French Letters

by Jonathan Miller

  CHIRAC, JACQUES

  Shady president of the Republic, 1995-2007

  Ethically compromised, nominally conservative French politician with unexplained wealth, a string of mistresses and a streak of chauvinism. Incredibly grand, famously priapic, before being elected President, Chirac was the holder of all of the great offices of state including prime minister. Nominally of the right but ideologically flexible or without a single political principle, depending on one’s point of view. Notoriously presided over the cohabitation government (in which the President and government are from different parties) of socialist Lionel Jospin in 1990, which introduced the disastrous trente-cinq heures (35-hour week). Asked by the BBC’s Jon Sopel, ‘What do you stand for, Mr Chirac?’ he replied, ‘I stand for election.’ To his credit, Chirac defied President George W. Bush by refusing to allow French participation in the second Iraq war, provoking an outbreak of French-bashing in the USA (French fries were removed from menu of the Senate restaurant and replaced by ‘freedom fries’). Linked to shady business in five separate affaires;as mayor of Paris he was reported to have accepted suitcases full of cash. It was reported in 1996 that he had a secret Japanese bank account containing 300 million francs (roughly 40 million euros). Known to the French as the super menteur (super liar), he is a graduate of the École Nationale d’Administration, incubator of the French elite.

  CHÔMAGE

  France’s plughole

  The curse of France. In March 2015, chômage (unemployment) in France reached a new record high of 3,509,800. In April, it set another new record of 3,536,000. Youth unemployment increased 2.2 per cent between April 2014 and April 2015. The number of long-term unemployed was up 10.2 per cent in the same year. More than 2 million people have been looking for a job for more than 12 months. This count includes only those registered with the local pôle emploi (job centre). Unemployment in France is twice the level of Germany and the UK. Youth unemployment is more than 25 per cent and in the ghettos between 40-50 per cent. French politicians think unemployment will fall as the economy picks up but this is fantasy because even if it does, employers will do everything they can to avoid hiring workers, exposing themselves to punishing payroll taxes and employment laws. Innovations that could create employment, such as the authorisation of more Sunday shop openings, private hire care services and permission for dental hygienists, are obstructed so as not to offend unions and entrenched monopolies.

  CINÉMA

  Film industry that is a flagship of French exceptionalism

  The art of projecting film was perfected in France and French cinematographers, directors and actors have strongly influenced the film industry throughout its history. France still reveres film and elevates directors to the status of auteurs (authors). The French love everything about film: the technical challenge, the artistry and of course the glamour. But despite protection for French films from barbaric American imports and heavy subsidies, and the glamour of the Cannes Film Festival, French cinema is in trouble, menaced by new technologies like Internet streaming. The industry’s dependence on handouts has not promoted a culture of paying much attention to audiences.

  Television channels pay 3.2 per cent of their profits and Canal+, the subscription TV monopoly, 12 per cent towards French film production. Yet it is in a slump, with increasing numbers of directors choosing to shoot their films in English and many of its most talented players leaving for Los Angeles. Many films that once would have been made in France are now being shot elsewhere. According to the New York Times, 22 per cent percent of filming for French movies was completed beyond its borders in the first nine months of 2014. In 2012, a particularly devastating year in terms of production flight, the rate was 50 percent for projects with budgets between 10 and 20 million euros, and 21 percent for films under 10 million euros, according to the French cinema industries federation. France has struggled to adapt to the new forms of cinema distribution such as Netflix streaming and has yet to fully adapt to the new long-form television formats. France has shown itself capable of producing internationally successful cinema-like TV series like The Returned (Les Revenants) and Spiral (Engrenages), which have found enthusiastic audiences in the anglophone world, even if the subtitles are often pretty dodgy. But these are exceptions.

  In a blistering article in Le Monde in 2012, Vincent Maraval, a distributor, declared the year to have been a(nother) ‘disaster.’ French cinema, he complained, has structured itself around an economy of subsidies and even the greatest so-called successes produced by this system have lost money. Overpaid actors have consumed too much of the budget, leaving little space for innovation. Production costs are among the highest in the world. He blamed television for dragging down standards, illustrating that few in France seem to have recognised the platform revolution in audiovisual production. At least tax-payer subsidies continue to provide cosy insulation.

  Does French cinema have a future? The French have taken perverse pride in boasting that their cinema is art. While superficially commendable, this is suicidal. The French government is dreaming of a so-called Google tax on end-users to keep the subsidies flowing once the old broadcast distribution network is supplanted by streaming. But in an age of media production - including some dramatic new successes from those money-grabbing Americans - French film will atrophy unless this industry, too, moves towards successful creative investments rather than politicised subsidies warranted by the elite.

  CLIENTÉLISME

  Goods, services and subsidies for political support

  A malaise at the heart of French society, responsible for corruption and economic failure. Clientélisme and political corruption on the one hand, and normal political give and take on the other, are sometimes hard to tell apart. In France clientism is deeply embedded as a consequence of a political system in which the state provides a flow of subsidies to local government in return for the political support of local politicians, and awards government contracts to private enterprise with political piston (influence). The consequence is that politicians are dependent on their political superiors for finance of their projects, and that the private sector is often not as private as it looks (see paraétatisme). A third pillar of clientélisme is the relationship between the state and the syndicats (unions), to whom are delegated important governmental functions, and deferred to on reforms, in return for not making too much trouble.

  CLOSER

  Magazine that goes where political reporters fear to tread

  Since French newspapers are so tame, French readers are turning to gossip magazines inspired by British tabloids, which they call the pressepeople. The most daring of these is Closer. Despised by the French journalism establishment, who believe that professional ethics prohibits investigating the private lusts of public figures, the British-founded Closer (circulation 350,000), although now run by Italians, has been treating the French elite with the contempt it deserves and paying the inevitable legal fines for invasion of privacy as a cost of doing business. The people’s press is hardly virtuous. Closer revealed Kate Middleton topless and Carla Bruni in a swimsuit, but sometimes it produces genuine scoops, most notoriously pictures of President François Hollande on a motor scooter outside the actress Julie Gayet’s apartment. Voici and Public are other popular French titles. Paris-Match, akin to the now defunct Life magazine in the United States, is not strictly a people magazine since it also includes much serious reportage, but it is certainly interested in celebrity and has been the platform for the scorching revelations of President Hollande’s erstwhile first lady, Valérie Trierweiler.

  COCORICO

  The cry of a crowing cockerel and a boastful Frenchman

  This is the triumphalist soundmade by a Frenchman standing up to his ankles in shit. I merely pass on the definition proffered to me at a reception at the French embassy in Washington, by a senior diplomat.

  CODE CIVIL

  The national yoke

  The legal system under whose yoke the French are condemned to have
every aspect of their lives regulated. The enduring legacy of Napoléon Bonaparte, there are in fact 60 separate codes and while they contain some enlightened revolutionary ideals, they are also in many respects today less flexible than the Anglo-Saxon tradition of common law that has come to dominate international business transactions, and resulted in the ascendance of English and American global law firms and the marginalisation of French law on the global stage (see avocats).

  CODE DU TRAVAIL

  Employment law against employment

  Ludicrous, perverse compilation of employment laws, codified down to the tiniest detail. The code contains 196 pages of regulations just for hairdressers. Although called the employment code, it might as well be called the unemployment code. It is in every way a catalogue of restrictions that create obstacles for France to develop service industries. The regulations are enforced by inspecteurs du travail who have police powers and their rulings are subject to review by councils of prud’hommes (elected by, among others, the labour unions) who take months to make decisions and are not known for being employer-friendly.

  The manifold restrictions and costs of the code, the imposition of inflexible contracts and conditions of employment that make it almost impossible to fire anyone, are more than enough to demotivate French businesses from hiring. The lethal cocktail of the code and sky-high cotisations (social charges) is a job killer. In 1990, just 25 years ago, the Code du Travail was 1,000 pages in length and there were 1,000,000 unemployed. By the year 2000 the code had doubled in size to 2,000 pages, and so had unemployment, to 2,000,000. In 2010, following a perfectly symmetrical trajectory, the code stood at 3,000 pages and unemployment at 3,000,000. And in 2014-15 with more than 3,500 pages in the Code, unemployment is precisely on track at more than 3,500,000!

  The inspecteurs du travail recently prosecuted Stéphane Cazenave, a master baker in Saint-Paul-lès-Dax, in southwest France, for his failure to close one day a week. The baker, who has 22 employees and has won a prize for the best baguette in France, says the judgement will cause him to let go some of his employees and lose hundreds of thousands in annual revenue. Other bakers had complained that Cazenave’s energetic activities were unfair competition. A notorious perversity of the Code du Travail is that it is usual for companies to seek to remain under the plateau of 50 employees. At 50 or more, like it or not, an employer is required to involve social partners (unions), establish works councils with meetings, agendas, etc. and pay higher social charges. The result is that three times as many companies in France have 49 employees as have 50; another perverse triumph for French regulation.

  COMMERÇANTS

  A real nation of shopkeepers

  Napoléon Bonaparte said the English were une nation de boutiquiers (derogatory term usually translated as a nation of shopkeepers), which was not an original sentiment as it had first been observed by Adam Smith. This is no longer true. Britain is now a nation of chain stores and Internet distribution and it is the French who are the petits commerçants (small shopkeepers). This is not all bad as there are still many family-owned tabacs (tobacconists) and maisons de la presse (newsagents), whereas in Britain these enterprises have long been transformed into a sterile branch of WH Smith or, in America, Hudson News. Family-owned businesses are advantaged in France because they can reduce their exposure to social charges and work-time rules. The Daily Mail says French shopkeepers are the surliest in Europe but in my village this is not true at all, although they do close for lunch.

  CON, CONNARD, MERDE, PUTE

  The art of being vulgar

  The French curse liberally and creatively. Con is one of the great polyvalent (multipurpose) French insults. Con depending on context can be equivalent to asshole, jerk, imbecile or someone who is mentally deficient. It’s a diminutive of connard (masculine) or conne, connasse or connarde (feminine). A connerie is a stupid or idiotic action. ‘Casse-toi, pauv’ con!’ (more or less, ‘fuck off you pathetic asshole’) was the phrase famously used by former president Nicolas Sarkozy during a walkabout in Paris after a man refused to shake his hand. The man told the president: ‘Don’t touch me, you’ll make me dirty.’ Sarko’s riposte was considered below the dignity of a president. Although the French lack the word fuck, which is of Germanic origin, there are multiple ways to express this sentiment in French. ‘Va te faire foutre,’ means go fuck yourself, in which the verb foutre (fuck) is freighted with the added insult of the familiar pronoun. Dégage is another way of telling someone to fuck off.

  Merde (literally, shit) is another highly versatile French vulgarity. Can be used in combination with the particle ‘de’ to form compound insults such as, pute de merde de con (literally ‘asshole-shit-whore’, lyrically ‘holy fucking shit’). You can insult someone by saying tu m’emmerdes (‘you’re pissing me off’, strengthened by using the familiar tu pronoun as an insult), or you can declare how pissed-off you are by declaring, ça m’emmerde (‘that’s pissing me off’). A pute or a putain (pronounced with a deep U - sounds like ‘oo’) is a whore but the word on its own can be used to express any negative emotion (reaction to a flat tyre) or to emphasise an imperative, éteins cette putain de télévision (‘turn off the bloody TV’). A bordel is a whorehouse where you would find putes but the words can be combined with the ever versatile merde to produce putain de bordel de merde (roughly equivalent to ‘fucking hell’). The masterwork on French swearing is Merde! The Real French You Were Never Taught in School (1998) by Genevieve, illustrated by my former newspapercolleague Michael Heath, although it is now rather dated.

  The sentimental film Le Dîner de cons (Francis Veber, 1998)portrayed a club of arrogant Frenchmen who competed to invite the most awful cons to their dinners in order to mock them. The twist was that the supposed con turned out to be the only decent human being among them.

  CONCURRENCE DÉLOYLE

  Unfair (read any) competition

  The term refers not just to unfair competition but in practice to any economic activity that might force a market incumbent to compete. The French are very keen on monopolies, restraints of trade and inhibitions on market entry. In effect, any and all competition is a priori unfair to existing market players, hence there are tiers of regulation to protect established economic actors, no matter how inefficient, and to inhibit competitors, no matter how innovative. French booksellers were able to persuade the government to prohibit amazon.fr from offering free delivery, as this was considered unfair competition. Its scope to shake up the French book business is further handicapped by the price controls on the books themselves, forbidding discounting. Amazon does not function in France as it does in the UK or Germany; it can take days or weeks for goods to be delivered, if they are. See taxis.

  CONSEIL CONSTITUTIONNEL

  Council for geriatric statesmen

  Compromised arbiter of the constitution. The council is made up of former presidents of the Republic and nine other members, typically superannuated politicians at the end of their career in the Senate and National Assembly. It decides whether new legislation is compatible with the French constitution. Riven with conflicts of interest, feuds and dubious appointments, the rulings are not supposed to be political even though they are made by people who are all politicians. The council struck down Hollande’s first effort to impose a 75 per cent income tax as un-Republican and discriminatory. Since most members of the Conseil Constitutionnel can be fairly considered millionaires, this would be fair enough, except they have nothing to say about a tax code that is riddled with other exceptional privileges.

  CONSEILLER MUNICIPAL

  Municipal Councillors

  Humblest élu (elected official) in France. I am one of these and have even been issued an official identity card to prove it. I have yet to discover what this card will do for me, other than reminding me of my weighty political responsibilities, should I forget. You do not need to be a French citizen to be a councillor - any EU citizenship will do - although before the election I did get a call from an official at t
he préfecture to check me out. I suspect this may have been to verify that I could hold a telephone conversation in French. I have absolutely no power but I am allowed to speak at council meetings where I denounce villagers who let their dogs foul the sidewalks. Nepotism is taken for granted in local government and it is the relatives of the mayor and his close political allies who benefit. A nearby village recently hired a municipal police officer. Sixty candidates applied but nobody was surprised when the job went to the granddaughter of the deputy mayor. Some councillors are paid - the mayor and his adjoints (deputies). Not me. Much of the work is crushingly routine and largely to do with approving budgets in a form acceptable to the state, and voting to apply for subsidies to fix the sewers, etc. We also deliver copies of the municipal bulletin to our neighbours. Hence, I have gone from being a national newspaper journalist to a delivery boy. Sometimes the meetings get heated. One of our councillors demanded that we censor the contentious tribune (monthly political diatribe) of the ultra-left wing opposition councillors that is published in the municipal bulletin. This demand came immediately after the entire council had paraded in front of the town hall in a demonstration of solidarity with Charlie Hebdo, claiming to support liberty of expression.I spoke strongly against it, judging that the opposition was free to publish any drivel it wanted to. My intervention was approvingly reported in the Midi-Libre newspaper, after which I have gained a certain notoriety as a champion of free speech.