talking about and got pretty much all your counter arguments wrong.
Carrefour established its dominant position because of restrictive zoning laws vastly amplifying first mover advantage built 40 years ago. France hourly productivity is about at America’s level because France maintains an enormous amount of less productive people unemployed through welfare and rigid employment laws, and those who work do so many less hours per year. Laïcité is quite different from “regular” secularism as it actively infringes on freedom of religion. Confusing it for tolerance demonstrates, well, confusion. There’s food and wine as good as France’s in quite a few countries. France’s healthcare system is bleeding $10B+ Euros a year and yet people wait months to get to see a “specialist” doctor as they’re called over there.
It’s a nice country to live if you’re loaded and retired, that is. Your vision of the country is a collection of cliches quite remote from reality. If France was a functional country at all, it wouldn’t have the highest anti-depressant drug use worldwide. I dare you to go and spend 2 years over there, employed by a local company on 1,500 euros a month to confront your shiny postcard to facts. Then you’ll get to pontificate about “quality of life and balance.”
Olivier – I have lived in France, and my wife is French. I have also lived in the UK and I have also lived in America. So if I still don’t know what I’m talking about then my perceptive ability isn’t that great.
There are many things wrong about all three places, but France gets a bad rap and isn’t all bad. But I do wish Sarkozy would live up to his original promise and dismantle the endemic culture of entitlement and complacency that plagues France and really only benefits middle class, white, lazy people.
I should add that religious tolerance and freedom of religion is a meaningless concept, because it often means having to tolerate intolerance itself. I believe in tolerance rather than freedom of religion, i.e. unreason (faith).
Bonjour.
About sex.for me,It is an anglo saxon phantasm.It amuses them it seems (lol ).Even if french are probably less “cold” than english.(less a Protestant culture.Despite John Calvin was french. Jean Cauvin).
About economy,english are the world champion to criticize france. Nevertheless it is probable that we will be less massacred by the world crisis than brits(see the title) .But we have too rigid labor laws,it is true.
I recall for example that France owns 45% of Airbus,more than 60% of Ariane espace(the most profitable launcher of satellites). And that we have the 3th stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.
Thanks for your article.
David, the problem of your post is that you went after right wing talk radio red herrings. Who cares that France is not strictly “communist”? (China isn’t either.) It still feels that way when you’re crushed by taxation and feel daily pressure from everywhere about what you can and cannot say, think or do. Try launching a small business when the overwhelming feedback is “you’ll fail” and “why don’t you work as a civil servant?”
Fact is, it’s a saddening, maddening country for anyone not blessed with connections who’d want to make it through hard work. Your vision of France just doesn’t reflect how it feels to many from the inside. I don’t think the fact your wife is French and you lived there makes your perspective less outsider-ish. If your argument is that France is great for Russian billionaires on the riviera, then yeah, knock yourself out.
Believing in good faith that mini Chirac would do anything meaningful about the country’s many deep-seated problems displays your pleasant yet misplaced optimism about the country. But then Sarko fooled quite a few Frenchmen too so maybe you’re not so bad at understanding the soul of the country. I’m thinking you have Stockholm syndrome 🙂
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