French Letters

by Jonathan Miller

  SNCF

  Squalor on wheels

  The terrestrial analogue of Air France. The nationalised railway (SNCF) is an employee-benefits scheme with a not especially impressive railway attached. The French railways are attractive to those who are not required to use them. Whenever I hear an Englishman wax lyrical about the quality of the train network in France, I can be sure he has never put a foot on any train other than a high-speed train à grande vitesse (TGV). To ride the stopping service from Montpellier to Béziers in the summer with no air conditioning is to be nostalgic for Southwest Trains in England. Société nationale des chemins de fer has a debt of 40 billion euros - a figure only marginally smaller than Egypt’s national debt - which is predicted to double in coming years since the necessary drastic reforms to its network and its bloated bureaucracy and wildly generous pension scheme are not occurring at all. Train drivers retire at 50. If the TGV is a symbol of French technical accomplishment, then the rest of the trains in France are dilapidated, often dangerously so, with the most approximate of schedules. There remain ghosts of a glorious past. Le Train Bleu, the spectacular restaurant at the Gare de Lyon, is one of the most magnificent dining rooms in Paris. Their steak tartare is epic. But descend to the platforms and even if the cheminots (railway workers) are consenting to work that day, the trains are likely to be late and dirty. The Gare du Nord is squalid.

  SOLIDARITÉ

  Hypocritical mantra

  The proclamation of solidarity is the substitution of sentiment for activity. Politicians insist on solidarity with the unemployed, while doing nothing about unemployment. They express solidarité with refugees, while doing everything they can to move them out of France. When there is an earthquake in Nepal or a tsunami in the Pacific, political expressions of solidarité are as ritualistic as they are meaningless. It is perhaps the most overused and hypocritical word in the French political dictionary. President François Hollande cannot make a speech without insisting on solidarité, but everyone else uses the word, too: there is a national federation of solidarity amongst women, one for farm workers, another for students, a federation for socialist solidarity and even an Internet site in which the Carrefour supermarket chain expresses its commitment to solidarity. In the context of taxation, solidarité is a simile for confiscation. There is the Impôt de Solidarité sur la Fortune (ISF), the notorious wealth tax, introduced by former president François Mitterrand. All employers in France must pay a payroll tax called the contribution solidarité autonomie (CSA) to support aged and handicapped people. A French pay slip now runs to two pages, to leave room to enumerate all the deductions. Then there is President Hollande’s absurd Pacte de responsibilité et de solidarity. Every French town has a maison de solidarité that serves as a gateway for claiming benefits. Ultimately, solidarity boils down to a way for politicians to make themselves seem sympathetic, for unions to pretend they act in the interest of anyone other than themselves, and for justifying the imposition of new taxes. See langue de bois.

  START-UPS

  Not a thing in France

  There is not really a French word for a start-up, hence it is borrowed from English; neither does the word entrepreneur have the same meaning in French as in English. Start-ups are frequently sued by those who feel threatened. 1001Pharmacies, a Montpellier-based start-up that wants to disrupt the protected drug-store market, raised 8 million euros in 2015 and has ambitious ideas to roll out their online service across Europe, although for the moment they are still banned from offering prescription drugs in France. ‘It’s the kind of thing that breaks your heart, when regulation gets in the way of innovation,’ wrote Rude Baguette, the French start-up blog, after the French courts banned the company from delivering prescription drugs in a case brought by the Conseil National de l’Ordre des Pharmacies (one of numerous drug-store trade groups). Other recent start-up deals have been for between 1.5 million euros and 31 million euros - decimal points away from the venture capital investments being made elsewhere.

  Ubisoft, the number three computer game company globally, is the only French gaming software company with any kind of global recognition but it has been doing everything it can to delocalise and has grown the most largely outside France. Its biggest studio is in Montreal and it expects to employ 3,500 staff in its rapidly expanding business cluster based around Montreal and Quebec City.

  Esker, a business process software developer and Vupen, a Montpellier-based Internet security company, are accoladed in the French business press as examples of cutting-edge companies but are in truth small potatoes. It’s taken Esker 30 years to get to 40 million euros in sales. Parrot, a Paris start-up that designs multi-rotor drones, is highly regarded for its technical innovation but has already been overtaken globally. Its modest 243 million euros in revenue in 2014 does not inspire confidence that it can maintain its market place. The French have a minister for digital innovation, Canadian-born Axelle Lemaire, who is also a deputy in the national assembly, representing French citizens in 10 countries in northern Europe, including the UK. Her influence is minimal. Rude Baguette says she has failed to fight for entrepreneurs and failed to object to the recent Loi sur le renseignement, the French law permitting virtually unlimited electronic surveillance by the government. She is, in any case, reported to be barely on speaking terms with her boss Emmanuel Macron, the minister of the economy. He is planning new legislation encouraging digital start-ups: what about less legislation, eh?

  SUICIDE

  Enduring artistic theme

  Individual suicide is a constant theme in French literary and filmic discourse. National suicide has become a feature in France’s management of its economy. Flaubert’s Emma Bovary’s terrible suicide sets the literary standard but the theme is readily seized by contemporary essayists with the gloomy polemic by Éric Zemmour, Suicide Français, at the top of bestseller lists in 2014. Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission (Submission, 2015)also describes the auto-destruction of the Republic. Le Petit Prince (1943), the children’s classic authored by Antoine de St Exupéry, can be read as a suicide note and indeed its appearance was swiftly followed by the death of St Exupéry, who despite being too old to be a combat pilot, and hardly current in his flying hours, was tortured by his failure to engage in combat. As the war drew to a close, his masterpiece finished, he returned to Europe and joined the Free French, taking out a tricky high-performance aircraft and recklessly, some say suicidally, flying into a hostile environment, where he was killed. The theme of national suicide is central to Marcel Carné’s film Hôtel du nord (1938) where a young couple’s suicide pact was a metaphor for France’s own decision to live or die faced with the approaching forces of Nazism.

  SUISSE, LA

  Where French people hide their money

  In 2013, embarrassing President François Hollande, Jérôme Cahuzac, the French budget minister responsible for leading a crackdown on tax evasion, resigned after it was disclosed he held a secret bank account in Switzerland. In 2015, Arlette Ricci, heir to the Nina Ricci perfume dynasty, was sentenced to three years in prison (2 years suspended) and fined 1 million euros for hiding 18 million euros in Swiss accounts. Fifty other French taxpayers are being targeted in the ongoing investigation. HSBC was in 2015 accused of hiding 5 billion euros for nearly 9,000 French customers. Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the National Front, has been accused by the Mediapart online news service of hiding 2.2m euros in Switzerland but has denounced his accusers as politically motivated.

  SYNDICATS

  Compulsory Trade unions

  Although French people do not especially love unions, anyone working for the government or a large enterprise is represented by a union whether they like it or not. Unions play a key role in negotiating employment reforms, despite representing only 8 per cent of private-sector employees. The largest is the Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT) and the most influential is the Confédération générale du travail (CGT), historically dominated by communists. Strikes do not requir
e a membership vote, work stoppages are constant and the public be damned. Labour actions in France are not confined to the withdrawal of labour and picketing, but can comprise widespread social disruption. Electricity workers used to turn off the power to the entire country when they went on strike, though this practice has now been abandoned.

  France lost more than a million days to strikes in 2013, 10 times as many as Germany. Strikes, which are described as ‘mouvements sociale’, enjoy wide de facto immunity to the criminal law. Police will usually stand aside when workers block highways, set fires, occupy factories and hold their bosses hostage. Unions enjoy numerous privileges under French law. They have a statutory role as co-custodians of the enormous social security system and in companies with 50 or more employees, they have a right to statutory representation on a works council, and to be consulted on everything from company strategy to the arrangement of office furniture.

  SUBVENTIONS

  Subsidies with strings attached

  France’s many strata of local government are less autonomous than they pretend to be and are highly focused on extracting subventions (subsidies or grants) from superior layers of regional government. These are in turn focused on winning their own subventions from the state itself. Naturally, political support is expected up and down the line, and this is a pillar of the French system of clientélisme (clientelism). It is by dangling the carrot of subventions that central government gets local governments to follow priorities established elsewhere, but the subventions on offer can be so attractive, a municipality would be mad not to grab at them. Who would not want someone else to pay to replace the sewers? Seemingly every town in France seemed simultaneously to install ralentisseurs (traffic calming). This is no bad thing, but the top-down nature of the decision-making means there is always a price. Subventions and the related dotations (transfer payments to collectivities from the state) are nevertheless decreasing as the state has forced austerity onto the collectivities while maintaining intact the core activities of the state itself, where there is needless to say no evidence of austerity. What might replace a reduced level of subventions in the future? There are structural problems that make it hard for local government to partner with the private sector to deliver developments and planning gains. In any case French local administrations have little experience of, and are not comfortable working with, private-sector partners.

  SYSTÈME D

  How things get done in France

  D stands for débrouillardise meaning making do, or resourcefulness. Applies to any quick-witted, improvised work-around to a problem, it can apply also to getting things done in the black economy. Also applied to the art of improvisation in a kitchen, popularised by chef Anthony Bourdain’s book, The Nasty Bits, 2006.

  T

  TABAC

  More smokers

  Cigarettes have never been more sublime than in the hands of a French person. Jean-Paul Belmondo with his dangling Gauloise in À bout de souffle (Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard, 1960) is an essential image of French cinema. Nobody who knows the French doubts the necessity for the government’s vigorous campaign against smoking. The health minister, Marisol Touraine, said in 2014 that smoking deaths in France were the equivalent of an airliner crashing every day with 200 people on board. By 2016 it will be illegal to smoke in a car if there are children present and cigarette packets will have to carry even more prominent health warnings. Smoking has been forbidden in all public places including cafés since 2008 and in 2013, the government announced that it would extend the ban to electronic cigarettes to discourage mimicking behaviour. Since the 1960s, the proportion of smokers in France has fallen from 57 per cent to 32 per cent, but sales of cigarettes have shockingly increased 7 per cent since 2014 so smokers are puffing more or more people are smoking. A fifth of French women still smoke while pregnant. Peut mieux faire (must try harder).

  The buralistes who have the right to sell tobacco in France are, like many of their compatriots, angry. They recently dumped four tons of carrots outside the headquarters of the Socialist party in Paris, to protest the planned introduction of plain cigarette packets. The carrot was chosen because it looks vaguely like the sign outside all shops in France that sell cigarettes. Before that they were angry that French people were buying their smokes in Spain. Indeed, they are usually angry.

  TAYLOR JR, MAURICE

  American businessman, enemy of the state

  Here is a cameo of how France sends the wrong message to foreign investors. Arnaud Montebourg was the minister for economic development in the first François Hollande government, before walking out of the government in a huff. He was trying to sell a strike-ridden, failing tyre factory in northern France to Titan Tire, an American company that has developed a reputation for hard-nosed turnarounds of bust businesses. After visiting the factory in Amiens and listening to Montebourg’s pitch, Maurice ‘The Grizz’ Taylor Jr, Titan’s no-bullshit chief executive, put it to the minister quite simply: ‘How stupid do you think we are? Titan is the one with the money and the talent to produce tyres. What does the crazy union have? It has the French government. The work force gets paid high wages but works only three hours. They have one hour for their breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three. I told this to the French unions to their faces and they told me, ‘That’s the French way!’

  Montebourg’s response was not measured. He might have said: ‘Come to dinner, let’s try and work it out.’ Instead, he publicly called Taylor ‘extreme’ and ‘insulting,’ accusing him of ‘perfect ignorance’ about France and its strengths. ‘Incendiary!’ ‘Insulting!’ and ‘Scathing!’ were among the comments elsewhere, while the head of the communist CGT union at the plant said Mr. Taylor belonged in a ‘psychiatric ward’. Very few voices were raised to say: perhaps Taylor has a point. (An honourable exception was the online journal, Atlantico.) How can you take a government seriously that has employed a minister with a temperament like Montebourg’s? The factory has now closed after workers took managers hostage, an act for which nobody was punished or even charged. Another example of how the French police are utterly feeble dealing with unionists. Montebourg was last heard of joining the board of the French ‘eco’ furniture store Habitat (long separated from its British roots). I recommend going short on this particular enterprise.

  TAXIS

  Police-protected mafia (like any other organised job)

  While the French police fail to keep the Channel Tunnel open, they are doing everything they can to keep Uber closed. It’s not surprising that the idea for Uber, which uses a smartphone app to summon private hire cars, was born in Paris, when Travis Kalanick, one of the founders of the company, tried and failed to hail a taxi. The number of cabs in Paris was capped at 14,000 in 1937 and is now only 15,900. London has 8 taxis for every thousand inhabitants, New York 6 and Paris 3. Uber has had a rough ride in France. When it opened an office in Paris, it was raided by the police. The minister of the interior, Bernard Cazeneuve, ordered the arrest of the CEO of Uber France and the general manager of Uber Europe. More than 400 police officers were sent to fight against Uber on the streets, pulling over cars with passengers in the back seat. And although Uber cars are still technically permitted, they must return to their base after every trip. So as it now stands, an Uber driver who takes a passenger from Paris to De Gaulle airport must return to Paris, 34km away, before he is allowed to return to the airport to pick up another passenger. This while Paris has some of the most contaminated air in Europe. UberPOP, an even lower cost version of the service, has been banned altogether.

  When Phil, an Englishman in a nearby village who has lived in France a long time, finally persuaded his mayor to give him a permit to operate a voiture de tourisme avec chauffeur (VTC) - a sort-of taxi but limited to offering guided tours to tourists - he was promptly visited by the long-established taxi operator in the next village. ‘Take one of my customers and you may find your car on fire,’ he threatened. Phil, not to be intimidated, replied: ‘That
’s not fair. You have nine taxis and I have one. It’s going to cost me a lot more in petrol to burn your cars than it will cost you to burn mine.’ He has heard no more. The French government, which instinctively sides with producers against consumers, hasn’t the guts to stand up to the taxi mafia whose fight against Uber has been violent and nasty. Caught in a protest in Paris, the American singer Courtney Love tweeted: ‘They’ve ambushed our car and are holding our driver hostage. They’re beating the cars with metal bats. This is France?? I’m safer in Baghdad.’ She added: ‘François Hollande where are the fucking police???’ In Marseille, taxi drivers have used the Uber app to summon private hire cars, which they then vandalise, beating up their drivers. When they are not physically attacking their competitors, taxi drivers punish everyone else with frequent operations escargot, blocking motorways during rush hours.

  TELEVISIONS

  Dominated by CSI and Masterchef

  France has long abandoned its eccentric SECAM television system (a product of French technical exceptionalism) and all broadcasting is now numérique (digital). Viewers can receive dozens of digital TV channels via satellite, over the air, or over broadband. But most of the TV in France is pretty dire, which probably makes it similar to, rather than different from, TV anywhere else. American imports are often the highlights of French schedules, especially on TF1, the principal commercial channel. Les experts (CSI) is wildly popular in France. Formats like Masterchef are imported from the United Kingdom. There are news, sports and music channels, an arts channel and some pretty marginal channels that have tiny viewing figures. A redevance audiovisuelle (television licence) of 136 euros is charged on every French household as an add-on to the taxe d’habitation (home-occupancy tax). The proceeds finance France Télévisions, the public service television conglomerate whose president is appointed by the president of the Republic. France Télévisions operates channels France 2, France 3, France 4, France 5 and Ô - the latter being a special service for the overseas territories, which pay a reduced redevance. The redevance is never questioned nor is its relevance in a digital epoch ever mentioned. France Télévisions is an enormous bureaucracy with 10,000 employees, primarily concerned with its own survival, deferentially covering the presidency, broadcasting some lively chat shows but also much appalling drivel. The customers do not get to decide if this is value for money or not, because unless they sign a declaration to the tax authorities that they do not own a television set, they must pay, whether they like it or not.