French Letters

by Jonathan Miller

  ÉCONOMIE ET FINANCE, MINISTÈRE DE

  Lala land

  House of dreams, cooking the books since 1975, which was the last time France balanced its budget. France has a remarkably successful, open and reformed economy, according to ‘The Economy of France’ page on Wikipedia, which it can be assumed is authored by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, since it reads like a press release for an imaginary country, one that exists solely in the fantasies of the Ministry of Economy and Finance. Not even the department’s own ministers believe the official line.

  ÉCOTAXE

  Ruinous red-baret debacle

  A couple of years ago great steel gantries began to appear on the A9 motorway near my house and Dalek-like kiosks sprouted on the edges of minor roads. This was repeated throughout France. All were bristling with cameras linked to automatic number-plate recognition systems. A few months later the government was preparing to pay 800 million euros to dismantle them. The idea was that trucks could be tracked wherever they went and made to pay for their environmental impact. But truck drivers in Brittany, wearing red bonnets and styling themselves les bonnets rouges, attacked the equipment and blockaded the highways. The tax was ‘suspended’ (forever) by Ségolène Royal, President Hollande’s environment minister and former partner. She claimed she would collect the money from the autoroute operators instead, whom she accuses of excessive profits, but this hasn’t happened. Taxpayers are still paying 10 million euros a week to the Italian consortium hired to collect the écotaxe and these payments are expected to continue for several years. The total bill for this project is expected to reach 1.2 billion euros.

  ÉDUCATION NATIONALE

  Like the NHS

  The Republic promises all of its students access to an equal education from which anyone, from no matter how humble an origin, may ascend to the very top. That’s the theory, anyway. The delivery of this Republican ideal is more complicated. The mission is entrusted to the system of Éducation Nationale, words which are as engrained in the consciousness of the French as, for example, the National Health Service in Britain. The words encompass every element of the French education system. Yet there is an ideological component to this and it could also be termed endoctrinement national (national indoctrination).

  The nation’s education is centrally directed from the Ministry of Education in Paris. But the Prime Minister and President of the Republic are also deeply involved in a subject which is so politically sensitive and that accounts for spending of more than 150 billion euros a year. Éducation Nationale is a pillar of the Republic, charged above all with the assembly-line production of loyal Republicans. But how is it holding up? ‘It’s on its knees,’ says one teacher I know. And, say many, has been for some time. Jean-Paul Brighelli in his book La Fabrique du crétin (The making of idiots, 2005) was exaggerating, but perhaps not too much, when he declared, ‘Our children can’t read, can’t count, can’t think.’ He alleged that 30 years of good intentions, badly managed, had turned the French education system from one of the best in the world to one responsible for the collapse of social mobility.

  The more cynical might say that the more teachers that have been hired, and the more money spent, the greater the apparent deficiencies of national education, but this is not entirely fair. Even though there are a fair number of ultra-left teachers and unfit teachers on the job, there are serious professors too and some well disciplined schools, yet in various league tables the educational achievements produced by this investment have been rather middling.

  National education begins at three at maternelle (infants school), continues from 6 to 11 at primaire (primary school), then collège (middle school) from 11-15 and finally lycée from 15-18(secondary school). Instruction is compulsory in France to age 16, but this does not mean it is compulsory to attend school, only to be educated. I have altermondialiste friends who withdrew their children from school and said they could learn more working on their farm and would learn to read when they wanted to, but this is rare. In supposedly egalitarian France, schools are not equal, especially the lycées. The rich who have sufficient piston (clout) and who live in the best postcodes, have access to the handful of elite lycées, a disproportionate share of whose graduates move on to the Grandes Écoles (elite higher-education establishments). These high schools are known to all as the entry point into the French establishment and include Lycée Henri IV, Louis-le-Grand, Stanislas, Thiers, and Le Parc. Throughout France, ambitious parents, few of them devoutly religious, take their children out of the state lycées and into private, mainly subsidised Catholic schools, to avoid the perceived inconsistency and mediocrity of Éducation Nationale. These Catholic schools charge fees of 100-1,000 euros a year, and are subsidised by the state, which pays the salaries of the teachers.

  EDF

  French electricity monopoly

  Gigantic bureaucratic French energy company, largest generator of electricity in the world. Like many French industrial giants, paraétatique (semi-governmental), nearly indistinguishable from an arm of the state. Électricité de France was partly privatised in 1999, being floated on the stock exchange, although the French government continues to hold de facto control of the group. EDF has used the monopoly profits of its activities in France to buy electricity generators abroad and is now active throughout America, Africa, Asia and Europe, Britain. Under EU rules, it is now possible to buy electricity from competitor companies but these have made little impact and the market dominance of EDF is unchallenged. In 2011, EDF was fined 1.5 million euros and two executives were jailed for spying on Greenpeace. EDF’s corporate culture was comprehensively skewered by Corrine Maier in her book Bonjour Paresse (Hello Laziness, 2004).

  ÉLECTIONS

  Democratic theatre

  Healthy turnouts in French elections seem to affirm the legitimacy of the political system. It’s common to have 80 per cent turnout in presidential elections and even municipal elections draw 75 per cent of the voters. But whether the votes mean anything is another matter, as the French discovered in 2005 when they voted 55-45 per cent to reject the proposed European constitution, which was nonetheless imposed essentially intact in any case, re-labelled as a treaty.

  Most elected offices in France are filled from party lists. This keeps the politicians safely remote from being directly accountable to voters. Those at the top of the lists are always likely to be elected, while the lower the candidate is listed, the chances of election decrease. Thus it is the party, not the voter, who really gets to choose who will be elected. The voter is required to vote for the entire list or none of it, there is no crossing out of names that displease individual electors, as was once permitted.

  Presidential elections and elections to the National Assembly are conducted differently, over two rounds. In the first round, any number of candidates can present themselves and there are typically candidates from the Chasse, Pêche, Nature et Traditions (hunting, fishing, nature and tradition) party as well as monarchists, Esperanto speakers, etc., but after the first-round votes are counted, only the top two go through to the next round, when it is a straight choice. The French joke that in the first round you vote for the candidate you like and in the second you vote against the candidate you hate the most.

  Senators are elected by les grands électeurs, an electoral college comprised of parliamentary deputies, already-elected senators, regional councillors and delegates from municipal councils. In other words, politicians elected by other politicians.

  France has a vast number of officials elected in this way: 620,000 or one for every 100 people.

  ELYSÉE

  Inflated presidential palace

  If Buckingham Palace is more shabby than chic and the White House rather suburban, the principal palace of the French Republic represents the gilded extremity of interior design. Only the princes of Araby can return home to more splendid apartments. It is so grand, so ornate, so over-the-top, it is doubtful that anyone who lives there can have any idea whatsoever of reality
. It would probably help restore the French presidency to reality (and help balance the budget) by moving to the grimly modernist office district of La Défense or maybe Clichy-sous-Bois, one of the worst French ghettos, and flogging the Elysée to the Chinese.

  EMBOURGEOISEMENT

  Gentrification

  A tendency to be heartily decried at leftish dinner parties, even if those doing the decrying are the self-same bourgeoisie. Gentrification is nothing new and modern Paris itself is the consequence of Haussmann’s brutal displacement of poor people driven to the suburbs by rising rents, with the new quartiers repopulated with bourgeois. The archetypal gentrified suburb of Paris is Montreuil, equivalent of Brooklyn or Hackney and home to journalists, artists and gallerists, where they talk about house prices as if it was London.

  EMPLOIS D’AVENIR

  Fantasy jobs for the future

  An old idea, re-launched by President François Hollande but never delivered. The only plentiful jobs of the future for most French young people seem to be wiping old peoples’ bottoms in care homes, which are the only institutions in France constantly recruiting staff, although at the minimum wage. Real jobs for the future seem to be elsewhere, like the UK where 27,884 French citizens were issued national insurance numbers in 2014, up 25 per cent in a year.

  ENGIE

  Formerly known as GDF Suez

  The new name for what was once called Gaz de France, like EDF, a state monopoly, partially privatised but still under the thumb of the almighty state. GDF was merged with Suez, the water and energy company, in 2006 with the objective of creating the world’s largest liquified natural gas company and has 215,000 staff in 70 countries. The French state continues to hold 35 per cent of the shares and has an effective veto over all strategic decisions. As with EDF, the electricity generator, alternative suppliers are available but have hardly eroded Engie’s dominant position. It is the 6th largest company in the world.

  ENGRENAGES

  Hyper-gritty cop show on French TV

  As close as French TV has got to The Wire. Rare export success sold to more than 70 countries. Perhaps the first feminist cop show. Basic story is about Parisian criminal investigator Laure Berthaud, running a serious crime squad in waters infested with dangerous criminals and scheming superiors. In some ways she is the opposite of the semi-autistic Sarah Lund in the Danish show Forbrydelsen (The Killing). Laure is almost too emotional but like Lund, her life is shit. A literal translation of Engrenages is ‘gears’; it is called Spiral in England where it is broadcast by the BBC, though I would have thought helix a better title. The series has a noirish visual palette and scripts rich with contemporary parigot (the street slang of the capital city). Bravura performances by Caroline Proust as Captain Berthaud and Audrey Fleurot as Joséphine Karlsson, a brilliant but ethically compromised criminal lawyer. One of the two directors is also female, Alexandra Clert. One could accuse the series of being utterly implausible except at the real-life headquarters of the judicial police, the truth is even stranger than the fiction. See 36 Quai des Orfèvres.

  ENTENTE CORDIALE

  The frequently glacial alliance between Britain and France

  Opening the channel tunnel, then-president François Mitterrand evoked the famous Entente Cordiale of 1904 establishing the Franco-British alliance against Germany and Austria-Hungary. He added that indeed relations between the two countries were indeed cordial and then he paused, adding: ‘presque toujours’ (almost all the time, not always). This caused sa gracieuse majesté (Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II), who is fluently francophone, to laugh. She knows that in the sweep of history France and England are more comfortably at war than peace with a state of almost continual conflict that goes back for 1,000 years. Since 1945 there has been no special entente between Britain and France, indeed the French kept Britain out of the earliest institutions of Europe and turned to the Germans as their new best friends.

  ENTREPRISES FANTÔMES

  Pretend companies where the unemployed pretend to work

  The Candela web site is right up to date, offering special offers on its catalog of office furniture, gifts for mother’s day, and more. But do not click on anything because Candela is not a real business but a government-financed pretend business where unemployed people can pretend to work. The idea is that by exposing the unemployed to a simulated work environment, they might be able to move on to real jobs. More than 100 pretend companies are operating in France where the long-term unemployed are exposed to all the experiences of employment, so that they might be prepared to take a real job, should one ever materialise. Workers at Axisco, a pretend virtual payment centre in Val d’Oise, north of Paris, recently staged a pretend strike.

  ENTREPRENEUR

  Alien concept

  ‘The problem with the French is that they have no word for entrepreneur.’ President George Bush supposedly said this to British prime minister Tony Blair, but whether he said it or Blair invented the story, it is both funny and true. Funny because entrepreneur is a French word (from the verb entreprendre) and true because it is a faux ami (false friend) whose meaning is markedly different in English and French. In France an entrepreneur is a builder. The Anglo-Saxon meaning of the word is not readily available in French.

  ÉOLIENNES

  Wind farms

  France produces 3 per cent of its electricity using wind turbines at a cost per kilowatt hour double that of traditional energy sources. The main operator of these wind farms is a subsidiary of EDF. Consumers thus pay more for their electricity, and the shareholders of EDF profit. This is justified because it is durable (sustainable).

  ESCARGOTS

  Gastropods prepared with garlic; road blockages to protest proposed reforms

  The most delicate snails are harvested after rain, from locations where they will have feasted naturally on fennel, thyme, rosemary and other wild herbs. The old ladies in my village emerge after a shower with their paniers (baskets), pluck the fattest specimens off the wild fennel, take them home and put them in a shoe box where they are starved to allow their intestinal tubes to empty completely, then cooked with olive oil and garlic or tomato sauce. They are delicious. Escargot is also a disruptive action mounted by taxi and truck drivers intended to reduce autoroutes to the speed of a snail and inconvenience as many of their compatriots as possible, all while calling for solidarité. See taxis.

  ESPAGNE

  Spain, for buying cigarettes, melons, hashish and toxic chemicals

  For millions of French people living within 100km of the border, Spain is a tobacconist, drug store, source of cheap groceries and agricultural chemicals banned in France. A pack of 20 Marlboro cigarettes in France costs 7 euros versus typically 5 euros in Spain. The A9 motorway from the Spanish border is also Europe’s biggest conduit for Moroccan hashish and more legitimately much of the melon and citrus sold in French supermarkets. The French douaniers (customs agents) keep the motorway under video surveillance and mount barricades at the péages (toll booths) where they search suspect cars, often with spectacular results. Imports of cheap Spanish wine into France have provoked road blockages and destruction of Spanish tanker trucks. An Aldi supermarket in Pézenas selling Spanish plonk was actually bombed by infuriated French vignerons (wine growers).

  ESPIONS

  Spies

  There are eight principal intelligence agencies but it is not clear that quantity equals quality. The Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure is the foreign intelligence agency responsible for the Rainbow Warrior debacle; the Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure is responsible for internal security and counter espionage, a task at which they have been caught flat-footed, failing to prevent attacks by Islamist extremists including the Charlie Hebdo massacre. The security services failed again to prevent a known Islamist militant from beheading his employer and attempting to bomb a chemical factory in Isère in June 2015. President François Hollande has given the espions unprecedented new powers to intercept the private communica
tions of French people. But all recent attacks have been perpetrated by persons already on the radar of Hollande’s spooks.

  Faith in the competence of French security was further shaken with the revelation by Wikileaks that the Americans have been systematically intercepting the communications of French presidents for years. What the Americans will have made of Hollande’s voicemails is intriguing. If they may have learned few state secrets, perhaps they gleaned a reasonable understanding of the president’s complicated sex life. French outrage over this business seems to me in any case overblown. When I worked in Washington and occasionally flew for work on the Air France Concorde to French Guyana I was warned by an American security official to watch what I said, since ‘every seat was bugged.’ Was he joking? Absolutely not.