Would you hire this man? (rioting French layabouts)

Let's see if we have this right: French kids are rioting because they can't have jobs for life?

Here is how I understand last week's wave of marches, riots and blockades in the land of loitering existentially in smoky cafés while making meaningful hand gestures:

Lots of over-educated youths with too much black in their wardrobes are desperate to dress up in balaclavas and bandannas and torch things because (now let me word this correctly) they are disillusioned that their government wants to help them get jobs, because when you get a job there is a big danger you might one day lose it, especially if you are crap at it.

I could have sworn that not long ago French youths were rioting because, thanks to workplace-protection laws so rigid you could dry your pantalons on them, no one under the age of 65 can break into the job market (unless their grand-père is head of the Union of Permanently Picketing Fonctionnaires, in which case there is always room for one more shop steward).

France's youth unemployment rate is consequently a staggering 23 per cent. The government's solution is this: In order to ease employers' worries about hiring graduates and then being stuck with them, regardless of their competency, for life, a new law will allow them to fire anyone under the age of 26 with fewer than two years on the job.

It is this law, designed to help students find work after university, that has them aux barricades. One minute French students are rioting for jobs, the next they are rioting because they might actually get a job but be required to perform well to keep it. How swiftly indignation adapts to circumstance.

Any anthropological textbook will tell you (using longer words) that France is a strange land with weird traditions. A few years ago, French prostitutes went on strike and took to the streets against plans to limit their soliciting. This protest was followed by a full-scale walkout by France's stilt-walkers (I'm serious!).

So perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that France's students are rioting before they have even got the jobs they are rioting about. Only the French could come up with the pre-emptive riot. Call it French Exceptionalism. Where else would you see a 12-metre banner demanding Regularisation?

The networks are loving the "romance" of "the heady scent of revolution, black coffee and Gauloises."

"French student power has an impressive record," the BBC drooled, gushing on about "the delicious sense of people power" as McDonald's gets trashed.

One young revolutionary was quoted as saying, "[This new fascist law the government is proposing] means that when I do get a job I will basically have to work as hard as I can to keep it!" (My emphasis, his accent).

What was that thing Francis Fukuyama said about the "Last Man," who so cannot bear having nothing to revolt against that he revolts against his own liberty? Well, I'm no Fukuyama (I never change my mind about something and sell books about it), but I've got two big things to say, and here they are:

First, it's impossible to ignore the fact (though everyone seems to be doing it but me) that it's cool to protest, and that's why a lot of people, especially young people, do it (about anything). Every teenager knows how "It's not fair!" What they don't know is that, as Derek Jeter once wrote, "The World Is Not Always Fair." C'est la vie.

Staging sit-ins or building blockades in university canteens doesn't have to have any more meaning than the fact kids are dyeing their hair blue and sitting cross-legged in snack shops — big deal.

As for the violence part, well, let's face it, it's fun to lob flaming things at people you don't know, especially if your country refuses to go to war with anyone ever (even when it gets invaded) and, unlike, say, the United States, you rarely get the opportunity to formally lob flaming things at people you don't know. "I had nowhere to go but the streets!"

But the thing that really irks me is how, as my friend (who edits a magazine) put it, "It's like '68 all over again, only this time the French students are demanding a decently paying middle-management job and mid-range Citroën for all! What gives?"

One report quoted Marion, a girl full of that ever-present "indignation," saying, "I haven't studied hard to get nothing at the end of it. I've earned the right to a secure job."

The French are so wedded to the public sector that the Fifth Republic is, in essence, nothing more than a prenup. If the government breaks the terms of the deal, the rioters can construct a Sixth Republic and the government gets nothing. Zéro.

Has everyone forgotten what La France is all about? A couple of years back a book appeared on France's bestseller lists called Bonjour Paresse: De l'art et la nécessité d'en faire le moins possible en entreprise (Hello Laziness: The Art and Importance of Doing the Least Possible in the Workplace).

"Finally," ran a review in The New York Times, "instead of dissembling behind ambiguous notions of Gallic joie de vivre, someone in this leisurely land has declared outright that the French should eschew the Anglo-Saxon work ethic and openly embrace sloth."

Author Corinne Maier "worked" for years at the state-owned Electricité de France. Here are some excerpts from her manifesto:

"What you do is pointless. You can be replaced from one day to the next by any cretin sitting next to you. So work as little as possible and spend time (not too much, if you can help it) cultivating your personal network so that you're untouchable when the next restructuring comes around."

"You're not judged on merit, but on whether you look and sound the part. Speak lots of leaden jargon: People will suspect you have an inside track."

"Make a beeline for the most useless positions (research, strategy and business development), where it is impossible to assess your `contribution to the wealth of the firm.' Avoid `on the ground' operational roles like the plague."

"Tell yourself that the absurd ideology underpinning this corporate bullshit cannot last forever. It will go the same way as the dialectical materialism of the communist system."

France's latest "revolution" is its most embarrassing yet. Not even a strike by stilt-walking prostitutes could rival this effort. Expect to read about it next week.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dominic Hilton is a British freelance writer based in Philadelphia. He has just completed his first book, This Is The World.

"Seriously, are you for real? 'What Muslims?'"

Yes, I am completely serious.

Here, people look at 10% of French being of North African descent and they say "Muslims".
That is as accurate as saying that France is "87% Catholic".
Religion is an idea. It is not inherited like skin color. It is either learnt and accepted, or not learnt.
The parents and grandparents of the Beurs in France are Muslim, but are the Beurs?
10% of the population, more or less, is Beur.
And of them, less than half practice any religion at all.
Perhaps 80% of the French are baptized.
Maybe 20% of the French are actually Catholic, in terms of actually believing the religion, or attending Church more than once a year (if that).
To be a Muslim, of the sort that threatens the country, requires actual belief. If one uses that as the standard, at most 5% of the population is really Muslim, and that number differs by sex. Religion is passed along by females, generally, not males.
In France, there is some Islam, and a smaller subset of radical Islam, but half the Beurs are secular.

That's why I say "What Muslims"? 4 or 5% of the population are going to take over?

"No flame intended, but you're missing the point. If the medical system in France is just terrific, wonderful. But it has to be paid for one way or another. Either the individual pays for it out of his own pocket or the government picks said pocket-taxes-and pays for it. The disadvantage of the latter is that the individual who takes care of himself has to help bear the burden of those who don't. There is no free medical care any more than there is a free lunch."

This is true, but there are ways to compare the costs of medical systems. France has a private health care provider system, with universal public health insurance. America has a private health care provider system, with partial public health insurance for retirees (Medicare), partial public health insurance for the poor (Medicaid), private health insurance, and 40 million uninsured.

The direct comparison of quality can be made by comparing results, such as infant mortality, or life expectancy, or survival rates from major illnesses. France has better infant mortality and life expectancy than America does, and comparable rates of survival. So, the two systems are of comparable quality, or the French system is better at some things, the American, at others, depending on how finely one wishes to screen it. Given relatively equal outcomes overall, one can then look straight to the PERCENTAGE OF GDP SPENT ON HEALTH CARE.

And here, it is not close.
The French and American systems have approximately the same standard of care.
But France's system of health insurance finance causes French health care costs per capita to be 10% of GDP.

The US spends 16% of GDP for a comparable or lower standard of care.

Alors: the conclusion one can draw is that the French are much better businessmen, and have much greater economic skill and understanding when it comes to medicine, because they do the same thing the Americans do, at less than half the costs.

Yes, there is a price to be paid for health care.
And in France, that price is smaller than the US.

So, should the US adopt the French system?
Logically, yes.
But America CAN'T.
Structurally and psychologically, Americans cannot tolerate that sort of massive concentration of power and money into government. Also, there is no particular reason to believe that the American government health care agencies would be as competent as the French government agencies are, again for cultural reasons.

In France, the very highest and most prestigious positions in the society are...the top jobs in the Civil Service! And so, in France, the best and the brightest in the country actually aspire and compete for the Civil Service School (ENA - the Ecole Nationale d'Administration). In France, "Harvard" is like a French "Annapolis" for Civil Servants.
So, those who, in America, would be aspiring to be hired by Goldman Sachs out of Harvard Business School, are instead dreaming of one day being the Minister of Health, or the Minister of Finance.

Wherever you concentrate your best intellectual capital you have the best results, and France concentrates its intellectual capital very heavily into government.
America, um, DOESN'T.

What that means, in a nutshell, is that the French Minister of Health is someone who would be, in America, the equivalent of a graduate of the Wharton Business School and Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government who runs Goldman Sachs, something like that. But the head of the American Health Care Financing Administration and his staff are, no doubt, well-meaning people, but they are not the elite intellects of society.

This is another reason why the two systems are not translatable. France has a royal monarchical tradition. Service to the State is the highest and most prestigious service, and the French routinely trade higher incomes for greater prestige in the civil service. Americans are the opposite.

In America, health care finance is largely done by senior doctors who have moved up to the role of administrators of hospitals and programs. To the French, this would be exceedingly strange. A senior doctor is the most skilled surgeon. Surely, he should be doing MORE operations, not less, and spending his time in the operating room with students, so he can pass along his superior skills. What the hell does he know about running financial programs and negotiating business contracts for equipment and janitor services. Indeed, why the hell would he even WANT to do that, given that he chose to be a medicine man and not an administrator or businessman.
But that is French thinking, where everyone is a specialist.

Anyway, the bottom line is that I don't think the original poster was missing the point. The French health system is terrific, and has the same or better results across the board than the American system, and it costs 55% LESS than the American system. It's simply better.

Now, can the AMERICANS learn from the French here?
I am skeptical. I think that giving American civil servants that sort of power would be a recipe for calamity. America is not France, and France is not America, and it's not simply a difference in money, but in mindset. Now, if the American MILITARY were to run things, yes. Because that is comparable. The American professional military out of Annapolis and West Point have that level of professionalism and non-economic committment that the French out of the Civil Service School have. But could the Civil Service mindset be transplanted to America? God no! It's contrary to the American people's whole ethos. Can American-style employment-at-will doctrine be transplanted to France? God no! French bosses would turn the workplace into the tyranny that it used be in France before the labor laws.

"East is East, and West is West, and ne'er the twain shall meet." - Rudyard Kipling.

"Funny how the communist totalitarians are held in great esteem while the fascist totalitarians are abomination.
Communists snicker at the pathetic body count that the fascists were able to roll-up. No beats the communists at murdering millions with very little complaints in the media.
Funny how that works."

It depends on the context of the country, of course.
The Communists IN FRANCE were the only ones out there resisting the Nazis while the French Right was collaborating with them.
Of course Stalin and Lenin, et al, were butchers, but really, does one expect anything different from Russians?

The French Communists fought the Nazis while the Right cooperated with them to harness up the French workers for the Nazi war machine. That is the history of France, and the reference point that the French really care about.

So, within FRANCE, there is a different dynamic. You had the military and the French right go over to the Fascists and become fascist. And you had the French Communists resist until 1944. Once the Americans were ashore and the Germans were on the run, everyone in the country was a "resistant".

Nobody was ever really fooled by this. There remained the truth, which was that the Communists fought the enemy, while the corporatists and the French Right collaborated with them. French Jews have always been very far to the Left, and supportive of the Communists IN FRANCE, and this is why.

This was all within living memory, and many politicians constructed histories for themselves in World War II. The French men of the Right who really resisted, for the most part were over with de Gaulle and were military. La Resistance IN France, at least in 1941, 42 and 43, was Communist. The Right was operating the factories and deporting the Jews.

Other things went on elsewhere in the world, but obviously what Communists did in Russia or China is not relevant in France. To the French, what matters is what the French Communists did, and what French Communists did was fight Nazis, and fight French fascists, and save Jews (many of whom then became Communists).

Cleary the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a different thing, but that's a faraway foreign country. Within France, the Communists emerged from World War II as having been the true heroes WITHIN France during the war.

Communists in France might have had totalitarian ideals, but they never held power in France. They fought Nazis. Fascist totalitarians DID hold power in France, and Frenchmen enslaved and murdered Frenchmen, as the government, in service of those ideals of the hard Right.

Therefore, OF COURSE Communism has a better reputation in France than Fascism does. The Communists were national heroes. The Fascists were traitors.

You say "No-one beats the Communists at murdering millions". The French Communist Party didn't "murder millions". French Communists killed NAZIS. French FASCISTS killed Frenchmen of all stripes.

You can't tar the French Communist Party with the murders of the Russian Communist Party. It's like saying "No one beats lynching black people like whites." Too broad a brush. When did the Italians ever lynch black people? They're white.
When did the French Communists murder anybody?

Is it guilt by association?
Why is that? Because the Soviet Union was big but France is relatively small, and therefore the French Communists were simply obedient vassals of Russia? Is that how it works with French Communists? Just like French people of the right have always been lock-step obedient vassals of America?

Not to put too fine a point on it, Russia is the Arkansas of Europe. France is the New York of Europe. The Russians had a Communist party that behaved barbarically - what can one really expect of Russians? The French had a Communist Party that behaved like Frenchmen. Americans, locked in their Cold War mindset, paint with that broad brush, but the fact remains that French Communists were heroes of World War II, and the French Right were the traitors. Nothing that went on in Russia or China, which had nothing to do with France or French Communist, detracts from the French Communist Resistance.

French Communists killed Nazis.
They did not collaborate at all.
That's what places them among the French heroes of World War II.
The French know this.

The French Right divided, and the larger part collaborated with the Nazis.
The French know this too.
That's why corporatism and the Right is more suspect in France than the Communists and the Left are.

You pointed out what you perceive to be a double standard in the French treatment of Communists and Fascists. But there is no double standard. Communists fought hard for France and did not mass murder French people. Fascists governed Vichy France and operated France as an enslaved economy in the service of the Third Reich.

The French don't compare the two, because there's nothing to compare. The French Communists were the good guys. The French Fascists were the bad guys. There isn't any equivalence or equivocating between the two positions.
Of course, therefore, Communists in France had a great deal more prestige coming out of World War II than the corporatist Right. The French Communists were national heroes, full stop. The corporatist Right were murderous traitors, full stop.
In France, in World War II, Communists = Good Guys fighting for France. Right Wing Fascists = Bad Guys fighting for Hitler.
The comparison could not be more stark.

Why do you suppose French Jews practically as a class were very pro-Communist in and following World War II? Is it because Jews are stupid idiots? Or is it because the Jews saw, correctly, that the French Communists were fighting the good fight against the French Fascists who were with the Germans?

There isn't anything to be sarcastic about.
Yeah, it sure would be bad if the French Communists had engaged in violent repression of French people. If they had, that would have sharply balanced the equation, and they wouldn't have been heroes of World War II.
But they DIDN'T, and that's the point.
The Communists fought AGAINST Hitler.
The Corportatists fought FOR Hitler.
It is as simple and as stark as that.
And that's why Communism enjoyed prestige in France, and even those people (like me) who realize that their economic ideas are hopeless recognize that they were brave and fierce defenders of France.
It's why Fascism and Corporatism are much more despised in France. It was a substantial portion of the Right who were the quislings. So the Right's legacy in France coming out of World War II was partly of resistance at the end (De Gaulle), but mostly of cooperating with Hitler and then pretending not to have done so after the war.
The Communists were patriots, full stop.

Today, everybody knows that capitalist economics are the way forward, and the Communist economic agenda cannot work.

But there remains, among the old, the residual loyalty to the Communists because they were the vast majority of organized loyalists to France fighting for France in France during the darkest years of the occupation.

Americans hate Communists full stop, for their ideology.
The French reject Communist economic ideology, but CAN'T hate the French Communists, because the French Communists were the heroes of World War II, the ones WITHIN France who fought for France. The Right sold the country out.

"The Communists IN FRANCE were the only ones out there resisting the Nazis while the French Right was collaborating with them."

Er, no. I beg to disagree here.

As John Lukacs says in his book "The Last European War" the first resistance movements were organized on patriotic grounds, not political ones, by right-wing groups. De Gaulle was certainly not a Communist, and many of those who joined him in the Free French Forces or in the Resistance were not Communists either.

As for Communists, THEY started opposing what they saw as a capitalistic war between the French and German peoples, and they kept accusing the French RIght to have devious plans to bring Germany and the Soviet Union - then best buddies, let's keep this in mind - on a collision course.

In autumn, 1940, at the height of the Communists-Nazis honeymoon, three leaders from the Communist Party (which had been outlawed by the legitimate right-winf French government) asked the German Gross Paris command for an authorization to publish "L'Humanité", their newspaper again, under German supervision.

Sure, lots of French Communists tore their party card in half in august 1939 when the Soviet Union signed a very profitable pact with Nazi Germany, a pact that ensured Germany would be able to attack Poland with Soviet help, and France without having to fear a second front. No doubt these honest people, justifiably outraged, joined the resistance movements.

And sure, lots of Communists entered the Resistance AFTER Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, when they were asked to do so by STalin. The very same people who opposed the war in 1939, sabotaged French armament factories in 1939-1940 and sometimes deserted (like Communist Party leader Maurice Thorez), the very people who could not be made to fight for France would rather fight for the Soviet Union.

As for Vichy, while it certainly attracted a very right-wing crowd that loathed the Republic and everything it stood for, let's also remember that it was a natural home for a man like Jacques Doriot, who advocated a complete co-belligerency of Vichy France at Nazi Germany's side, and was himself, surprise, a former Communist.

Franchement, I cannot let all this pass without a little commentary. France is not a country of personal freedom:

A) freedom of speech does not exist (hate speech laws, anyone? Ask Brigitte Bardot); note also that newspapers are funded by the government, there is no truly free press in France (instead, the government "ensures diversity of the press" by ensuring that papers can't fail by subsidizing them heavily). The irony there is that it's far more expensive to buy a paper in France than in the US...

B) The government controls 53% of the economy, has enacted extremely rigid labor laws which make it nearly impossible to become an entrepreneur and make it illegal to work at more than one full-time job. (note Vicomte (and God almighty, how I hate royalists---believing in superiority based on accident of birth, although I suspect you must be a Gaullist)-- in the US, most of the people who work at more than a full-time job do it by choice, either to gain enough to achieve a certain dream, or to get a new venture off the ground).

C) Taxes are so confiscatory and regulation so onerous that none of your personal capital is truly your own. Don't believe me? Try evicting a non-paying tenant in France. You will still pay your mortgage, but the tenant doesn't have to pay you and you can't make them leave. There's always a way to be allowed to stay---get pregnant, become unemployed, you name it. Taxes are so ridiculously heavy that the black market is the thriving part of the economy in France. Polish plumbers were the latest bugaboo of the French, not because they'd displace legitimate French plumbers, but because those French plumbers would lose their lucrative under-the-table payments. Domestic workers were so notoriously paid under the table that the government had to come up with a freakishly byzantine tax incentive structure to get people to pay legally. French employees have very low salaries because they don't want to pay the taxes on salary, so they get paid "in nature" instead---with paid-for vacations, cars, etc., which the government approves of because it bases medical benefits payments on salary and would have to pay out more on higher salaries. Don't even start with the series of CDD (temp) jobs with which many French are stuck---because no one wants to hire anyone they cannot fire. The country is reaching SOL time, but refuses to acknowledge the need for reform, something the Germans have at least learned.

Per your latest comment, Fascists and Communists are merely two sides of the same coin (although the communists are still going strong in France)---giving up personal control of your life to the government is common to both, just as it is common to current French society. Given your obvious deficiency of understanding on matters economic, there are some French authors with whom you must be sadly unfamiliar, including one of the most brilliant: Frédéric Bastiat (see here). Seriously, the French model is fated to collapse, just as the Soviet Union was fated to collapse, because the economic model is simply untenable. Not surprising that the French understanding is so skewed when even the so-called "right-wing parties" in France are far to the left of the left parties in the rest of Europe. Check out the chart in the current issue of "L'Expansion" for yourself if you don't believe me.

The young are protesting because they are fearful of globalization, fearful of uncertainty and fearful of risk, period. You have obviously been too long out of France to have your finger on the pulse anymore. It is a country run as a nanny state for its infantilised citizens (see La Grande Nurserie : En finir avec l'infantilisation des français). And I say all of this as someone who is very very worried about the state of France and who has a stake in seeing it succeed.

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