Thierry Coste
Author, lobbyist and adviser to Nicolas Sarkozy
The French have the annoying habit of complaining about everything and blaming others for their supposed problems. For example, foreigners who come to France are often accused of loving our country too much! Some natives of France profonde imagine they are living in a sort of besieged citadel with a shortage of boiling oil to pour on the heads of today's invaders. This allergy to the Other makes us so arrogant it would be understandable if we were struck off the list of nations for whom welcome is second nature. But despite that, France remains the prime tourist destination in the world, with tens of millions of foreigners arriving each year. It has to be said that our beaches, countryside and mountains have a diversity and a cultural richness that make others green with envy.
We Gauls tolerate these hordes of foreigners only because we assume they will very soon return to the hell of the planet's cities, leaving behind them a few pennies, pocketed without a flicker of a smile by the locals. The trouble starts if these English, Dutch or German migrants decide to settle in a corner of this Eden, for the rural Frenchman can be the most arrogant homo sapiens there is, execrating these foreigners who "push up house prices" and "snatch all the best properties." Instead of profiting from the economic windfall, for these invaders keep our craftsmen and shopkeepers in business and save many regions of France profonde from depopulation, we try to make their life as difficult as possible with our undoubted talent for Soviet-style technocracy.
Liliane & Michel
Michel is the general manager of a biotechnology company
My wife and I live in Paris. Ten years ago we were proud of working at the top of French industry. Today we no longer dare talk about what we do because many of our fellow citizens would look at us askance. In France, "multinational" is now a dirty word, together with money, profit, capitalism, scientific progress, productivity, pension funds, free market, competitiveness, delocalisation, globalisation, privatisation and the construction of Europe. Before you breathe such words, make sure the person you're talking to shares your point of view. Don't speak too loudly, otherwise you'll be denounced by anyone within earshot. A friend of mine working in the nuclear industry lives the same ghetto-like existence that I do, working in biotechnology. On the other hand you can happily jog along in French society by pumping out phrases like: exception française, organic, inalienable rights, time off, ozone layer, cycle tracks, fair trade, expertise citoyenne, wind farms, hand-harvesting, the precautionary principle (refusing the slightest, usually imaginary risk), anti-American, anti-globalisation, short-contract theatre workers. Indeed, if you say those words loudly and forcibly enough, you'll probably get invited to talk on the television or radio.
Scientists are blacklisted, ridiculed and verbally guillotined, even though the government trots out the mantra about needing to invest in research.
Present-day France has become fearful, unadventurous but at the same time cantankerous and bitter. The country reassures itself by seeking refuge in nostalgia and solutions from our great grandparents. Any initiative is derided. It's the behaviour of people who have too much, clinging to what they've amassed and risking losing the lot.
As a couple, we get our respite travelling abroad. There, we meet people who like to work, who want to create new things, who believe in the future. We also meet other French people who, away from home, speak without fear. And yet, we're happy to return, we say to each other "How beautiful France is—what a lovely place to live!"
Pascal Engel
Professor of philosophy, Sorbonne and Geneva universities
The lasting success of Sempé and Goscinny's Le petit Nicolas, the diary of a schoolboy from the 1960s, owes much to France's nostalgia for its schools, when there were neither Islamic headscarves nor violence towards teachers in class. This spring the rioters who occupied the Sorbonne were trying to mimic the feats of their elders of 1968, but they only succeeded in vandalising the buildings. Is French education a thing of the past? The third republic was called la république des professeurs, but where are the professors today? French universities fare badly in international rankings. They have been compared to those in the third world. No wonder: the grandes écoles, attended by only 4 per cent of the students, get 25 per cent of the total budget for higher education. Do they fare any better than universities? No, because they do not have enough critical mass. Recently, laudable but laughable attempts were made to bring "deprived" children from the tower-block ghettos into these prestigious schools. "Republican elitism" has been replaced by patrician privilege. Everyone agrees with the diagnosis but nothing is done, and candidates in the next presidential election prudently avoid the issue. No one has any interest in changing the system, but there is a simpler explanation. The school mythology in France has always been a story of hardship. We French believe that the more our campuses look like slums and the fewer means available to our academics, the more we flourish. And we do: our mathematicians, who need only computers and paper, are among the best in the world. So if abstract reason wins, there is hope.
Lucie Palanque
Student
I went to school in a working-class lycée, in a tower-block banlieue of Marseille. A lycée labelled "difficult." But, contrary to myth, there was no violence, no racketeering, no drug-dealing. The "difficulty" was social and academic. My teachers did their job well, but the difficulties of these particular students meant they couldn't spend time on any single idea or any particular pupil.
I spent the next year in a preparation class for a grande école, the Sciences Po, but unusually, it was only for students from "difficult" lycées. Some call it "positive discrimination," a perversion of republican equality. But that's not the point: it's a stairway to higher education, without it students from the banlieues have no chance. This prépa comes close to what I think education should be: an opening on the world, the key to understanding. An apprenticeship for thinking. Not training for an exam.
Coming from a bourgeois background but attending a lycée in a "difficult" area helped me understand how much social and racial diversity is necessary in France, but also how complex and perilous that ideal is. The need to integrate the children of immigrants into the intellectual elites is more and more urgent. France, shaken by its neighbours' models of integration, questions its own. The debate rages everywhere, the newspapers are full of it, everyone has his or her own theory of what should be done. But experience of it is rare and the national education doesn't dare talk about it. Having taken part in an experiment to prise open the doors of the grandes écoles, I realise how far there is still to go. Yes, on both sides the mentality is changing, but slowly. We have to understand that immigration is not a curse but a necessity. Only then can young people from immigrant families move freely into the academic and professional worlds. Teaching has to evolve as well, to create alert, wide-awake citizens, not docile, smiling workers. We've got our work cut out.
Nacira Ferdjoukh
Recruitment associate, London
Reconciling oneself with France today is not easy. So attractive when you are there, so off-putting when you are not. From abroad, she allows you to see yourself as you are, you can be yourself; immersed within her, you can't: she makes you love her, then maltreats you, she carries you along, then spits you out.
In the hope that finally she will do something about the corpse of her history, I try to keep alive the forlorn belief that by equality, the second of her mottos, she doesn't mean only her definition of it (French grandeur, French knowledge, French culture, everything Franco-française).
France has never allowed the people from her former empire to be part of her, though she has made herself part of them. So, even as I distance myself from her, I am still waiting for France to share herself with me, to engage in a dialogue.
It would be unfair not to acknowledge her generosity, but for the moment I leave her to her sad fate, even though from abroad she still arouses both passion and hatred in me. That is France, who has not known how to establish a dialogue with her immigrants. Today's France must renew herself and no longer blow on the ashes of her past. So I place myself between the dead culture of the land of my birth (Algeria), the dying culture of the land that welcomed me as a child (France) and the evolving culture of my adopted land (Britain). I am searching for a living language that will speak for all "my lands."
Jacques Godfrain
Mayor of Millau, MP for the southern Aveyron
Strange country, which bears a girl's name. Do you know any English girl called Great Britain? Or Cambodian girl called Cambodia?
Strange country, her history written in stone: a beautiful country, birthplace of so many inventors, engineers, artists, writers and mathematicians. Land of cathedral-builders and of modern technological marvels (the Millau viaduct).
Strange country, France: home of the rights of man, land of refuge, welcoming people escaping war and revolution.
Strange country, full of history yet turned towards modernity, its landscapes a scaled-down version of the whole planet, love of food part of its heritage.
This France who, like a shameless girl, lifts the veil on her past to the tourists' gaze.
This France who listens, who exists, who rebels; this France eternally seeking, yet never finding, her identity; in love for a day, she deceives her great men, for she adores change; her lovers are many and they write her history.
She is unsatisfied, never happy, queen for a day, she always wants to win.
She pillories her losers, showers her winners with praise; she has the ability to exist in the world simply because the world knows full well without France's influence there is only void.
Her clothes are old now, she has put on a little weight. Behind her seductive smile she hides her wounds, called unemployment, insecurity, exclusion. She keeps her head high, wants to be present everywhere, France is proud. She knows that tomorrow is already today, she knows she must gather her children together, accepting their differences.
This tolerant France, this truly strange country, has put her money on the future and will become the France of tomorrow.
Jean Ibanez
Professor of philosophy, Montpellier
The France of today is not the country of our history books. We are not at war with the English, the Spanish, the Italians, the Germans or anyone else. No more wars of religion: ours is a time of ecumenism and thank goodness for it!
One could almost doze off, were it not for the riots in the ghettos. The young, furious at the authorities' utter contempt for them, attack cars, a symbol of modernity and means of individual, individualist transport.
The France of today is a paradox, like the enigmatic painting of the Mona Lisa, the gentleness of her smile set against a disturbing, tormented backdrop, a landscape of chaos, darkly threatening.
The French are "predictably unpredictable": the New Zealand rugby coach said from one match to the next the French could go from the sublime to the ridiculous. The final of the 2006 soccer World Cup, with the sublime Zidane, is a perfect example of that, or again de Villepin, so flamboyant at the United Nations, so pitifully pig-headed over the contrat première embauche. This unpredictability, the "no" for the European constitution for example, is seductive, but it prevents us from being convincing.
The France of today fails to convince (convaincre) and we should be happy about that because in "convaincre" there is "vaincre" (to conquer) and thus a logic of war. France no longer needs enemies in order to exist. French cultural identity is no longer defined by an origin, or even a destiny, by a past or by a future, but by a way of doing things now, in the present.
Elisabeth Lulin
Former adviser to prime minister Edouard Balladur, now managing director of a public policy consultancy
What is France doing in this second half of 2006? She's waiting for 2007, the presidential election. Not because the new head of state will, with the wave of a magic wand, change anything, but because this election symbolises the baton passing to a new generation—or at least we hope it does.
So what? you might say. Don't presidential elections come round every five years? Surely it's part of the way of things that generation will succeed generation at the seat of power?
Certainly, but over and above the constants spanning history—the impatience of princes to change things, the reluctance of the old guard to leave—there are some unusual features in today's situation:
First, the feeling that everything has to be rebuilt. The new generation is going to have to put right the disastrous mess they've inherited—it cannot continue along some comfortable well-worn path. To find a comparable challenge, you have to go back 50 years, to postwar reconstruction.
Second, the fragility of power. The discrediting of the elite; the demand for transparency, putting leaders' every action, decision and even intention, real or supposed, under the public microscope; the diminishing effectiveness of the public sector. As a result of these factors, it's clear the generation arriving at the controls won't have the same power as its predecessors.
Finally, increasing inter-generational conflict. The generation coming to power will be dogged by those behind them, who won't be fobbed off with being told to tighten their belts by a generation that has already squandered their children's inheritance for their own benefit. So, to the usual lack of understanding between young and old, can now be added resentment.
What's likely to result from the conjunction of these three elements? The worst, if the machinery for reform proves to be irreparably broken. If each generation digs in, refusing to budge, we will see two kinds of conservatism in conflict with each other: one using the ballot box, the other the street. On one side, ageing voters vetoing any reform that threatens their "acquired benefits"; on the other, young people expressing their refusal to pay the price for others' ineptitudes through blogs, striking or by burning cars.
Or, if the fragility of authority and the urgency of the crisis become a goad for some renewed form of government, if the present crisis makes essential reforms acceptable, we may see a positive outcome. One which will restore authority to state institutions while giving fresh impetus to the concepts of shared destiny and shared tasks.
Denis Robert
Independent investigative journalist and writer
I live in France and I'm pretty happy to live here, it's a question of roots and language more than of geography or politics.
Of course we have sea, mountains, the Pompidou centre, the Louvre, Airbus 380, mature burgundies and Roquefort. We've also got Céline and Truffaut, Jaurès and Mitterrand. Sometimes I almost think we don't deserve them.
Without doubt what sickens me most in France is the state of its journalism. I know that in many countries it's not much better and that we are less trashy than our English colleagues, but over here we are witnessing the same shameful servility and dishonourable behaviour without a word of protest. The political interviews make you cry with laughter, on television as much as in the papers. Everywhere the screws are being tightened because of this stupid presidential election. Sarkozy has most of the media and the owners of the press in his pocket, and he should carry the day, according to the scenarios dreamt up by those we call La France d'en haut. But beware victories proclaimed too far in advance! There's always a moment when the vox populi does the unexpected. In 2007 the far right has an even greater chance of getting into the second round than it did in 2002.
France is no longer a generous, open or tolerant country. France is led by a president who is amiable but corrupt, a prime minister who has orchestrated a murky business of trumped-up lists behind the scenes to discredit his interior minister. A couple of weeks ago he wrote me a letter bringing a libel action against me—poor dear. France has become the republic of dirty tricks and intellectual laziness. In my own way I try to fight against that, without political bias but with great determination. I used to do it at Libération, my old paper. I carry on with my books. For the first time in ages a book was banned for a month because it angered the powers that be. That was last June. It was my book, Clearstream: the Investigation. It doesn't bother me, but I do find it fascinating to watch this slow descent. Perhaps one day the country will come back up again. Perhaps not. There will always be books, films, literature. But in any case, let's not misunderstand each other: I prefer to live here than in a country which sends its troops to Iraq on false pretences. Despite our many faults, we haven't sold our soul to George W Bush.
Richard Vilaplana
Rural mayor (population of commune, 274)
The town rat and the country rat! Urban France is nothing like rural France: quite apart from their different economic contexts, the two populations have utterly different mindsets, and are daily moving further apart.
The social context of today's France aggravates the already bad feeling between people in the countryside who have work, inevitably on low wages, and the people migrating from the towns into this same countryside, who live on RMI—welfare handouts. Thanks to low rents and a panoply of welfare benefits, including universal health coverage, these urban migrants find a financial situation here in which it's preferable to do nothing rather than working hard for a low wage.
As Charles Aznavour sings: "Poverty is less painful in the sun." I would add "and in the country."
People say "Too much tax kills tax." I would add "Too much welfare benefit kills the benefit of welfare," since today in the countryside some wage-earners and pensioners cannot even afford proper health care: they don't fall within the right category to receive additional government help with their medical bills, unlike those on welfare.
Rural France, the rural France of work and labour, of values, suffers in silence. It doesn't burn cars or bus shelters, but it feels the injustice, and it suffers.
Jean Milesi
Rural mayor and member of departmental general council
Without doubt it would be quite undeserved, but this run-down old country is still capable of pulling itself out of the mire. Oh, it won't be thanks to its government! Whatever their political colour, politicians have proved themselves quite incapable of keeping pace with society, or uttering the ghost of a new idea. They've buried socialism, without bothering to keep its generosity or relevance—or its civilised values of solidarity and sharing. Soon they will be saying a requiem for political liberalism, having confused it with economic liberalism and tried to regulate everything through the market, instead of leaving that to the state, whose responsibility it is. Utopia, they say, must give way to reality. But can there be anything more stupidly utopian than imagining that economics alone will guarantee social cohesion and bring happiness to citizens?
In politics, France's major problem is that there is a plethora of phrasemongers, only one or two true politicians and not a single statesman. Everyone is locked in their party positions. So when François Bayrou expresses the commonsense notion that truth is not the monopoly of one camp and there should be dialogue over and above party barriers, he is given a good belting by both left and right. So, for the presidential election I have decided to back Olivier Besancenot on the far-left: not because I believe in his analysis, or even his propositions, but he at least knows how to give this bleating political class the dressing-down they deserve—he's still young, he has guts. Their stupidity makes my blood boil!
What will save this country is its people: they are worth more than they are given credit for, and much more than those who govern them. But in this age without political imagination, ideas or convictions, isn't that the case everywhere? It would be impolite of me to criticise British politicians, but meeting more and more ordinary English people has led me to like them a lot, they are not at all our traditional caricature of the snob from the City, sheltering from the endless drizzle under his immense umbrella. All insularity gone, light-years away from Fashoda and "splendid isolation," these English people have become totally acceptable continentals, and honi soit frankly, qui mal y pense. If we old Europeans can just accept each other and work together—the island and the continent—we still have a lot to teach the gnomes of Wall Street, stuck in their arrogance and illusion of power. Europe is far from finished.
Laurence Bagot
Journalist at Les Enjeux, monthly magazine of Les Echos, sister paper of FT
France is like an old friend, the kind of friend who can be sometimes unbearable, but to whom, eventually, every sin is forgiven because she is so lovable. Often I have been tempted to leave my home country. I stored my belongings and escaped far away, to India, later to Hong Kong then the US. But after a while, I would miss my lazy afternoons on a café terrace, the grouchiness of my compatriots, their love for endless—though most of the time useless—debates over a bottle of wine, the stunning beauty of the landscape, the elegance of Parisian women and of course, food. France is an imperfect country made of the best as well as the most irritating ingredients. Should we fix it? Convert the revolutionary soul of French people into a pragmatic and reasonable mind? Forbid smoking in bars; punish being late; outlaw going on strike for a worthless cause? To a certain extent it would ease daily life, make the country more civilised and productive. But too drastic a cure would also flatten the flesh of France. As an old friend, France needs also to be enjoyed with its extravagances: sometimes frustrating but more often delightful.
Dominique Fayel
Beef farmer and general secretary of FDSEA (Aveyron) Fédération Départementale des Syndicats d'Exploitants Agricoles
France is not fundamentally different today from the way it probably was in other periods of history. This country never gets anything done by consensus, only if there is an outside threat or, much more rarely, if it is galvanised by a unifying project. Well, since there is neither a perceived threat nor a nationwide project, France treads water. The only energy seems to be entirely self-centred, self-obsessed: professions refusing to give up their collective privileges for the common good, a generation putting itself first (over the national debt or pension reform), the rise of individualism. Solidarity is proclaimed as a value only because it no longer works, or at least not beyond groups already linked in some way. The country lives from day to day, without any real idea of where it's going or any clear objective.
Yet, unless there is some unforeseen external threat (a new hundred years' war, for example), the country still has the capacity to bounce back. It needs three things:
First, a modicum of courage from the political class, which has focused debate exclusively on a few immediate issues. They must risk proper debate on basic, long-term choices: a grand design (not necessarily a design of grandeur).
Second, the European ideal has been achieved at the level of institutions, but not of peoples. Chirac's reaction to the countries of eastern Europe who chose to follow the US into Iraq shows that perfectly: history justifies France's stand over Iraq, but his outburst shows our national incapacity to understand the things from other people's history or geography that influence their decisions.
Finally, there is a real need for direction, particularly among young people. Their crisis of confidence springs either from misgivings about the real purpose of our society, or because the market has become the justification for everything. In a growing section of society this uncertainty provokes disaffection, and out of that comes a fundamental questioning of work, teaching and state institutions, which people think no longer serve legitimate objectives. Hence the strikes.
Nevertheless there is hope, an energy, a desire to do something: it is to be found in the monde associatif—voluntary organisations ranging from political pressure groups to angling enthusiasts' societies. Coming out of this nebulous hotchpotch of disordered groups are some human solutions which may unlock the economy, politics and state institutions. People discover two things in these associations they don't find elsewhere: the certainty of doing something useful and a belief in what they are doing.
Georges Calvet
Civil servant in the ministry of agriculture
La france gastronomique. The restaurant scene in France has no new visionary chef comparable to Catalonia's Ferran Adrià. Excellent French chefs like Alain Senderens refuse to submit to the diktat of the restaurant guides, in particular the Michelin guide. They insist on not being listed. That particular guide has been turned inside-out by the publication of a book by a former inspector.
As for wines, a British magazine has named Domus Maximus from the Château Massamier in the Minervois the best red in the world.
Sport. The Tour de France—a French institution on a par with the Eiffel Tower, the baguette and the Moulin Rouge—is going through a real tragedy. The eviction of stars like Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso, suspected of using drugs, made us hope we would see a clean Tour this year, purged of its demons. Consequently revelations of the winner's involvement with doping, real or imagined, and the possibility he may now be stripped of his title, has caused a trauma which puts the Tour in real danger and seriously weakens the sport in general.
Teaching. The reduction in the number of civil servants and of supervisors in lycées and secondary schools perhaps contributed to the rejection of the contrat première embauche (CPE) by university and sixth-form students. But the repeal of the CPE has not brought any lasting solutions to the teaching profession. The great majority of young people are worried by the future and veer either to doom-and-gloom or to radical politics. In the Paris area, the strikes against the CPE revealed a division between two distinct kinds of youth: the classic idealist and the completely wild. The latter, originally from north Africa and now living in tower-block ghettos, have found their own way to express: "No Future."
The future. The future has yet to be written—this is deeply worrying for a country which consumes more tranquillisers per inhabitant than anywhere else on earth. Two points particularly disturb me. France's decline and her decline-ologists: there is a lot of talk about this, messieurs Nicolas Bavarez and Jacques Marseille spend their time describing and dissecting the phenomenon. Should we be worried? Have we declined beyond the point where worrying serves any purpose? And next year's presidential election is worrying: we risk a repetition of 2002, even though the media spews jingoistic hype about Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal—with her outrageous "just order." Pass the tranquillisers! But our health service is so deep in debt we can't afford them.
Christian Viguier
Managing director of SEFEE (Société d'Etudes et de Fabrications Electroniques et Electriques)
Decentralisation isn't happening at anything like the same pace as globalisation. In rural France, globalisation is making itself felt in business and professional circles in the same way as in domestic ones, in all the things available in the corner shop. On the other hand, decentralisation is a piece of jargon proclaimed on high from the major towns without the faintest echo in smaller ones.
Many technocrats talk about decentralisation because the word goes down well, but actually they don't really think the regions have either the capacity or energy to make it work. So in remote regions like the Aveyron we scarcely feel its impact. However, there's more to rural France than ancient peasants with beret on head and baguette under arm. There is a large population of bright young people with university degrees from major towns like Montpellier and Toulouse, who want a fulfilling career where they were brought up, but who are frustrated by the lack of decent companies. For despite the oft-stated desire that France must decentralise there are no real incentives for firms to set up outside the big towns.
Nevertheless, in spite of this constant underestimation of the potential of rural France, there are a few company directors fighting to develop and maintain high-tech centres in the backwoods. For example SEFEE, a company in Saint-Affrique (a small town of less than 9,000 souls) in the southern Aveyron. Set up 20 years ago with a staff of three to supply specialised cables for aeroplanes and helicopters, it now employs 120 people, and, thanks to the 200 products developed by its R&D department, has grown from a simple aeronautical subcontractor into a fully-fledged component manufacturer with an annual turnover of €15m. Last year the company invested in a brand new site as it moves into cables for satellites and other spacecraft. That shows that even out here it's possible. We must hope that the success of firms like SEFEE will prod the powers that be into offering better incentives, encouraging other company directors to set up in these remote backwoods.
