French Letters

by Jonathan Miller

  Salvador Dali said Perpignan railway station in the department of Pyrénées-Orientales in the region of Languedoc-Roussillon, on the Spanish border, was the centre of the universe but if this was ever true, is no longer the case. Although the exterior facade remains glorious, all interior character features have been eliminated by SNCF. Tucked away in the bottom left-hand corner of the Hexagone, Perpignan has been neglected at the expense of Montpellier.

  PÉTAIN, MARCHAL PHILLIPE

  Notorious collaborator

  Hundreds of thousands of French men and women revered him during World War Two, before abruptly switching allegiance to de Gaulle when the Nazis started losing. Pétain (1856-1951), austere, unsmiling despot, spawned an ideology known as Pétainisme and also as Vichysme, afterVichy, the capital of the French collaborationist government. Subsequently sentenced to death for treason, although he was never executed. Died in exile on the Île d’Yeu, an island off the French Atlantic coast. There may be a certain amount of nostalgia these days for travail, famille, patrie (work, family, country), the slogan that replaced liberté, égalité, fraternité during the dark days of Pétain’s dictatorship. Or maybe not so dark days in the minds of many French people with an odd nostalgie for the imagined discipline and order of Pétainisme. ‘If we’d been overrun by the Germans we’d be better run,’ said Emmanuel Petit, the French footballer. ‘I have great difficulty with the French, I have never seen such arrogant, smug, lying and hypocritical people,’ he declared, before thinking better of it and withdrawing the remark.

  LE PETIT JOURNAL

  Jolly TV show

  French equivalent of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. It is presented by Yann Barthès, can be watched on the Canal+ television channel and online. Gentle mocking of the Parisian media establishment (but not too mocking), often very funny, ratings success gives them license to be a little subversive (but never really questioning the fundamental precepts of French statism; they feed from the same trough of subsidies after all).

  PHILOSOPHIE

  Torture for French students

  Compulsory subject on the bac. Students must study philosophy for up to eight hours per week and are then subjected to a four-hour examination on such questions as whether truth is preferable to peace and whether it is possible to be right in spite of the facts. Very little of this is likely to prepare French students for life in the 21st century. Deep down, much of what has passed in the Anglo-Saxon academy as profound French thought - existentialism, structuralism - is pretty obscure and self-regarding, even as it seduces intellectuals elsewhere. The French would be well-advised to substitute economics for philosophy and to include Adam Smith in the curriculum, since their enlightenment seems to have skipped over the fundamentals of wealth creation.

  PIGEON

  A dinner - or a victim

  (1) Bird often cooked with garlic and red wine. (2) In general, victims. Les pigeons is the name adapted by an ad hoc movement of small business people to protest against France’s strangling regulations and social charges. Génération pigeon is the name given by the magazine Le point to young people in France who have been betrayed by a social model that protects the already employed at the expense of young people.

  PIKETTY, THOMAS

  French economist, enemy of the rich

  Celebrated but widely unread French economist whose enormous tome on inequality, Le capital au XXIe siècle (Capital in the 21st Century, 2013), demanding higher taxes on rich people, drew much comment and admiration from the likes of the Princeton professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (‘serious, discourse-changing scholarship.’) Amazon said its tracking of electronic readers showed most buyers gave up reading its dense argument after just a few pages. Piketty is the Marcel Proust of economics. Admitting that I am reviewing a book I have not read, if I understand Piketty’s reported arguments correctly, the solution to inequality is for more progressive taxation, to redistribute from the rich to the poor. It is true the rich are richer than ever, but will making them poorer make the poor richer? Has this ever worked? In a country like France, won’t it just feed the voracious civil servants, with very little trickling down, and won’t that which does drip-feed itself to the lumpenproletariat perversely create an ever more dependent and infantilised population, who will vote forever for the munificence to continue? That’s assuming the rich people stay put. Indeed, this is exactly what has been tried in France with entirely predictable results. Wouldn’t an easier solution be to raise the minimum wage and make employers pay their labour better? Conservatives hate this idea, of course, claiming it will bring higher unemployment. But instead of paying more taxes, why can’t we just pay a dollar, pound or euro more for a hamburger, with the money going to the person who makes the hamburger? Let the people who work at McDonald’s be able to afford to eat there, to channel Henry Ford, who paid his workers $5 a day, so they could afford to buy a car. Piketty is more convincing when he argues for the demolition of anti-competitive structural obstacles. He seems a bit precious.

  PISTON

  Privilege, influence, connections

  Literally pull/push, meaning influence. Through family connections or shadier masonic networks, it is possible in France to gain access to privileged positions. In principle, jobs in the gendarmerie, for example, are awarded strictly on the basis of a competitive exam (concours). But everyone knows that the children of gendarmes become gendarmes. Piston helps children of the privileged gain admission to elite schools. And piston is the best passport to jobs in local government. Piston gives the lie to French claims to have established a meritocratic society.

  PLANQUES DE LA RÉPUBLIQUE

  A sinecure that pays well

  Also known as a fromage (cheese) de la République or un job en or (a golden job). A belle planque, not too stressful, is one of the blessed jobs of the Republic that do not require much in the way of heavy lifting, or often any actual work at all, other than a ceremonial presence at the occasional meeting. (While there are as many as 1000 of these plum jobs, arguably, the entire French economy - largely comprised of the state and semi-governmental corporations - is itself best characterised as an overripe fromage.)

  The French have not gone down the road of quangos (quasi public organisations, such as the BBC) quite like the British and so the planques remain for the most part jobs directly attached to some function of the state. There are numerous obscure inspectorates, high-counsels and other jobs sometimes involving the wearing of a uniform and usually coming with a legion d’honneur. The average pay is 110,000 euros per year but the best jobs are even more lavishly compensated. The regulator of radio and TV channels is paid 10,000 euros a month. She is Christine Kelly, author of a hagiography of former prime minister Francis Fillon before she was appointed to a six-year term at the CSA. The troughs are numerous: controller-general, first class: 8,000 euros a month; controller-general, economics and finance, 8,000 euros per month; inspector of social affairs, 6,500 euros per month; inspector of the academy of Paris, believed to be an especially untaxing position, 3,800 euros per month. Some of them come with other privileges, like chauffeurs, sumptuous Parisian apartments, secretaries, although the details are kept very hushed-up.

  POLICE MUNICIPALE

  Local police

  We have three of these in the village and they are very effective. They are unarmed and run errands for the mairie, keep an eye on parking and tell-off dog owners who let their animals foul the sidewalk. The police municipale is the third and smallest police service in France comprising around 20,000 officers in 4,000 communes, reporting to the local mayor but also required to co-operate with la police nationale and gendarmes. Increasingly armed with immobilising weapons such as Tasers and sometimes pistols, they are supplemented by ASVPs, agents de surveillance de la voie publique (equivalent to British community support officers).

  POLICE NATIONALE

  National police

  Not to be confused with gendarmes.Pathetic to useless in confronting blatant law
lessness by trade unionists, ignoring road blocks on approaches to the Channel Tunnel, refusing to arrest unionists who invade railway tracks and frontiers inconveniencing thousands, refusing to intervene when unionists take bosses hostage, yet assiduous in issuing tickets to motorists who fail to update the address on their driving license. A dedicated squad of police, however, is assigned to arresting Uber drivers for the crime of competition - France’s greatest taboo.

  A force created under Vichy, the police nationale work for the Ministry of the Interior. Its 145,000 officers are responsible for large towns and cities including Paris. In major crime investigations, the French police often seem more Clouseau than Maigret. Paris and the Riviera are known for spectacular criminal escapades that leave the flics (cops) flat-footed. The notorious Compagnies républicaines de sécurité (CRS) riot police are an elite squad. They are the heavy-police mob trained to repel the rebels, should they ever lay siege to the Elysée palace. They have a reputation for toughness and were recently filmed in action against refugees, in Calais, tossing them over the parapet of a bridge. The top of the police nationale is very keen to talk about its technological future. The interior ministry has been envious of the British closed-circuit TV panopticon and there have been recent heavy investments in surveillance.

  POISSON D’AVRIL

  April fool

  An April fool’s day joke is a poisson d’avril (literally, an April fish). On April 1, 2015, the local Midi libre newspaper published a story reporting that the British had seized control of my village, that the monarchy was to be restored, that residents were henceforth to drive on the left and cricket would be played at the village boulodrome (pétanque pitch). The article was accompanied by a photograph showing a Union flag flying insolently from the échauguette (watchtower) atop the old village ramparts. I cannot say who might have been responsible for this.

  POLITIQUEMENT CORRECT

  Ineffective foil to French rudeness

  The French have blessedly avoided the worst excesses of political correctness but it is starting to catch on. Since the French can be especially good at causing offence, indeed have practically perfected it, the new rectitude is not always welcomed. Political correctness with its horror of causing embarrassment is 100 per cent an Anglo-Saxon import but is nonetheless infesting campuses, businesses, and the administration. Lists for local elections must now be equally balanced between women and men, even if French women are still expected to make the coffee. The city of Paris has a team working full-time to rename streets that carry racist or colonial overtones, or that honour individuals whose sentiments at the time are no longer deemed worthy of memorialisation on the local plan. It’s a war against bad memories. I have yet to spot a French trigger warning but doubtless this will come and the Académie française will have to think up a French phrase for it. La marseillaise, the national anthem, is definitely not compatible with political correctness.

  PLOMBIER POLONAIS

  Dangerous Polish plumbers

  In 2005 the Polish plumber became the symbol of French discontent with the single market and special measures were adapted to keep Polish and other new EU citizens from working in France, where they might compete with the locals. Given the number of toilets that remain to be modernised, the French needed the Poles more than the Poles needed the French, and so they went to England instead, greatly improving the standard of British sanitation and leaving France looking for their missing toilet seats. See toilettes.

  POMPIERS

  Fire and rescue service that works

  The Sapeurs/pompiers are both firefighters and paramedics. In a country characterised by dysfunctional official institutions, the French have somehow got this one right. There are 250,000 pompiers and 80 per cent are volunteers. It was the pompiers who led the extraordinary and difficult effort to recover the remains of the crashed Germanwings/Lufthansa flight in March 2015. It is the pompiers who battle every summer with terrible fires in the dry southern scrubland called the garrigue. Pompiers are sent by the government to civil emergencies all over the world, and it is the pompiers who come if your neighbour falls off a ladder. And they never strike.

  PRÉFECTURES

  cathedrals of the state

  The State’s physical presence in provincial France is the inevitably grand préfecture, which is equivalent to a federal building in America. The division of France into regions governed by prefectures was the idea of Napoléon Bonaparte and the modern French state still uses the préfectures to enforce its will. There are préfectures in each of the 101 French departments located in the principal city of the department, and usually one or more sous-préfectures in subsidiary cities. The préfecture is headed by a senior fonctionnaire (official) called a préfet (prefect), and is technically an outpost of the ministry of the interior. The préfet, who wears a splendid uniform on high days, is the ultimate law enforcement authority and bishop of the state. The préfectures are often sinister, operating largely unscrutinised by local media and rarely user-friendly for those seeking to transact business with them. It is assumed they hold a dossier on just about everybody. They are often installed in magnificent heritage buildings whose inefficiency is almost legendary: members of the public wait for hours to have their papers stamped and car registrations approved by austere, unsmiling functionaries. If one were looking to entirely abolish a layer of government in France to save money the préfectures would be a good place to start.

  PRÉPAS

  Academic crammers

  French swots who want to gain admission to the elite colleges must pass still more rigorous examinations even after getting top scores in the bac. The Classes préparatoires aux grandes écoles separate the wheat from the chaff, or perhaps not, since those who make it through are not proven especially good at thinking, only at passing exams. The ruthlessness of the process is startling. Typically 40 places are allocated for every 1,500 applications.

  PROCÈS VERBAL

  Summons

  Under French law a PV (which is not, in fact, verbal, but always written) can be issued for a traffic infraction, a parking violation, failure to bring in your wheelie bins at night, and numerous additional reasons. To receive a PV is to be verbalisé. If you know the mayor, a PV for a parking violation is readily suppressed.

  PRODUCTIVITÉ

  French mirage

  Homer Simpson famously said ‘you can come up with statistics to prove anything.’ Even if he is not an economic authority, it is clear that productivity measurement tells very little about the overall health of an economy, especially in France. The French often claim to be the most productive economy in Europe (although according to Eurostat they are fourth) but it is hard to reconcile personal observation and real-world competitiveness with the French data. Productivity measurement is in any case highly misleading but the official French numbers are, literally, incredible.

  I will ask this: who is measuring productivity in a state-centred economy but the very bureaucrats whose productivity is to be measured? The distortion of a state-heavy economy is itself enough to produce the mirage of a productive economy. But do we always benefit from what they produce: endless regulations, constantly multiplying layers of administration, bottomless pits of entitlements and unlimited interference in the private sector? So many French economic claims are dodgy but the boast that the French are productive is an example of a self-deception repeated so often that many people have come to believe it, including some British politicians who ought to know better.

  Here is the sniff test: If the French are so magnificently productive, why are they exporting capital and delocalising industrial production? Why are foreign investors putting their money elsewhere? Why have more jobs been created in Yorkshire than in France in the past five years? Who is rushing to exploit this alleged productivity? Why are 66 per cent of Germans aged 55-64 in work, compared to only 47 per cent of the French? If the French are so productive, why have they managed to produce only 0.3 per cent per cent growth in GDP over the past
seven years? Why has inward investment in France fallen 77 per cent to the lowest level in 27 years, according to the United Nations ($5.7 billion in 2013, vs. $53 billion in the supposedly less productive UK)?

  Perhaps the long lines at the cash registers in French supermarkets (because they cannot afford to hire more workers), produce more productivity per cashier employed, but the statistics do not measure the time wasted by frustrated customers waiting to pay.

  PRODUIT INTÉRIEUR BRUT

  Grossly manipulated domestic product

  The French love to boast that they have a higher gross domestic product than Britain but this is a claim that should be taken avec des pincettes (literally with tweezers, or as we would say, with a grain of salt). The French belief in this obviously ridiculous metric evidences the poor quality of much of the Gallic economic discourse. The two economies are very similar in size and therefore which one is the biggest can be largely a matter of the exchange rate chosen to compare them. But the real flaw is that in France, 54 per cent of GDP is represented by state expenditure and of that, 50 per cent is represented by taxes and social charges. The state can literally employ workers to dig ditches and fill them in again (and does, by all accounts), and this counts as GDP. In the UK, government spending represents just over 40 per cent of GDP. Hence, the claim that France has a higher GDP than the UK, even discounting exchange rates, relies on France collecting higher taxes and social charges, which it then cheerfully counts as GDP. The inflated GDP figure plays into another set of misleading claims relating to productivité (productivity).