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The majority of students attend universities that do not select on entry and are virtually free (fees are currently under ?200 a year). Any school-leaver with the baccalaur?at is granted a place. Students are packed into overcrowded lecture halls: France spends less per undergraduate each year than it does per high-school pupil. Lecturers are civil servants, employed by the national Ministry of Education. Universities have little autonomy. And much research is done elsewhere, at the national research institutes. Little wonder that France's undergraduate drop-out rate is about two-fifths and that, in the latest global ranking by Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, not a single French university appeared in the top 40.
If the grandes ?coles students have little to worry about, university students are right to be fearful. Young French people not only face a woefully high unemployment rate, they also find it difficult to break out of a cycle of back-to-back short-term contracts. Over 64% of French 15-24-year-olds in work are on temporary contracts one year after leaving education. The reason that these jobs are the best on offer is that permanent jobs are so protected, with complicated and uncertain redundancy rules, that employers hesitate to hire. This is precisely why Mr de Villepin wanted to loosen the firing rules for the young.
The potential trade-off—between less security and more jobs—is not the way the students see it. Nor does public opinion: polls show a majority against the CPE. Many of this week's demonstrators carried banners denouncing not just the new contract, but other liberal evils, such as globalisation and the free market. “I have never felt France so tense and tormented,” said Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister and head of the ruling UMP party. This fear for the future is what distinguishes today's student-led rebellion from that of a generation ago. “May '68 was an offensive movement, carrying a positive vision of the future,” Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the 1968 student leader turned Green Euro-politician, told Paris-Match magazine: “Today's protests are based on the defensive, the fear of insecurity and of change.”
Why do the French seem to fear capitalism? The country's republican revolutionary history bequeathed faith in a strong dirigiste state as a civic religion. Today, nearly 5m French workers, or one-quarter of all jobs, are still in the public sector. Left-leaning intellectuals, with a romantic communist heritage, are not derided but treated as national treasures. There is a lingering culture of suspicion of profit, and a demonisation of business leaders, encouraged by a mainstream left that still equates efficiency with injustice.
The Socialist Party, for instance, is committed to renationalising Electricit? de France (EDF), the state electricity utility, which was partly floated last year. The Communist Party, with its hammer and sickle flag and its grip on the biggest trade union, the Conf?d?ration G?n?rale du Travail, is considered part of the mainstream left. Only assorted Trotskyites and Revolutionary Communists earn a place on the fringe. As Fran?ois Bayrou, a centrist political leader, once put it: "France has never been properly d?Marxis?."
The real world of France is much more complicated, and the weight of the nineteenth century and the dead hand of Marxism are just one-half of the French economic/political puzzle:
Within the private sector, the rules of globalised capitalism are well accepted. France is less unionised than America, and very few days are lost to strikes. Per hour, French workers are more productive than their American counterparts—though they lose out on overall productivity because, thanks to the 35-hour week, they work so few hours. And young French people snap up the loosely protected jobs in bars and caf?s in London, the sort that are being protested about so vigorously in Paris.
Who then is to blame for the gap between the rhetoric and the reality? The short answer is a political class that has repeatedly failed to explain to the French what is at stake and why things need to change. For the past 20 years, the mainstream political choice has been between a form of socio-Gaullism embodied by President Jacques Chirac (who last year described liberalism as a greater threat than communism) and an archaic socialism that fails to understand, or at least to explain, that wealth needs to be created before it can be shared. Such reforms as France has carried out tend to have been introduced by stealth, both by the left and the right. Lionel Jospin, a Socialist ex-prime minister, for instance, managed to privatise whole swathes of industry without ever using the word.
The result, however, is that the credibility of the political word has been undermined. As Michel Camdessus, a former IMF director and author of a devastating criticism of the French model in 2004, put it: “Reform in our country still moves forward with its face masked. Certainly we take action, but we never say why.” So when Mr de Villepin promised last year to keep a 70% holding in Gaz de France (GDF) as a condition of its partial flotation, employees disbelieved him. Instead, they took to the streets to contest what they suspected was a first step towards privatisation. Sure enough, when Suez, a private French company, faced an expected hostile bid from an Italian firm in February, Mr de Villepin stepped in and orchestrated a merger with GDF—even though that will shrink the state's share to about a third.
Where was the politician ready to argue that a Franco-Italian merger could create a new European energy giant, rather than fend off outsiders at any cost? Why was there not a murmur when BNP Paribas, a French bank, marched into Italy earlier that month and picked up an Italian one? Or when L'Or?al, a cosmetics giant, recently snared Body Shop, an iconic British chain. Capitalism, judging by the rhetoric, is for the French only when it suits.
Were all this simply political theatre, it might be little more than a distraction. But the failure to explain is also a failure to create the consensus needed for reform. And the longer reform is postponed, the more painful it will be. The weight of the state, which raises too many taxes, to pay too many civil servants and implement too many rules, is already a drag on economic growth. The French government's overall tax take is 44% of GDP, next to a euro-zone average of 39.5%. The economy grew by a mere 1.4% in 2005, and is only slowly picking up this year. All the while, France is piling up unsustainable debt to prop up its sprawling welfare system. Michel P?bereau, chairman of BNP Paribas, pointed out in a government-commissioned report that if nothing is done about the government debt, it will soar from 66% of GDP today to 100% in 2014. The net result will be a "foreseeable reduction of our capacity to create jobs and wealth."
Reform cannot be accomplished by the ham-handed methods that the never-elected-to-dogcatcher Dominique de Villepin employed when forcing the CPE laws down the union/socialist throats without negotiation. This Napoleon-wannabee is an anachronism in a France which absolutely must undergo the pain of reform to overcome its addictions to an outdated social model that might work in Scandanavia, but is untenable in a nation of 60 million people. So the ruling UMP might find itself defeated by Socialists if they cannot resolve their internal strife while attempting a real change in the national political/economic environment.
Supporters of Mr Sarkozy, who like Mr de Villepin is an aspirant candidate at next year's presidential election (and who preaches a "rupture" with France's social model), tend to regard this as a fruitless trial run that is not worth the political capital. Mr Sarkozy has been careful to distance himself from the prime minister, calling early on for the CPE to be put on hold while negotiations take place.
Had the parliamentary party, and the government, been united behind the prime minister, this stand-off might have been avoided. But underlying the bungled CPE affair is the corrosive power struggle that pits the prime minister against his number two. Mr de Villepin's desire to force through the CPE was guided by his need to establish himself as a man of action, not just of letters, and therefore as a potential candidate for 2007.
Appointed only last May, he had little time to put his plans into place, and in his haste he failed to prepare public opinion or the unions for what he was trying to do. By treating parliament as a plaything, to be dropped at whim, and the unions as optional, he has ended up looking like yet another in a line of aloof political leaders exploiting a system of highly centralised power to impose their way.
Naturally, Mr Sarkozy has lost no opportunity to remind the French that he would have handled things better. "It is not change that the French refuse," he declared in a speech this week, "but reform that they consider unfair." As both men's popularity sink in the polls, however, the greater threat to both is not each other. It is that their self-destructive rivalry enfeebles the political right, and that, in 2007, the Socialists end up victorious.
If the Socialists gain the Presidency, there is a good chance that protectionist barricades against any and all globalization or even Europeanization will prevent France from being part of Europe or the world in any positive fashion. Sarkozy is negotiating with the unions, which refuse to deal with the imperious de Villepin. Chirac is effectively self-neutered. Tomorrow the demonstrations will restart and the next act in France's street theatre will commence. The future of Europe might eventually hang in the balance. Can France reform or fall back into the addictive patterns of its past? Any student of French history will affirm: "Plus ca change....etc."
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