The Bonjour Effect

by Barlow, Julie

  The French also love talking about how expensive life is. The code for this is: la vie chère. Techniques for saving money are sort of an ideal conversation topic, not to mention the fact that it flatters French fatalism. The French talk a lot about le Système D, the D-system, with D referring to débrouillardise (resourcefulness, or the ability to improvise to get something done, though the term also refers to the underground economy). In short, whatever socioeconomic milieu you find yourself in, you are bound to hear the expressions Système D and le bon plan pop up in conversations.

  French attitudes about the third category of money, “impersonal” money—economics and the business world—have changed the most dramatically. A decade ago, French business news was practically nonexistent. This always struck us as odd, France being the world’s fifth economy. France has as many Fortune 500 companies as Germany does, with a smaller population,3 and French entrepreneurs regularly win awards for their innovations. Even in the middle of a recession, when we were there, France was creating more businesses than anywhere else in Europe, including Germany and the UK.4 Foreign investment in France has had its ups and downs, but France’s workforce has long ranked as one of the most productive in the world. Yet no one even talked about France’s economic strengths, probably because traditionally, the French have always thought about business principally as a source of tax revenue. In French minds, the state makes the world turn. Business just supplies the funds.

  But today, even left-wing publications in France have started covering business news. French unions, which traditionally garnered a lot of sympathy, have borne the brunt of this change in attitude. Labor relations are now seen in a completely different light. Unions are viewed with increasing skepticism, even a degree of resentment. While we were in France, there were plenty of protests but few calls for strikes, and—to our amazement—the ones that did happen failed to garner much popular support. In June 2014, railway workers voted to strike to protest a reorganization of the national railway system. But instead of sympathizing, popular opinion turned against them. Since 2007, France has required striking transport workers to provide “minimum” services, perhaps a sign of the times, but even this wasn’t enough to stave off public frustration. After two weeks, the strike petered out and normal service returned.5

  When an Ipsos survey in the fall of 2013 asked the French what “institution” they trusted the most, an amazing 84 percent of respondents said it was la PME (small and medium-size businesses), followed by the army (79 percent), the police (73 percent), schools (68 percent), mayors (63 percent), the justice system (46 percent), and finally big business (38 percent). Unions, politicians, and the media got scores in the 20 to 30 percent range. Only 8 percent of French claim to trust political parties. The results surprised us, particularly since business, properly speaking, is not an institution like education or justice is. Not to mention the fact that twenty years ago, “small and medium-size business” and “big business” would have ranked at the very bottom of the list of favorite French institutions, had they even been on it.6

  The radical shift in French thinking about economics has been one of the many problems Socialist president François Hollande had to grapple with since his election in 2012. When we arrived in France less than a year and a half after the presidential elections, Hollande’s support rate had fallen to a record-breaking 12 percent, the lowest rate a French president had registered in sixty-five years. The change in thinking about economics didn’t help. Hollande’s electoral base would normally have embraced a classic socialist doctrine of high taxation and heavy state intervention in the economy. With the combined realities of the recession and the European Union, large segments of the French population, including Socialist Party supporters, had become interested in the prospects of French business.

  To his credit, Hollande read this change correctly. The problem was, Hollande’s government constantly blurred the lines between doing something and not doing anything about the economy. He led a policy of doublespeak and moved ahead on issues lobster style (backward). Old-style socialists felt betrayed and the new pro-business socialists didn’t take him seriously. In late 2013, Hollande’s economic leadership disintegrated into chaos. In August, when all French receive their avis d’imposition (tax notice), several million French families woke up to the news that they would have to pay a couple of hundred euros in taxes for the first time in their lives. France’s finance minister, Pierre Moscovici, tried to assuage them by inventing a new catchphrase to describe their frustration: ras-le-bol fiscal (fiscal fed up-ness) and Hollande announced he would reduce taxes. But his prime minister contradicted him the next day. Popular discontent quickly snowballed into outright rebellion. In mid-October, after a series of unrelated business closures in Brittany, tens of thousands of protesters joined the révolte des bonnets rouges (the Red Cap Revolt, named for their headwear), which lasted until the end of November.

  In January 2014, Hollande threw himself into the fire by audaciously declaring himself a social-démocrate (though as we mentioned in a previous chapter, this was done partly to deflect media attention from his recently revealed affair with an actress). “Socialism” in France stands for “revolution,” while “social democracy” stands for “reform.” But the difference between a socialist and a social democrat in France is loaded with historical significance. Although most of what France’s Socialist Party has ever done since it first took power in 1983 could be described as “social democratic,” the party has explicitly refused the label since World War II. Hollande was the first socialist leader to embrace it. Public opinion was not impressed. Hollande then tried to salvage the situation and boost his popularity by appointing a new prime minister, Manuel Valls, a very popular political figure.

  But the Hollande-Valls duet then came out and declared they were réformistes, which did nothing to stop Hollande’s plummeting popularity. Much of Hollande’s tenure as president has been about redefining France’s coded terms. This is not an easy thing to do in a highly coded society like France. But if anyone could do it, it should have been Hollande. He was the first French president with an economics background since Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was elected in 1974. Hollande studied at France’s preeminent business school, the École des hautes études commerciales de Paris (HEC), and later taught economics at the prestigious Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po).7

  Unfortunately, the task of changing mentalities in France is riddled with semantic booby traps and Hollande fell into many of them. For instance, right-leaning French call France’s mandatory social security contribution charges sociales (social charges), to stress how much they cost businesses and employees. Left-leaning French, meanwhile, use the term cotisations (contributions) for the same thing, implicitly suggesting that the French like sharing their wealth, or at least do so willingly. Sticking to their policy of economic doublespeak, Hollande and Valls tried to erase the cleavage by adopting the right-wing term charges sociales.8 When that didn’t work, the duo rebounded by coming up with yet another new expression: they said they were conducting socialisme de l’offre (supply-side socialism, ostensibly to encourage business), as opposed to socialisme de la demande, which responds to demand. That one didn’t fly either, and Hollande’s popularity continued to sag.9

  But while the French are talking more about economics and business now, casual conversation about money is about as sparse as it always has been. The old taboo rears its head the second the topic of money becomes even vaguely personal. Near the end of our stay we met Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, the director of France’s public radio channel, France Culture, to talk about doing a radio show on the French language. We spent the first hour comparing notes about international adoption (he had adopted his daughter in Africa), then the next forty minutes or so discussing language issues, which made sense since that was the topic of our show. The actual logistics of the show—like which director we would be working with and how the whole process would unfold—was conclude
d in twenty minutes. But we didn’t manage to get the topic of pay onto the table until we were halfway out the door. All Poivre d’Arvor would tell us was that France Culture had hired Canadians in the past, and we could get paid. We never got anything close to a euro figure out of him.

  After writing, recording, and editing the radio show—the whole process took about two months—we still didn’t know how much we were going to be paid for it. We kept asking everyone we met along the way, and all they did was send us to ask someone else. After we finished the final edit of the show, our producer finally sent us to France Culture’s human resources director, who was supposed to clarify the matter of pay. Instead, she showed us pictures of her daughters on holiday. That discussion was followed by a long one about the importance of learning foreign languages, and another one about Quebec. In the end, we didn’t get a euro figure out of her either. She just told us where to go next. The French are normally quite guarded about discussing family with strangers, but in professional situations, we noticed, they are more likely to wax on about their children or their holidays than talk dollars and cents. Every North American we have ever met who does business in France has said the same thing.

  One of the only places people seem to be comfortable talking about money is at trade shows. France is something of a capital of trade shows. The reason they have so many is, without doubt, because trade shows are a convenient way for French businesspeople to get around the taboo and talk about money. They have to do it somewhere. It’s as if the French have so many rules and customs that complicate business discussions, they had to create these zone franches (free zones) where people could skip the preliminaries and get straight to business. But even there one has to be careful. The second you leave the trade show bubble, the normal rules of conversation kick back in and you have to wait until the main course is over before you can broach the topic of money.

  Though it sounds a bit breezy, part of the explanation for the French uneasiness with business is probably nothing more, nor less, than “culture.” All societies have their disconnects. Why not money? Anglo-American societies, at least from a French perspective, are completely disconnected when it comes to food, and in particular, meat. Though big meat eaters, British, Americans, and Germans tend to prefer to dine in complete denial of the process by which flesh travels to plates: no one wants to hear about how to make sausage, or how much a particular cheese smells like an animal (the French love that).

  In the same vein, while the French love what money can buy, they can’t stomach thinking about where it comes from. Some commentators pin the blame for this attitude on France’s Catholic culture, cupidity having a top spot among the capital sins. But while Protestant culture, indeed, places a certain value on acquisitiveness—prosperity is supposed to be a manifestation of divine Providence—there is a limit to the argument. Catholic Italian merchants, after all, put the building blocks of modern capitalism in place, and Catholic Portuguese ushered in global maritime trade.

  Some explain the French aversion to money talk by invoking the legacy of French aristocrats, who were notoriously idle compared to their peers elsewhere. French nobles did indeed consider everything related to money, production, or trade to be far below their concerns. And while noble families have no particular sway in modern France, their attitudes still linger in French culture. Political leaders are allowed, even expected, to enjoy a certain level of gilded luxury, which the French assume goes hand in hand with power.

  Aristocrats aside, there is also a mundane historical reason average French citizens tend to steer clear of the topic of money—at least their own. Prior to the French Revolution, the French were taxed on apparent wealth, not real wealth. Tax collectors literally looked at people’s homes and drew up the bill. So even moderately prosperous French learned to avoid showing off their wealth in order to escape the notice of tax collectors.10 From a fiscal perspective, it has always been considered safer to pretend you are poor in France. We read an article in the popular Parisian daily Le Parisien written by a French lawyer who specialized in tax law warning readers against using tax shelters, despite the fact that they are perfectly legal, because they attract attention. Tax shelters aren’t worth the risk, he argued, because they’ll pique the interest of les Finances publiques (France’s Internal Revenue Service), which might end up auditing you. In short, the French think tax shelters are a trap: the inspectors in Finances publiques assume anyone using them has something to hide.11

  No matter what party is in power, traditionally, France’s national politics have always steered clear of the topic of finance, either public or private, and more specifically, about how much governments spend. Power in France is concentrated in Paris, and Paris still manages to cast money discussions as being “in bad taste.” France’s regional leaders (mayors, or presidents of regions or departments) often talk more openly about money. Even socialist politicians in France’s regions openly promote business and defend local business interests. But there’s a problem: most regional leaders are also, simultaneously, members of the National Assembly. So when they go from their region to Paris to sit in Parliament, they often fall back into their role and clam up about business.12

  Typically, French economic thinkers get better press and attract bigger followings outside of France, like in Washington and London. The French economist Thomas Piketty’s seven-hundred-page book Capital in the Twenty-First Century was a bestseller in the United States, but he is not the darling of university circles in France. Nor is the French economist Esther Duflo, one of President Obama’s economic advisers and a professor at MIT. Jean Tirole, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics, started a school in Toulouse in 1992 after twelve years at MIT. He certainly chose Toulouse for a reason. Paris is too supercilious about money.

  The French aversion to discussing money may also owe to four centuries of life under a strong, central state. The state made France a two-tiered society where members of the business class (owners, financiers, entrepreneurs, and management), no matter how successful, always play second fiddle to politicians and members of France’s intelligentsia (journalists and intellectuals). The worst French intellectual is more highly regarded than the richest and most successful French entrepreneur. France’s large, powerful market economy has evolved in a parallel universe, hidden from public discourse like a messy basement or a smelly stable.

  However, in the long wait to get the French talking about money, foreigners might be listening too narrowly. The protracted French prelude to talking about business does have its own logic. It’s during this preamble that the French figure out if they want to do business with you or not. Good conversation is paramount to the French, and all things considered, they would rather do business with an opportunist with whom they can have a proper conversation than with an opportunist who is inarticulate.

  Foreigners should not try to push things along too precipitously. Talk is never cheap in France.

  15

  Silent Labor

  The last thing a French person will tell a stranger is that she loves her job. It just sounds naïve. At best, if she actually does love her work, she’ll tell a close friend, because liking work is a private, almost intimate sentiment in France. It’s definitely not something you advertise to the world.

  We always suspected there was some posturing behind this attitude. The French can’t possibly hate their jobs as much as they say they do. In 2013, a French job site, monster.fr, confirmed our doubts. The site had commissioned a study to compare French attitudes about work to those in six other countries. The French daily Le Parisien published the results with the headline “Almost 10% of Employees Hate Their Jobs.” Old habits seem hard to break. The negative title was misleading because the study actually showed a positive: that nine out of ten French actually don’t hate their jobs. Only 8.8 percent of French respondents said they didn’t like their work. That was less than the proportion of Germans (10.1 percent) or British (12.3 percent) who claimed to dislike their j
obs. What’s more, the survey asked respondents if they liked their jobs. Here, the French ranked relatively high: 42.7 percent said yes, slightly fewer than the British, at 46 percent, but considerably more than the Germans, at 34.5 percent.1

  One might argue, tongue in cheek, that with their long lunch breaks, thirty-five-hour workweeks, and five weeks of paid holidays per year, the French work less than the Germans or the British, so they have less reason to hate their jobs. But according to the OECD, the short French workweek is something of a myth. The French actually work as much as industrious British and German employees do, and four more hours per week than the Dutch.2

  None of this makes a dent in the negative spin the French habitually put on their working lives. Unlike North Americans, the French rarely boast about being “busy” at work. It’s just not something you brag about in France. On the contrary, portraying yourself as a tad idle shows you are in control and not concerned about what is expected of you. To French ears, that sounds way better than being productive.