HUGO, VICTOR
Prolix author
Les Miserables is not quite as long as À la recherche du temps perdu, perhaps merely the second-longest novel ever in French. Poorly reviewed when it was published in 1862: Baudelaire called it tasteless, Flaubert said it was neither true nor great. Hugo’s opus of the Paris Commune in 1871 subsequently inspired 14 films, numerous television treatments and musical versions in English and French. Epic, dazzling, gigantic cast of characters, highly digressive text, the novel is today highly regarded although few can honestly claim to have read all of it. It has been suggested that if the song from the Les Miserables musical À la volonté du peuple (transcribed into English as Do You Hear the People Sing?) had been written at the time of the actual barricades, the Paris uprising would have succeeded and there would have been no need for the second half of the book. The song has subsequently been sung, inter alia, in Cantonese by democracy protesters in Hong Kong in 2014 and by demonstrators opposing the opening of a McDonald’s restaurant in Sydney, Australia, in 2013.
HUISSIERS
Over-paid bailiffs
A highly-specialised type of French lawyer resembling a bailiff who holds the monopoly right to serve and enforce orders of the courts. Reforms to open the profession to competition from normal lawyers are described as cinematic, changing nothing. The average huissier makes 8,000 euros per month. I repeatedly asked the huissiers’ trade association to explain why they deserve protection from competition. Answers came there none. This could be because they are too lazy to respond to questions, or have no good answers. I suspect both might be true.
HUMOUR
Yes, the French are funny
Contrary to received wisdom, the French have a sense of humour although they tend towards wit (esprit) and word games (jeux de mots) rather than Anglo-Saxon irony, understatement and slapstick. The French love to talk dirty and they are often cruel and mocking. Relying on puns that can require a sophisticated knowledge of French to understand, many French jokes are fundamentally untranslatable. I note that the French often laugh at my jokes, or perhaps they are just laughing at me. It is also very easy to laugh at the French, as when the English comedian David Lowe set up a stand at the weekly market in the southern French market town of Castelnaudary to sell Cassoulet, a French version of pork and beans, proclaiming it to be a British invention, imagining that the French would get the joke. Instead, it provoked a near riot that ended with his bowler hat being unceremoniously knocked from his head.
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IMMOBILIER
Real estate: Not really a respectable subject of dinner party conversation
Property is ‘the base of society, more sacred than religion,’ pronounced Flaubert. But that was the Second Empire and since the restoration of the Republic, this is not so true. If the best house in the village has been painted, it is probably owned by foreigners. The French like to conceal their wealth from the taxman: behind the shabby exteriors there is often magnificence inside. Few French characteristics offend the British so profoundly as the general indifference to property values, an obsession that is bred into British people from birth.
Why does so much of France’s housing stock look so dilapidated? Away from the centres of the cities visited by tourists, 2.5 million houses are empty and many of them are crumbling. In my own village, houses are literally rotting and falling down because their owners refuse to sell them, or cannot. It is too difficult to sell them because of Napoleonic laws of succession, which can turn transactions into protracted nightmares as generations of inheritors fight over the spoils. And it is too expensive to renovate them. Selling property in France requires the employment of a notaire, the navigation of numerous archaic procedures and a great deal of taxation. Estate agents are frequently lazy and unimaginative and charge three times as much as they do in Britain. If most of France is blessedly free of the insane property-price inflation common in the UK (Paris is an exception), it has the opposite problem that prices have actually been falling.
All notaires have stories of clients who price their properties ridiculously above any conceivable market value. The French often prefer to hold onto their old houses, leaving them vacant, and move into ghastly lotissements where there is a place to park the car, a small garden, and somewhere for children to play. These may not be the most beautiful solution to the demand for housing. Lotissement houses, especially in the south, are typically surrounded by towering walls made of cinderblock, which many French people never bother to roughcast. A country that claims cultural exceptionalism and boasts a magnificent architectural heritage seems broadly indifferent to the appalling quality of its new settlements.
IMMOBILISME
The inability to change
The French have not always resisted change and indeed have at times embraced the modern, but as an unintended consequence of clientélisme, weak governments terrified of unions and social unrest have cut and run from reforms at the first sign of trouble. Although the government announces reforms, it is extremely difficult to identify many that have been implemented, and easy to draw up a list of those that have been abandoned, delayed or watered down beyond all recognition. The headline reforms in 2015 include allowing shops to open on Sundays - but only 12 times a year; allowing intercity bus services (but with limitations); and reducing the maximum amount of compensation that can be demanded from people who have been fired. None of these are going to re-launch the French economy.
IMPÔTS
Squeezing until the pips squeak
Taxes have risen since President François Hollande’s election by an average of 1,517 euros for the middle class and 3,851 euros for the better off. In 2013, 8,000 households paid more than 100 per cent of their income in taxes, 12,000 paid more than 75 per cent. The administration has now generously decided that nobody should pay more than 75 per cent of their income in taxes. Innovation in France may be generally lacking but the tax collectors are never short of ideas. There is a tax called a taxe foncière on property and then another one, called a taxe d’habitation for occupying it. To this is added a redevance audiovisuelle (TV and radio tax) of 136 euros. There is a professional tax on business activities, payable even when the business is not profitable, a tax on income, numerous payroll taxes and that’s not including deductions (cotisations) for social security. Efforts by President Hollande to increase income taxes on the wealthiest to 75 per cent eventually petered out, but France remains assiduous in taxing its rich while not sparing the middle class.
Wealth tax is officially known as the Impôt de solidarité sur la fortune (ISF) and was introduced in 1981 during the presidency of François Mitterrand. Solidarity in this case means a tax avoided by the truly wealthy, who can put their money into antiques and fine art, which are exempt, ignored by politicians who undervalue their own villas, yet that hits hard professional people in their retirement who may have accumulated assets but who have limited incomes. The politics of envy play well in France.
President Hollande entered office saying he hated the rich but is of course comfortable himself, the issue of a bourgeois family, with a bijou vacation property in Mougins, a smart suburb of Cannes, co-owned with his former consort Ségolène Royal. This property in one of the swankiest villages of the Côte d’Azur (a ‘modest villa’, according to Hollande), convenient to some of the best restaurants in France, is nevertheless surely worth more than 1m euros. He has apparently declared it to be worth just one third of this amount. Then there is the flat in Paris worth a million euros, which he has reportedly declared to be worth half that, and then there is another property in northern France which has been put into a holding company, to avoid ISF altogether. Hollande has been estimated by critics to pay 1/10th of the tax he should pay if his properties were correctly valued. It is impossible to verify these claims but neither has Hollande provided any transparency.
While the rich avoid wealth tax buying works of art and antiques, those who live in houses that have sharply appreciated in value (
even if their income has not) have faced draconian demands. The worst stricken are small farmers in smart areas such as the vacation island Île de Ré. The latter have cultivated potatoes on land the value of which has sharply increased, and some face ISF bills of more than 100 per cent of their income. There is no evidence that wealth tax is contributing any meaningful sum to the French treasury, indeed its effect is counter-productive as it is estimated that 1,000 people a year subject to wealth tax are leaving the country. Not even Nicolas Sarkozy dared scrap this tax; Hollande increased it.
INTERMITTENTS DU SPECTACLE
Seasonal cultural workers
An attractive status for cultural workers who have chosen to engage in seasonal work, mostly in the many festivals, concerts and animations (spectacles) put on in France during the summer. When they declare themselves ‘unemployed’ during the winter, their social benefits continue, at the expense of other taxpayers. Unionised intermittents have disrupted numerous expensive cultural productions including international festivals in Montpellier, Orange and Aix-en-Provence. The intermittent regime is so attractive that it now claims 254,000 adherents (qualified participants), a number that has grown tenfold in 10 years.
INTERNET
Invented by the French but not quite
The French claim (not entirely implausibly) to have invented the idea of the Internet or at least the idea of consumer-level data communication. They did pioneer in the field but then bungled the execution in a classic demonstration of how dirigisme turns out to have unintended consequences. Far from positioning France in the fast lane of the information superhighway, the poorly architected Minitel system administered by the French post office became an anchor and the United States raced ahead in what became a digital free-for-all. If there is any comfort for the French in the depressing failure of even one French firm to become a top Internet company, it is that Britain is not ranked either (nor Germany, or any other EU member).
The French paid a high price for the failure of the Minitel and still have a relatively undeveloped Internet culture, not helped by the disproportionate exodus of the best French coders to London and California (the French consulate in San Francisco apparently knows of 40,000 French citizens working in Silicon Valley).
ITALIE
place liberated for its pizza
Pizza is, alongside McDonald’s, the French national dish. There are two pizza parlours in our village of 2,500 people, as well as a pizza van, which visits regularly. Pizza in France is often not very good, except in Nice, where they are really Italians. Some French people believe pizza should be made with Emmental cheese rather than Mozzarella. And they use the wrong flour. The French are comforted that Italy’s economy is even more of a basket-case than their own, and possibly equally un-reformable, although the current prime minister, Matteo Renzi, seems at least to be making an effort. The French believe that Napoléon Bonaparte liberated Italy. He crowned himself emperor in 1805. The French lost control of the country in 1870 after the disastrous Franco-Prussian war but held onto Nice and the Savoie (Savoy).
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JARDINS
The imposition of geometry on nature
The French revere highly formalised gardens like that at Versailles, created by André Le Nôtre, Louis XIV’s gardener. Le Nôtre’s extension of the Tuileries gardens in Paris eventually became the axis of the Champs Elysées. The French garden is completely different from the English garden, which valorises nature above all. The great English gardeners, like Capability Brown, prized the romantic and natural, expressed in such iconic invented landscapes as Sheffield Park, an imagined England, the enormous country house perched above its lake, bridge, meadow and woodland. The French don’t need to invent this because their immense countryside provides plenty of nature, with no shovel work.
JEUNES, LES
Young people, betrayed by the Republic
With an education system that is crumbling and bland universities that are absent from the top tier of international league tables, only a tiny elite of young French people secure well-paid, stable employment. Official unemployment among young people is 23 per cent and in the ghettos it is double this. One in five young people subsists at the official poverty level. Despite France’s vaunted social protections, 58 per cent of young people are hired on short-term CDD contracts, usually at the minimum wage (which has become de facto practically a maximum wage, given the surplus of labour). This contrasts with 14.7 per cent hired this way in the UK, and 25 per cent on average in the OECD. Twenty per cent of French young people are not in education, employment or training, twice the rate in Germany. François Hollande promised in his election campaign a ‘sole objective’ of ensuring that young people do better. France is still waiting..
JOURNALISME, JOURNAUX
Compromised profession
Journalists in France have historically been divided between the impossibly brave French correspondents and photographers on the front lines of war zones, returning with narratives that were too good to check, and the whiners, as brilliantly satirised by Evelyn Waugh in Scoop, grumpily complaining whenever they are beaten on a story, which is frequently. But the modern French journalist tends towards the pompous, the dull and the compliant. New web and app platforms are trying to challenge the established journals, which will be hard to dislodge, since they are massively privileged by the state.
Astute journalists like the Belgian-born Florence Aubenas of the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur have noticed that news is now routinely fabricated, that the ‘makers’ of news are well able to manipulate it, and that the media is itself complicit in all of this. The freedom of the press, she notes, is the freedom to say the same thing as everyone else. The compliance of the press to a manufactured agenda is a process especially advanced in France as a consequence of numerous subsidies and privileges, which makes the very politicians the journalists are attacking the ones who are in a position to turn on, or off, their salaries at will. So while individual French journalists may be brave, newspapers and broadcasters are largely timid, pompous, introverted and mediocre and governed above all by their dependency on others to pay the bills.
To be recognised as a journalist in France one must hold a press card issued by a commission established by the state, a form of state licensing. The claims of French journalists to independence are consequentially implausible. Those with press cards get a special tax break, making them even more dependent on the largesse of the state. The most rarefied journalists of all are those embedded with the President of the Republic in the Elysée Palace. They’re very grand, perhaps even grander than the White House press pool, or certainly very similar, with their own motorcades, chefs, etc. They are mostly poodles.
Professional political journalists don’t inform their readers of the private lives of public figures, on the grounds that this is a violation of the déontologie (ethics) of the profession. The assertion that the French have ‘no interest’ in the private conduct of their leaders is nonsense judging from my conversations with ordinary French people.
Liberty of the press, supposedly a bedrock of the French constitution, is compromised from the outset by the press having become habituated to feeding at the trough of subsidies. The privileged tax regime for recognised journalists sees the first 7,650 euros of income tax free, because it allows publishers (bless them) to pay journalists less! Scandalously, the government in addition hands 300 million euros a year in direct subsidies to the press, with the biggest handouts for Le Monde and Le Figaro (16 million euros each), 11 million euros for Le Parisien/Aujourd’huien France, and tailing down to 7 million euros for the communist paper l’Humanité which sells fewer than 50,000 copies (and which also has benefited from the government forgiving it 4m euros of debt). Even the International New York Times (formerly the International Herald Tribune), published in Paris, is listed among the organisations receiving subsidies (not much by comparison: 356,000 euros in 2014, though perhaps sufficient to cover the expenses claims for the paper’s Paris c
orrespondents). These figures have only just emerged after being kept confidential for years.
All these media insist that the subsidies have no impact at all on their outlook and coverage. Do not look to the local and regional press for courage, either. They not only receive state subsidies directly, but are stuffed with advertising placed by local and regional governments. In 15 years I cannot recall a single article in the Midi Libre, our local journal in the Languedoc, that could even vaguely be characterised as investigative reporting, or holding power to account. Indeed, the only newspaper that I have noticed to concern itself with demanding investigation is the sports daily, L’Équipe, whose pursuit of dope-cheat cyclist Lance Armstrong was more impressive than anything produced by the supposedly serious press. L’Équipe outsells both Le Monde and Le Figaro.
French Letters Page 15
