They Eat Horses, Don't They? Page 19

  The French haute bourgeoisie – many of whom claim noble origins – are obsessed with distinguishing themselves from the newly and flashily rich. In fact, there is no greater social disgrace than being considered a parvenu. (Interestingly and perhaps not accidentally, the principal terms used in English to designate the newly and vulgarly rich are of French origin – parvenu, arriviste and nouveau riche.) It is as a result of this fanatical concern for demarcating old from new money, distinguishing the breadth of one’s bank balance from the length of one’s pedigree, that the bourgeois French obsession with the rules of politesse and savoir-vivre (see here) arises; and it is in the haute bourgeois desire to set themselves apart from the vulgar arriviste that the principles of discretion in dress, the choice of sober colours, the rejection of flashy designer labels and jewellery, take root. The big and vulgar noises in France – actors, celebrities and football stars – are listed in Who’s Who in France (published since 1953), just as in the British version. The haute bourgeoisie, however, have their own directory – Le Bottin mondain – which lists precisely no French footballers, none of the best-paid French actors or singers, and only one top-selling French essayist. Instead, it features the handful of grandes familles françaises who form the inner circles of the Parisian élite.

  To the average Frenchman, or indeed foreigner, nothing is more evocative of an aristocratic past than a name that includes the illustrious particule (i.e. the appellation de in a person’s surname, as in Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais); and nowhere is the allure of the particule so strong as in the land of ardent Revolutionaries. There are, in fact, so many fausses particules adopted by members of the French bourgeoisie in a bid to ennoble themselves that there is a counter-directory of fake nobility to name and shame them: the hefty tome Le Simili-nobiliaire français, by Pierre-Marie Dioudonnat, which lists all the faux noble particules and patronyms adopted by members of the bourgeoisie. The book caused a storm of protest on publication in 2002. Famous faux noble name-holders of bourgeois origin include: General Charles de Gaulle; the former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin; the one-time French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing; and even the great nineteenth-century novelist Honoré (de) Balzac, whose humbly-born father added the particule to his name when he climbed the social ladder.16

  The paradoxical devotion of the French to two conflicting principles – equality and privilege – inevitably generates a vast amount of cant and hypocrisy. It is also another reason for the excessive tact and discretion of that secretive, low-lying and hunted animal – the French haute bourgeoisie. After all, heads once rolled in France as a result of the overweening display of wealth and privilege. The impossible predicament of the prosperous in France was aptly expressed by the Franco-Italian actor Fabrice Luchini, when he observed, shrugging his shoulders in despair:

  ‘I don’t have any gloating passion for money; at 58 years old, I am only beginning to learn how to profit from it. I am an insomniac, I don’t derive pleasure from anything, but I don’t have the right to complain because there are other people whose houses are being razed. So I shut my mouth. Either one keeps one’s privileges and shuts up, or one gives it all to Emmaüs.’17

  The latest round of bourgeois-bashing in France following the election of the Socialist François Hollande as president in 2012 triggered a flood of wealthy tax exiles from the country, most famously the noisy departure of former national treasure Gérard Depardieu, an exodus which has caused a certain amount of soul-searching.*

  * For example, a documentary on French national television in February 2013 examined the question whether one has to leave France these days to succeed. (L’argent : faut-il partir pour réussir?, France 2, 7 February 2013.)

  The agony of self-doubt was exacerbated by a particularly mordant attack on the Gallic attitude to wealth by another national hero, the French pop singer Johnny Hallyday, in his best-selling 2013 autobiography.†

  † Hallyday said: ‘I have always asked myself why, in the USA, if you have a flashy car people smile and say ‘‘that’s great’’, while in France they treat you like a thief. It’s a sordid mentality.’ (Dans mes yeux, co-written with Amanda Sthers, Éditions Plon, 2013.)

  Is it true, the French ask themselves, that they hate the well-off? If so, does such venom against the privileged sit well with a nation that prides itself on being the world’s self-appointed arbiter of luxury and refined taste, and which indeed lives in no small part off the trade in luxury goods? Right now, the French appear in grave danger of biting the very hand that feeds them.

  Not that the French would ever openly admit that they were élitist, or money-grabbing, or insecure about wealth, or anything like that, of course. Discussing money is simply… well, too vulgar. Popular demagogues such as the left-wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon and even François Hollande have made a great show of denigrating the filthy rich and their ‘dirty’ money (although Hollande himself is an énarque, and Mélenchon owns both a Paris apartment and a country pad, so neither seem to have missed out entirely on the much-denigrated privileges in life). ‘The French have a horror of ‘‘inequality’’, but they adore privilege. And often, ‘inequality’ is the name you give to the privileges of another,’ the French comedienne and actress Anne Roumanoff has wisely said. But shhh, we are encroaching now on private matters. None of that is relevant. Let’s return to the public mantra: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité… and, above all, the greatest Gallic virtue of them all: discretion.

  Myth Evaluation: False. The French are at least as élitist as the British, if not worse, because they pretend that they are not.

  THE FRENCH DON’T WORK VERY HARD

  Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.

  JULES RENARD, FRENCH WRITER (1864–1910)

  Doucement le matin, pas trop vite l’après-midi goes an old French saying. In other words, ‘slowly in the morning, not too fast in the afternoon’. And at first sight at least, for any visitor or foreign resident in France, the French would seem to be true to their word. Although shops in France are open on Saturdays, Sunday trading is generally for markets and small boutiques only. And then, naturally, all the shops that were open on Saturday close on Mondays to make up for the extra day of work (including, shockingly to most Anglo-Saxons, French banks). Turn up at any provincial shop other than a supermarket between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. on a weekday at your peril: you will find the shutters drawn and the establishment steeped in a somnolent, post-prandial haze, while the staff are lunching at the local bistro round the corner.

  Do the French work less hard than other Europeans? The answer is, probably yes. With 30 days as the legal minimum for annual paid leave plus 10 days of public holidays a year (therefore 40 days of paid holiday in total), France is second only to Finland in the league table of holiday-happy states in the European Union.*18

  * The stingy United Kingdom ties bottom of the EU holiday table with the Netherlands and Romania, requiring a minimum of only 28 days of annual leave and public holidays. This is nothing, however, compared with the United States, the ultimate no-vacation nation, which has precisely 0 days of legally obligatory paid leave

  But the French official minimum holiday requirement of 40 days doesn’t include all the ‘unofficial’ days that are widely taken – such as the infamous pont or ‘bridging day’. The classic case of this is where a public holiday falls on a Thursday: schools and most employers will shut up shop on the Friday as well, so that everybody gets a long weekend. And then there is France’s celebrated 35-hour week, introduced by the Socialist government of Lionel Jospin in 2000. Although in practice many French people work more than this theoretical ceiling to the number of hours worked (above which employees must be paid supplementary hours), the average number of hours worked per year by the French (1,554) is below the average of OECD countries (1,749 hours).19 The French also spend the greatest amount of time out of the OECD countries on ‘leisure and personal care’, including eating and sleeping �
� a whopping 68 per cent of their day, or 15.3 hours.20

  However, try to confront a Frenchman with his relaxed approach to working, and he will likely call your attention smugly to one of the most celebrated of the so-called ‘French paradoxes’ – the ‘French productivity paradox’. This is the apparently counter-intuitive claim that – despite working fewer hours than other countries – France has a preternaturally high productivity level. The country, in fact, comes fifth among the big economies of the OECD in terms of worker productivity per hour. Unfortunately, though, the French productivity paradox is more likely a myth. As a number of economists have pointed out, the real reason why French productivity levels are so high is because of the relatively high French unemployment rate, particularly among older and younger people. As workers in these age brackets are the ones most likely to be the least productive, their exclusion from the labour market artificially forces up the French productivity figure (never mind the ‘informal’ hours worked which are not counted in the official figures, particularly in the thriving employment black market). It has been estimated that if these unemployed, lowest-producing workers were factored into the French employment market to produce the same employment picture as in the United States, the French productivity rate would plummet by 10–15 per cent. In fact, some commentators go so far as to claim that the high productivity rate in France is actually a sign of the inherent weakness of the French employment market, rather than its strength.21

  What is going to count in the future is not work, but laziness. Everybody agrees that work is only a means to an end. People talk about a ‘civilization of leisure’. When we get there we will have lost all sense of leisure. There are people who work for forty years in order to rest afterwards and when they finally get to rest, they don’t know what to do and they die. I honestly believe that I would better serve the cause of humanity by lazing around than working. It’s true, you need to have the courage not to work.

  ÉRIC ROHMER, FRENCH FILM DIRECTOR (1920–2010) ADRIEN, LA COLLECTIONNEUSE, 1967

  The allegedly work-shy attitude of the French was the subject of a storm of controversy in February 2013, when the maverick chief executive of the American tyre company Titan – Maurice M. Taylor, nicknamed ‘The Grizz’ for his tough negotiating style – rejected a tentative inquiry by the French industry minister, Arnaud Montebourg, seeking to know whether Titan would be interested in taking over part of the struggling Goodyear tyre factory in Amiens. ‘How stupid do you think we are?’ Mr Taylor wrote, in a letter that was nothing short of extraordinary for its high-handed manner. ‘I visited this factory several times. The French workers have high salaries but only work for three hours. They have an hour for breaks and lunch, chat for three hours, and work for three hours. I told the French unions that to their faces. They replied that this is how it is in France!’*22

  * Maurice Taylor is no stranger to controversy. A staunch supporter of the ‘Buy American’ campaign, he once featured in a 2008 publicity campaign where he stated that putting Michelin tyres on an American tractor would be like ‘putting a beret on a cowboy’. Given that he ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996, one can perhaps be thankful, for the sake of Franco-American diplomatic relations, that he did not win.

  Insulting, unfair, and over the top as the letter undoubtedly was, even the French had to admit that it contained a grain of truth – which was no doubt why it was so widely discussed and reported, not without a touch of angst, in France.

  THE LAMENT OF THE WAGE-SLAVE (skip)

  The classic French expression of existential ennui at the endless round of commuting, earning a living, and hitting the sack is the phrase Métro, boulot, dodo (‘Subway–work–sleep’). This nicely rhyming coinage has revolutionary connotations, having been used as a slogan during the student revolt of May ’68 to encourage workers to rise up against the perceived slavery of their daily drudgery. Its origins, though, lie somewhat earlier. It was first used by the Romanian-born, naturalized French writer Pierre Béarn (1902–2004) in his 1951 poem ‘Couleurs d’usine’ (‘Factory Colours’), the final stanza of which runs:

  ‘Rush in boy, punch your number

  To earn your dosh

  For another dreary, routine day:

  Subway, work, bars, fags, sleep, nothing.’

  In the event, the May ’68 revolution petered out, General de Gaulle’s party came back to power with renewed vigour afterwards, and the phrase turned from being a revolutionary call to arms to a resigned and cynical acceptance of one’s lot. Cynics might point out, however, that given France’s work record, an essential element has been omitted, namely, Métro, boulot, dodo, vacances...23

  This is not to say, of course, that there are not people who work very hard in France. As in every country, there are the many self-employed people, who slog away with no paid leave or holidays; there are immigrants and workers on the thriving black market, who work like dogs for a pittance and no vacation at all; and there are the increasing number of people taking several jobs to try to eke out a living in the tough years of la crise. There are even employees who want to work more than their unions will let them – such as the staff of the DIY chain Bricorama, who in 2012 demonstrated against their union’s refusal to let them work on Sundays. Generally speaking, though, France is a country where people work to live rather than live to work – an ethic that can be more than a little irritating for those who actually enjoy their job and consider it a major part of their life, rather than a tedious but necessary activity of which the primary purpose is to pay for one’s next vacation. It also means that the holiday holds a sacred place in the national culture: the whole of the French year, in fact, turns around the school holidays, which set the pattern for French office workers as much as for the schools. The upshot of all this is that, when you come to France, like it or not, you just have to go with the flow. Don’t expect a reply to a phone message without several chasers (and don’t bother at all in August). Just turn on, tune in, and drop a beat. Remember: doucement le matin, pas trop vite l’après-midi…

  Myth Evaluation: True (relative to people in the UK and the United States, that is).

  THE FRENCH ARE A NATION OF CHEESE-EATING SURRENDER MONKEYS

  I would rather have a German division in front of me than a French one behind me.

  GENERAL GEORGE S. PATTON, US SECOND WORLD WAR COMMANDER (1885–1945)

  ‘Cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ has become a modern stock phrase for allegedly lily-livered Frenchmen. France’s propensity for cheese-eating has been the subject of a previous chapter (see here); but the allegations of simian cowardliness merit closer inspection. Not that such allegations are anything new: the phrase ‘Never trust a Froggy’ was once common among British soldiers. Moreover, the slur has an exact French equivalent: Perfide Albion. In fact, the myth of the cowardly, treacherous and dastardly French in English history is matched only by the myth of the treacherous, dastardly and cowardly English in the annals of the French.

  Whereas mutual mistrust between the Frogs and the Rosbifs goes back to the Norman Conquest, accusations of cowardice are relatively recent, dating in the main from the twentieth century. In fact, France’s military history prior to the modern age is replete with as many tales of derring-do and heroism as that of any other country. Take, for example, the great French hero of the Dark Ages, the bold warrior Roland, who is the subject of the earliest literary work in French, the eleventh-century La Chanson de Roland (‘The Song of Roland’). Battling the Saracens at Roncesvalles in the Pyrenees in ad 778 on behalf of the Emperor Charlemagne, Roland bravely refused to call for help by blowing on his horn (or oliphant), fighting a hopeless rearguard action until, finally, he was forced to blow for assistance but burst his temples in the effort, dying a martyr. Then there was the celebrated and dextrous Norman bard Taillefer who, according to the Anglo-Norman chronicler Wace, inspired the Norman knights advancing on the English troops at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 by singing the Chanson de Rola
nd (all the while deftly juggling with his sword), before rushing the Saxons and being cut down.

  Perhaps the most unlikely French military hero of all, however, is Joan of Arc, La Pucelle d’Orléans (‘the Maid of Orleans’; 1412–31), a nineteen-year-old peasant girl who was inspired by divine guidance to lead the French to several important victories over the English in the Hundred Years War. Captured by the treacherous Burgundians,* she was put on trial by the pro-English Bishop of Beauvais and burned at the stake for heresy.

  * i.e. supporters of John II, Duke of Burgundy.

  And yet, having done away with her, the French – in a rather spectacular change of tack worthy of their reputation as turncoats – proceeded twenty-five years after her execution to turn her into a martyr: she was declared innocent by Pope Callixtus III in 1456, beatified in 1909, and canonized in 1920. Today, she is one of the patron saints of France† and has been the subject of countless songs, poems and plays, immortalized in works as varied as those of Shakespeare, Voltaire, Tchaikovsky, Leonard Cohen, and the 1980s New Wave group Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.