By the mid-2000s, many people had concluded that France’s malaise was irreversible. An entire school of literature emerged declaring France fini. These polemics bore uniformly apocalyptic titles—Doomed France, Bankrupt France, Scared France, Gallic Illusions, France in Freefall—and their authors were known, collectively, as les déclinologues. Although they wrote from different perspectives and zeroed in on different aspects of France’s struggles, they delivered the same basic message: France had become a profoundly dysfunctional nation.
Indeed it had: After nearly three decades of dreadful governance, it was a country mired in economic, political, social, and spiritual crisis. The presidencies of François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, which together spanned from 1981 until 2007, were disastrous for France. Although the men were ideological opposites—Mitterrand was a Socialist, Chirac a conservative—there was, in the words of Nicolas Baverez, one of the chief déclinologues, a “sinister continuity” between them. They were united, said Baverez, by “their talent for winning elections and ruining France.”
In fairness, France’s woes did not originate with Mitterrand. In the wake of the OPEC oil embargo in 1973, France’s economy, like those of all the major industrialized countries, plunged into recession, ending les trente glorieuses, the thirty fat years that had followed the Second World War. The same toxic stew that choked the economies of Britain and the United States—weak growth combined with rising inflation and unemployment—left France ailing. A second energy crisis, in 1979, deepened the pain for all three countries. That same year, frustrated British voters swept the Conservative Party to power, and its leader, Margaret Thatcher, who campaigned on a promise to revive the British economy, became prime minister. In 1980, Ronald Reagan, who also ran on a platform of economic renewal, was elected president of the United States in a landslide. A year later, French voters elected Mitterrand, who came to office pledging to institute an ambitious program of left-wing reforms. Which voters you think made the smarter choices depends on your politics, but insofar as the restaurant business was concerned, the United States and Britain unquestionably took the better route. What was true in the eighteenth century was no less true at the end of the twentieth: Chefs need prosperous patrons. Notwithstanding their other effects, the Reagan and Thatcher eras made the rich richer and spawned vast new wealth, money that bankrolled gastronomic revolutions in the United States and Britain. The French economy stagnated and French cuisine did likewise.
The irony, at least as far as the food part goes, is that Mitterrand was one of the greatest feeders ever to hold the French presidency. When he took office, there was fear that his ideology would seep into the kitchen of the Élysée Palace, France’s White House, and that all pomp and extravagance would be taken off the menu. An enthusiastic and discerning palate had long been seen as not merely a desirable quality in the man at the top, but an obligatory one. Plying his guests with luxurious food and fine wine—“governing from the table,” in the words of Jean-Robert Pitte—was a way for the president to advance his political interests and, more importantly, the interests of France. The worry was that the Socialist Mitterrand would forsake this tradition in favor of a more proletarian diet.
The concerns were unfounded. Mitterrand proved to be one of the all-time great Champagne Socialists and an ardent champion of the culinary arts. In fact, his gourmandism would yield arguably history’s most famous last supper since the Last Supper. In December 1995, seven months after leaving office, the seventy-nine-year-old Mitterrand lay dying of the prostate cancer he had secretly battled for the duration of his presidency. Given to dramatic gestures, Mitterrand asked some thirty friends and relatives to gather at his home near Bordeaux to share in a farewell repast. As Mitterrand was helped to the dinner table and swaddled in blankets, all the color and vigor drained from his body, it seemed doubtful that he would be able to remain upright, let alone eat. But then came the raw oysters, harvested from the nearby Atlantic. The sight appeared to revive him; by the time the last shells were removed, he had slurped down nearly three dozen.
He ate the two courses that followed, foie gras and capon, with equal gusto, although the effort required caused him to doze off several times. But he was completely awake when the meal reached its scandalous denouement. For his last morsel of earthly fare, Mitterrand had requested France’s forbidden fowl: ortolan, a tiny songbird considered a delicacy by gastronomes but now an endangered species and therefore off-limits to hunters, chefs, and diners. Imperious to the end, Mitterrand had decided to flout the law in order to satisfy his appetite one more time. The ortolans had been prepared in the traditional way—drowned in Armagnac, defeathered, and roasted—and Mitterrand and his guests consumed them as tradition dictated: They draped napkins over their heads and ate the birds in their entirety—bones, organs, veins, everything. Mitterrand swallowed two ortolans and apparently never put another piece of food in his mouth.
But while Mitterrand’s gustatory exploits were impressive, his leadership was not. He inherited an ailing economy and turned what might have been temporary weakness into a chronic condition. Most of the damage was done during his first two years in office. Convinced that France could spend its way to recovery, Mitterrand cast aside any semblance of budgetary restraint. Government spending increased 25 percent (12 percent in inflation-adjusted terms) in 1981 and surged 27 percent the following year. Among the many added expenditures, social security spending went up by 20 percent, the minimum wage was raised by 40 percent, government-provided housing subsidies were increased by 25 percent, and hundreds of thousands of civil-service positions were created, all of which came with lavish benefits and pensions.
The vastly increased spending was just one part of the equation. Mitterrand had run for office promising “a rupture with capitalism,” and from the point of view of French business, he delivered. In addition to the sharp increase in the minimum wage, the workweek was cut to thirty-nine hours (and later reduced to thirty-five) with no corresponding loss of pay; revised labor laws made it more difficult to fire employees, and severance pay was increased for those who did get canned; French workers were given a fifth week of paid vacation; the retirement age was lowered to sixty; and generous government-funded early retirement schemes were vastly expanded. In addition, banking and several other key industries were nationalized.
By 1982, it was clear that Mitterrand’s medicine was lethal: Inflation was at 12 percent, unemployment had increased by nearly one third and stood at 9 percent, and the French franc had plummeted in value. In response, the president did a volte-face and imposed draconian austerity measures. Spending growth was cut sharply, wages were frozen, and prices for electricity and other government-provided services were increased. Later, a number of banks and other nationalized companies were returned to private hands. But many entitlements had been conferred during Mitterrand’s first two years, and entitlements, once granted, are notoriously difficult to rescind. Most of the ones that Mitterrand introduced remained in place, and notwithstanding the new emphasis on fiscal discipline, the general thrust of French economic policy—massive state intervention, a neutered private sector, and a strong pro-labor tilt but at the expense of job creation—went unchanged. As Timothy B. Smith, a historian at Canada’s Queen’s University, observes in his excellent book France in Crisis: Welfare, Inequality, and Globalization Since 1980, Mitterrand, like Thatcher and Reagan, implemented such a radical and far-reaching agenda during his first years as president that long after he was gone, French politicians still had their “hands tied by the … nature of the social programs introduced and expanded during the early 1980s.”
That was certainly the case for Chirac, who succeeded Mitterrand in 1995. He inherited a hamstrung economy in dire need of reform, but reform required political courage that Chirac did not have, and as a result, his presidency served mainly to perpetuate and deepen the problems that Mitterrand had bequeathed him. Economic growth remained anemic. France’s GDP grew 2 percent on average durin
g Mitterrand’s two terms in office; it averaged 2.2 percent under Chirac. During that same twenty-six-year period, the U.S. economy averaged 3 percent annual growth while Britain’s averaged 2.5 percent. A one-percent growth differential in a single year is significant; multiplied twenty-six times, it is staggeringly large. Among other things, economic activity creates jobs. During Ronald Reagan’s eight years as president, the U.S. economy spawned 17 million jobs and under Bill Clinton, it created another 22 million. France, by contrast, spent these years amassing a standing army of idle workers. When Mitterrand was elected, the country had 1.6 million jobless and an unemployment rate of 7 percent. By the end of his second term, 3 million were without work and unemployment stood at 12 percent. The numbers improved marginally with Chirac, but unemployment never dipped below the high single digits, and when he left the Élysée, France still had nearly 3 million jobless. And those were just the official figures; it was widely believed that the true unemployment rate was somewhere between 15 and 20 percent.
To a foreign tourist sipping an overpriced kir royale at the Café de Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, none of this would necessarily have been apparent. Indeed, from that vantage point, France might have appeared to be just about the most agreeable place on earth. And certainly, some of the changes enacted by Mitterrand and Chirac seemed very appealing. Less work for more benefits—what was not to like? But many of these initiatives proved over time to have devastating side effects. For instance, in the decade after the workweek was cut from thirty-nine hours to thirty-five in 1998, wages completely stagnated, badly eroding the living standards of many French. And they were the lucky ones—they at least had jobs.
But there was one sector of the economy that flourished during the Mitterrand and Chirac years: the public sector. While France had never been short on fonctionnaires, the size of the bureaucracy exploded after 1981. When Mitterrand was first elected, the country had 3.8 million civil servants; when Sarkozy was sworn in twenty-seven years later, that figure had swelled by nearly 40 percent and the state now employed 5.2 million people—one jobholder out of every five. By then, it was estimated that France had between five hundred thousand and one million more civil servants than it needed.
Public-sector jobs had also become the cushiest around. On average, they paid 20 to 30 percent more than private-sector jobs, were essentially tenured positions (it was virtually impossible to be fired), and offered an astonishing array of perks. Civil servants worked fewer hours than their private-sector peers and enjoyed more vacation and sick days. Employees of the French national railroad were permitted eighteen free rail trips in Europe annually, while employees of the French national electricity company were eligible for reductions of up to 95 percent for their electricity bills. But the best part of working for the government was retiring. The retirement age for French bureaucrats was fifty-seven, and many of them were able to call it a career even sooner than that—some as young as fifty. They were also entitled to pensions that were equivalent to 85 percent of their best six months’ salaries. Not surprisingly, in a survey published in 2005, three quarters of French ages fifteen to thirty said that they wanted to join the civil service after graduating.
Nor was it surprising that public sector employees were the most resistant to reform—the merest hint of it would send them into the streets in protest. In 2000, there were 710 total strike days per 1,000 civil servants, versus just 52 for private-sector workers. Employees of the state railroad were particularly prone to walking off the job; in 2000, they were responsible for 40 percent of all work stoppages, even though they accounted for just one percent of all French workers. “It’s always the most privileged people who strike,” Serge Levaton, a seventy-year-old retired doctor, told the New York Times while marooned in Paris during a massive transit strike in 2002. “I would like the public service to cease to exist. They only have privileges but no obligations.”
But it wasn’t just civil servants who were unwilling to make concessions. French workers in general were resolutely opposed to seeing their perks cut so that jobs could be created and the economy might recover, and rather than risking confrontation, the government left the status quo largely unchallenged and tried to keep the unemployed quiescent by extending fairly lavish benefits to them, as well. An unemployed worker could expect to receive benefits up to 75 percent of his last salary, for a period of three years or even longer. He could also obtain generous housing subsidies and other forms of assistance. People were able to maintain decent lives on the dole and lost any incentive to seek work. (One honest soul even wrote a book about the more than twenty years he spent living off government checks.) In addition to making unemployment a palatable option, French politicians also took care to absolve themselves of any blame for the country’s economic woes. Rather than admitting that France’s problems were mostly homegrown, they claimed that international trade and American turbo-capitalism were the culprits, and they fed the public a steady diet of antiglobalization rhetoric—what Timothy Smith calls the “Big Excuse.” The constant refrain was that France was a victim of forces beyond her control.
Amid all the stagnation and sloth, many French who did have ambition and drive went abroad in search of opportunity and a better life. By 2007, more than two million were residing overseas. Some four hundred thousand were in the Greater London area alone—an expatriate community so large that Sarkozy went to London, which he described as “one of the great French cities,” to fish for votes in 2007 and to urge his compatriots to return. “France is still your country even if you are disappointed by it,” he implored. “To all the expatriates who are unhappy about the situation in France … come home, because together we will make France a great country where everything will be possible, where fathers won’t fear for the future of their children, and where everyone will be able to make their plans come true and be responsible for their own destiny.” But a survey of French expats found that 93 percent were happy with their new lives and that 25 percent had no intention of ever going back to France.
Chefs were among the economic refugees. The Mitterrand and Chirac years were particularly tough on France’s culinary industry. Thanks to rigid employment laws, the hospitality sector was left with an enormous labor shortage—by the mid-2000s, some 80,000 positions were unfilled, mostly because the cost of filling them was too high. But even when employers were willing to bear those costs, they often struggled to find takers. For bakers, pâtissiers, and other artisans, it became increasingly difficult to find young people interested in the hard work of apprenticing. “We’ve lost that spirit of sacrificing,” said Gérard Mulot, an eminent Parisian pâtissier; like many of his peers, he was deeply pessimistic about the future of his profession.
Persistently sluggish growth and the thinning wallets of many French likewise made it difficult for restaurants to fill seats. Compounding the problem was France’s value-added tax (VAT). A quick snack at a café, a steak frites at a corner bistro, or a three-star feast automatically incurred a 19.6 percent VAT surcharge to the bill (along with the built-in 15 percent gratuity). The VAT became an obsession among French chefs, who were adamant that it was killing their businesses. Adding to their frustration, fast-food restaurants had a lower VAT rate, just 5.5 percent, since they were classified as takeaway establishments. In 1999, hundreds of chefs, wearing toques and banging on pots and pans, held a demonstration outside the parliament building in Paris. They came armed with eggs and flour, which they proceeded to throw at the riot police; the cops responded with tear gas. But the chefs felt they had no choice but to unleash the full force of their pantries. “If the VAT remains this high,” André Daguin, the head of the hospitality industry association and a former two-star chef, told the Boston Globe, “the haute cuisine restaurants will survive. The fast-food places will thrive. But everything in between will eventually disappear.”
Nor were onerous tax rates and crippling labor laws the only problems facing the culinary industry. Under Mitterrand and Chirac,
the government truly became a leviathan; with so many bureaucrats now on the public payroll, the red tape grew accordingly. Timothy Smith cites the example of French tax administration. Rather than putting assessment and collection under one roof, France had different departments for each, and the result was that tax collection in France, as a percentage of GDP, cost six times what it did in the United States. Starting a business required nightmarish amounts of paperwork and haggling. Establishing a new company in the United States took only seven business days; in France, it required sixty-six.
For aspiring restaurateurs who succeeded in navigating, pleading, or bribing their way past the authorities, throwing open the doors to customers brought no relief. In 1998, a representative of the Office of Competition, Consumption, and Repression of Fraud showed up at Jean Bardet’s eponymous two-star restaurant in the city of Tours, in the Loire Valley, and began looking for signs of fraud. The inspector found that some of the asparagus in the kitchen that day was not local, as the menu promised, but was from another part of France; that some of the fish being served might not have been line-caught, as advertised; that the veal chops came from a different source than the one listed on the menu; and that the wine list, though said to contain only AOC wines, in fact had a pair of non-AOC offerings. Elsewhere, these discoveries would have been recognized for what they were: minor inconsistencies resulting from hiccups in the restaurant’s supply chain, or simple oversights. In France, they were crimes. A local court found Bardet guilty of fraud and fined him $4,600. Headlines across the country reported his conviction with high moral censure and little respect for the facts; one paper claimed that he had sold supermarket wines, another that the asparagus had come from (gasp!) Spain. Michelin decided that the charges were serious enough to merit removing the restaurant from the Guide until the matter was resolved. A spokesman icily told BusinessWeek, “We cannot include a restaurant involved in such legal proceedings, and which could close at any moment.” Eventually, another judge reduced Bardet’s fine to $3,700, and Michelin took the restaurant out of purgatory. But it was a wonder Bardet didn’t take after his tormentors with a meat cleaver.
Au Revoir to All That Page 6
