Posted on 03/31/2006 9:34:50 AM PST by the anti-liberal
I just don't know what to say about all that. A country without a real partition between the entrepeneur and the gov't beauracrat is really just not a free, modern country, IMO. Too bad, actually, since I think at one time France had a very effective inventor class (over a 100 years ago?)
It wasn't until I learned just recently about their arrangement of 'permanent' jobs that I realized why they're so snooty - they have no fear of losing their jobs and so can be as rude and as snooty as they please.
I always thought it an odd 'French' thing, but now it actually makes sense.
"Too bad, actually, since I think at one time France had a very effective inventor class (over a 100 years ago?)"
France still does well at high science, because high science is not an entrepreneurial activity.
Also, sole proprietor and family entrepreneurial enterprises do very well indeed in France. They are one of the most successful pillars of the economy. All of those bakeries and butcher shops, antiquaries and paper sellers and the like, which populate every town corner and which the French vastly prefer, and patronize, in preference to the supermarket culture of other places: these are almost entirely family enterprises. They do well.
The problem arises the instant one wishes to expand past one's self and a very small work-force. There are allowances made for small artisanal shops perhaps the size of a bakery. But the instant that one begins to combine capital enterprises, one arrives at the threshold where additional employees are necessary. And at that threshhold, the additional burdens are utterly daunting.
And therefore, French entrepreneurialism remains quite bustling, but artisanal. It almost never metamorphosizes into something more...industrial...because the regulatory and legal burdens sharply increase. Small business and family business in France is very profitable, but it all remains small and bustling. Entrepreneurs in France work very, very hard, do as much as they can without hiring any help, and make good money. Virtually every bakery in France is run with an efficiency that would be the envy of IBM. BUT it is rare indeed the bakery that has TWO outlets. Did not Starbucks, the American coffee McDonald's, start as a single coffee house in Seattle?
Most coffee houses in France make much better coffee, and are very profitable. But to turn that into a chain? Ah. That would involve unions, and works contracts, and regulation, and new levels of taxation. It could be done, but it is fatiguing and burdensome. So it only very rarely is. Which means that France is a country full of expertly run small-businesses which will support a family and a few workers, but which will not grow.
I am not sure that this is terrible, really.
But it IS terrible for those few really visionary and aggressive people who want to TRY to make a "French Starbucks". THAT is quasi-impossible. To be an entrepreneur in France is not at all impossible, and in a curious inversion from America, it may in some senses be easier. American cities and business structures very much favor the bigger fish. The same regulations apply to all, and regulators are fierce. In France, the artisanal family businesses largely fly under the radar, and are not so heavily leaned upon and harrassed by the authorities as one sees the pressure placed on small businesses and storefronts by, say, the New York City government. The problem is that there are not nearly so many of these successful small businesses that can transition into being medium sized business. The regulation above the threshold is sudden, massive, and daunting, and suddenly, the inspectors become fouilles-merde. (I guess that needs translation. Imagine someone following someone else and poking through his poop with a stick to see what he ate for dinner the night before. Literally "shit-rifler").
The French are suspicious of capital power.
If it is large and established, then it is a grand enterprise and already regulated and known.
It is the parvenue, the arriviste, the one who starts low and suddenly surges high, and acts like the king of the world...bref, le NAPOLEON...that the French REALLY find distasteful. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker: good guys. The President-Director-General (consider for a moment, if you will, the combination of concepts that goes into the title of a French "CEO") of a grand state enterprise? Well, he is modern nobility.
But Donald Trump or Steve Jobs? He is an ASSHOLE who needs to be reminded that he is no better than anyone else, and that his money does not entitle him to put on airs and give commands as though he comes from importance.
Now, eager Americans encounter France, and have been doing so for years, with big plans about how to transform this beautiful, intelligent, well-built, rich and organized country into, well, something better, bolder, richer, BETTER ORGANIZED!
But that will not come to pass. France is not going to collapse and disappear in a river of poverty and pain. Paris has been a great city for one thousand years. Marseilles, for 2000. Romans, Moors, Germans and Vikings were not able to uproot the place, and neither will some transient economic phases: this too shall pass.
What France needs, and only rarely gets, is a ruler who understands her and works with the way she is. There is an old saying "Do not push the river, it will flow by itself." You can't make it flow faster if you try anyway, but you can sure make yourself tired.
When I look at the situation in France, and read about it on this American board, I see Americans grappling with it as though it is America: There is a PROBLEM! And by God, it must be FIXED! SOON! Or everything will collapse.
There has been a problem in France for 2000 years. There is always a problem. It's not going to be fixed soon. Really, it's not going to be fixed at all. So we have to get through with what we have and do the best we can.
France is as old as China. You can't change China. How many invaders have tried? Only to be dissolved. And you can't fundamentally change France either. Romans, Moors, Vikings, English, Germans...they all tried. They left a mark, but France remained identifiably France, in about the same borders too.
If you go to Paris and look, you will see emblazoned on the buildings and bridges, a shield with a medieval boat on it, a cog. The boat is on the water. There are three fleurs de lys above. This cog and a river, with the trinity of lilies of old France, has been the symbol of Paris in some fashion since time immemorial. Medieval coins bear the same symbol, the mark of ancient Paris. Now, sometimes you will see a device in Latin underneath it or around it "Fluctat nec megritur". What does it mean?
Literally, it means "I fluctuate (ebb and flow), but I do not sink". Now, this Ile de France, this Paris, has had Vikings at the northern gate. It endured. It has been ruled by the English, overrun by the Germans. It endured. It was destroyed by the Romans and rebuilt by the survivors. It endured. It was beseiged by the Germans and reduced to eating house pets, and then a few years later lived under Adolph Hitler and the Gestapo for four years. It endured. The Black Death swept away half of the population, twice. It endured.
Are we to believe, therefore, that due to an unemployment rate that is a few percentage points higher than the United States, that Paris is going to sink and never rise again, unless something radical is done RIGHT NOW? Or ever? Are we really to believe that because of some non-lethal riots and angry protests, that a city and a nation that endured the Gestapo during living memory is going to dissolve and be no more? When I read the opinions here, you would think we were talking about Detroit, and not a city that has endured since the sword of Brennus clashed on the scales at Rome.
The circumstances in France right now are unpleasant politically. The strikes are irritating. There is an excess of street scuffles and some cars burning. Cars burning in the Place de la Concorde, where thousands of people met their deaths on the guillotine is small beer. France is not going anywhere. The economy will probably always lag the Germanics by a bit; it has, off and on, for a thousand years. An unemployment rate that, adjusted to reflect the true comparisons, is 2-3% higher than the Americans, who have always had the most dynamic economy in the world, is annoying. It's an irritant. Governments will come and governments will go trying to find a solution to a perennially unsolvable riddle. Technologies will transform things, for a time; ideas will transform things, for a time, and then the same problems will return.
The sun will rise and fall. Governments and passions will come and go. But a 9% unemployment rate and some immigrant bonfires is not Harold Bluetooth and the Vikings at the gate, and it's not Labienus and the Xth Legion. It's not the Moors, or the English, or the Gestapo. It's certainly not the Black Death. It is momentary ebb in the flow of events, and it is nothing more than that. And France is no more going to become America, or try to, than China will.
Does anybody, anywhere, remember a time when the money wasn't tight and the times weren't hard? No.
There may always be an England. There will certainly always be a France. And everybody in France knows it.
The problems that France faces at the dawn of the 21st Century are the most trivial problems that France has ever faced at the dawn of any century in her two thousand year history since the Roman conquest. They will be dealt with, to the extent things ever CAN really be dealt with, and life will go on.
I should very much like to save all the predictions of the End of France If France Doesn't Accept McJobs!!! that I have read posted on about 50 threads here by very earnest Americans. I should like to put them in a scrapbook, and sit down someday with them 50 years hence over a bottle of wine, in some restaurant in Paris...perhaps even the Tour d'Argent. It has been there, in the same place, open and operating and serving meals, since the Year of Our Lord fifteen-hundred and eighty-eight. Now, General Motors may have disappeared by the time of our meeting there in 2056. And Microsoft may have gone bankrupt, or been dissolved, or been taken over by somebody else. But I will bet you a meal in the Tour d'Argent (which by then should probably cost $100,000, since today it costs about $500 for a setting), that we will be able to sit in the Tour d'Argent 50 years hence, or 100 years hence, and it will still be in the same place, still serving fine food and wine. And when we are sitting there, grey and bent and old, you can pull out whatever paper has replaced the Wall Street Journal and, full of fire, you can urgently entreat me to lend you my ear as you tell me how if France does not change its business model its businesses and the country will never possibly be able to survive in this every changing and turbulent world. And I will sip my wine and nod my head and look at the gargoyles of Notre Dame, the same ones I marvelled at as a kid...the same ones Victor Hugo marvelled at as a kid...the same ones Henry V marvelled at after Agincourt when he was certain that the English flag and his dynasty would forever fly securely over Paris...and I will still annoy you by suggesting that France is probably not going to follow the route you are suggesting, is probably going to meander along in its own serpentine path, like the Seine, is probably going to remain 3% points behind. And will still have better croissants.
Fluctat nec megritur.
I figured my last right up the thread will either inspire you or very intensely annoy you, so I am pinging you to it and, very modestly, referring you to myself.
Ecellent post. I have noted the Innkeepers worked long hours.
A day wasted is one where I don't learn something. Thanks for the insight into the French capitalist mind.
(I think too many of get our view of France from Mel Brooks movie, "History of the World"
As I was thinking about what I wrote and the tenor of these threads, and driving home to my house in Connecticut, I thought on an analogy. Being that I am American and also French, you will excuse me if I take the part of the French in this, and speak to you as the American.
I think that much of the difference between France and America, and between the Americans and the French, can be demonstrated by something very simple and visible.
You build your houses out of wood.
We build our houses out of stone.
Now, building with wood has many advantages to it. Wood is much easier to work with than stone. A new wooden house be be thrown up very quickly and inexpensively, with unskilled labor. A stone house takes much longer, and requires at least a skilled mason to supervise, lest it topple over and kill its occupants.
Wood is cheap. If you want a new wing on your house, you throw it on. If you want to take down a wall and add a porch, you pull it down. The wooden houses of Americans are often greatly expanded affairs, expanded and built upon to fit their inhabitants. A new child is born? A wooden house may have a new bedroom, or two, and a bathroom tacked on all quickly and quite economically. You shape your wooden houses to suit your families and your lives at the moment.
Stone is expensive and quite permanent. Having built a stone house, one rarely, if every, expands it or tears out walls. Such modifications must be planned, and the money saved for many years before doing it. When you live in a stone house, you shape yourself to it, because it is very difficult and expensive to change anything about it. An extra bedroom or bathroom would be nice with an extra child, but it cannot be afforded. And so the family arranges itself to fit snugly within the house that is. They dream of someday maybe modifying it a little, but even the changes must be modest because of the cost. We shape our lives to fit into our houses of stone.
Your wooden houses are warmer than our stone houses. It takes more energy to heat stone houses than wooden houses, and stone is always a bit colder than wood, by its nature. Also, stone is damper. You are a bit more comfortable and a bit warmer and a bit drier and more expansive in your big wooden houses. We are a bit more cramped, a bit chillier, and wear more sweaters in our narrower old stone houses.
Stone is damp, and becomes mossy and sometimes moldy. It is impossible to completely prevent it. The best you can do is scrub it off and keep a lookout, but there is always some mold growing on stone.
Wood rots and falls down. You constantly have to repair your wooden houses. A stone house will turn green with mold, but it will stand there. Termites eat wood, and wooden houses burn down.
Nothing has teeth that can break stone, and stone cannot be burnt down. A whirlwind will knock a wooden house to matchsticks, but will only carry the roof off of the stone house. In the pictures from Hiroshima, the wooden and paper houses are gone and there is a flat wasteland, but there is a stone building still standing, forlorn, roof gone, windows broken out. But still standing.
Wooden houses are transient and impermanent, lasting in many cases less than a human lifetime. They are torn down and built up a and torn down again, to fit changing life.
Stone houses stand there almost forever, and life takes its shape around their bones. Men and families move in and out, and centuries pass, but the stone house is still there, like the spine of the country, with a new family fitting itself into it for a time, making some small changes here and there, perhaps once in a lifetime, and leaving it largely intact for the next generation, and five more after that.
When new technology is discovered, such as plumbing, or electricity, or the telephone, your houses are built around them. The pipes disappear invisibly into shaped walls. Electrical outlets are conveniently located all around, right in the walls, the wires invisible behind wood and think sheets of wood-like boards of plaster. Heating element are vents flush with the ceilings or floors. You build your wooden houses with these things as an integral part.
Many of our old stone houses were standing there before there was any electricity or plumbing or heat other than a fireplace. And so the wires are all there in sight, tracking up the walls, and the pipes are bare and stark. It is clear that these mechanicals are tack-ons to a structure of which they are not an integral part.
You build your houses, too, with plaster boards. Closets have doorways and are tiny rooms. Nobody can build a stone closet without the fortune of a prince. And so our closets sit out in the room, great wooden pieces of furniture. Or things simply sit on shelves. Your clothes and pots and pans are all discreetly tucked away behind doors, but all of our possessions are visible to the world in our old stone houses.
To boil it all down: you build your wooden houses and structures to fit your lives here and now. You throw them up and tear them down carelessly.
We fit our lives into a stone carapace that we inherited from the hundreds and thousands of years that preceded us in the land. The fit is often cramped. We can change the stone skeletons bequeathed to us by our forebears, but only with difficulty and caution, and at considerably greater expense than you have to bear for your wooden houses. Ours don't burn down or rot out, and very seldom fall over, 'tis true, but when yours do, you just throw up another one.
In terms of convenience, comfort, and control of one's space and life, your wooden houses have everything to recommend themselves over our old stone relics (and even the new stone houses, which we keep insisting on building...the cost of which keeps us in apartments much longer than you are in life).
But there's one more thing.
You pay hundreds and thousands of dollars to get on airplanes and fly across the see to see our stone houses.
But we don't fly across the sea to see your wooden ones.
Now, given the choice, and you and we DO both have the choice, we could switch to wood and reap all the advantages of convenience, cost, and ability to tailor our houses to our lives. And you could switch to stone and have the solidity, the safety, the beauty and the permanency that a stone house has by its nature.
But we don't change to wood, and you do not change to stone.
Because we prefer to live the way we have known. We recognize the advantages of wood and the disadvantages of stone, but we choose to go on struggling with our old stone houses anyway, even rebuilding them after they were bombed and we could start anew.
Only your very wealthy opt for stone, and for some reason stone buildings in America often feel pretentious. It is perhaps their scale. You do not build small single family stone houses. That would be far too much investment for such low people on the totem pole, really. But that is what the French live in. And it's part of the secret charm of the country, I think, although I've never heard anybody express it that way.
And this is, I think, a metaphor for so many of the differences between America and France, and the Americans and the French: houses of wood, houses of stone.
Yep!
lol
They would park in the middle of the highway to take photos since no one else is around in the summer for hundreds of miles. Well, almost "no one." Major road hazard if you are driving 60 or 70!
I love Death Valley.
When I lived in California, on weekends I would get into my car and go driving out into the mountains, or out into the desert, just to see it. There was nothing really to do but see it, but it's just magnificent because it's so empty and the air is so clear.
And hot!
Death Valley is expecially beautiful, I remember.
I also remember a place called the Salton Sea, which seemed very odd to me because it was water in the desert, and warm, but hardly anybody was on it in boats, and nobody was swimming in it.
There were houses out there, which apparently had people living in them, but I could not figure out anything that those people could do, other than sit in their small houses with the air conditioning on all day. It was a curious place.
Wow, Vicomte - that is neat! We'd better start a We Love the Mojave Desert FR Club :)
I lived in DV for five years, including two summers. The hottest I experienced was officially 128, but of course it is 5 - 10 degrees hotter out in the salt pan.
Still a few Mansonites living around there, UFOs (ha!)and government experiments (well, I do remember the Stealth being tested there before the rest of the country knew about it), underground nuclear testing (the DOE would call to find out how many body bags might be needed), prospectors and loners and lots of other interesting desert rats, quite an unusual area!
For sure, I miss the silence... the safety, the pure American experience that exists no where else on the planet.
One of the most impressive things I saw on one of those desert drives was some creature walking across the hot desert road. I stopped and got out to look at it, and my eyes had not deceived me. It really was a hairy spider the size of my hand.
A tarantula! They migrate in the Fall to find mates.
Sorry, I had assumed you were from the Hexagon based on your statements. First, I don't think that there is anything wrong or immoral with businesses acting in ways that will help them to make a profit, so long as the activity is legal. They are not primarily social service providers, like the state-owned behemoths of China. Second, I would not assume that a company is going to in every case simply rely for someone who will stay only two years (and now one year) as a mainstay of their workforce and then toss them out. They may in some cases, and they may not in others. There are often benefits to the company's activity and efficiency that come with experience and seniority with people that have proved that they can help and not hurt the company. Third, even if many of these jobs are temporary, it certainly is better for young people, say in the Maghrebian blocs around Paris, to at least have some job experience rather than none at all and remain permanently unemployed, never having had a job in their lives. They will have a fuller resume being able to show some work experience and not just education. Fourth, one can't always tell how a worker will turn out merely on their academic record. It is simply unfair to employers to force them to take a stab in the dark and hire someone without seeing if they will help or hinder the company's economic mission. Fifth, a first job, even if not permanent, can be valuable experience in any career, and so the system should not be designed to discourage employers from taking the risk to hire young people. My first job was in a large law firm in New York. Most of the associates in my class knew that very few of them would end up partners at the firm -- over the years, some go to do other things, some don't want to put in the hours necessary to make partner or build business for the firm, others may be asked to leave for whatever reason. Nevertheless, the experience of working in such an environment with quality work and complicated transactions and cases is invaluable, even to someone who didn't end up in a Wall Street law firm permanently. That experience would be denied if the law firm could only hire people that it had to keep forever. Sixth, a flexible labor market allows for resources to shift away from inefficient or dying industries into new and growing industries. It helps economic growth, which is not a bad thing and helps society as a whole.
Permit me to remind you that without the Americans (twice!) the proud and historically-bound Frenchman would be speaking German and eating sauerkraut.
Also, the propensity in France for businesses to be either very huge or very small is pretty much typical for most of Europe (think of Sweden, for example). Overly regulated States tend to squeeze out the same type of people (innovator class)
France is not going to collapse and disappear in a river of poverty and pain.
I certainly hope not, but I don't think it is wise to trivialize whats happening in the immigrant suburb/ghettos. If France was to clamp down on crime without offering other outlets , like "McJobs to the youth" (or any job), or affirmative action, or access to the elite high schools (which are 95 % old French-blooded Caucasians); they are asking for more riots and more problems down the road (ie a real revolution,not unlike that which you alluded to earlier). Chirac, Villepan et al may be elitists, but they can see whats coming down the road if you dont bring these outcasts into the mainstream, or at least give them hope. (Even Sarkozy agrees with them secretly). You know.. sometimes change is bad, and sometimes its good. Resistance to change out of some misplaced nostalgia is just regrettable, IMO.
In any event, I enjoy your posts.
Thanks for the insight. We'd love more info on what's happening there from FReeper observation. Suffice to say we trust your analysis far over what the papers present.
Really, it all belongs as part of an explanatory post for all FReepers to understand what is happening in France. If I wasn't exhausted from hitting the beach this morning and working on the house for four hours, then signing onto work this afternoon and FReeping in between, I'd repost it myself with your permission. Perhaps tomorrow AM?
It will endure as long as it can persuade other countries, such as Britain and the USA, to come in and save it. Assuming you'd even exist, you'd be speaking German if defending France was left to only Frenchmen in the 1940s.
We'll see if that occurs once again as the Moslems overrun France. Here in the USA, I don't see much enthusiasm building to expend our capital and risk our lives to save it once again.
As you wish.
My opinions are my own. Were this a French site, 30% would agree with me. 30% would say that I was an idiot. 40% would question my credentials to state an opinion. 10% more would vehemently disagree then repost the same ideas with nuanced differences which they would say make them more credible. Yes, this adds up to 110%, because some people would psot two different opinions. Oh, and 2% would FreepMail me to try and get a date.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.