The French are always complaining
Talking this week to my optician, Pascal, in the market town of Carhaix, I was struck by something he said about the French. “They never stop complaining,” he said. “Most of them have never left France, but they are convinced they would be better off living almost anywhere else.” He smiled, glancing up from the computer screen on which he was working out my bill. “Not that they would live anywhere else, of course. The truth is, we have our problems – who doesn’t? – but France works. It is a better country in which to live than almost any other.”
By definition, Pascal’s verdict on the state of play in contemporary France is not widely shared. Instead, the grumbling is audible, even when nothing is said. It’s like a low murmur of discontent that stands in for an actual conversation. In 2021, the complaint was that people were dying of Covid and it was all the government’s fault – that is to say, Emmanuel Macron’s fault. In fact, after a dicey start, France came though the pandemic better than most. Six months ago, it was the age of retirement, raised from 62 to 64 (still two years less than the EU average) that raised the nation’s hackles. The French took to the streets in their hundreds of thousands to show that they could not, and would not, accept this scandalous measure, aimed at making them all work until they dropped. Except that they have. The trade union movement that vowed to overturn the measure these days makes little or no reference to it. Nor does the press.
Simultaneously, there was the rage over police tactics. The French want order on the streets. They expect to see armed officers on the beat and they support the use of force to root out disruptive elements. What they resent is when they are seen as the disruptive element, as when demonstrators were beaten back during riots that left cars ablaze and shops looted in the name of The People.
Later, when a traffic cop in Paris shot dead a Muslim teenager at a routine stop, the young people of the banlieues – nearly all of them Muslim or black – rose up in force, demanding justice. Most French people could see their point. This didn’t stop them calling for a strong police response. The same split personality has accompanied attempts to kerb the spread of religion-centred Muslim identity. Just this week, Macron and his new education minister, 34-year-old Gabriel Attal, have come under attack (a) for banning Muslim girls from wearing the abaya (the long robe worn past puberty in conformity with Islamic teaching) at school, and (b) for not doing enough to enforce laïcité, the separation of Church and State.
In the meantime, the French economy has emerged from both the pandemic and the inflationary pressures resulting from the war in Ukraine in a better state than most of its neighbours, including Germany and the UK. French corporations and businesses are reporting record profits; wages and productivity are on the rise; unemployment is down; taxes on business have been relaxed; obstacles in the way of high-tech startups have been removed; and inward investment is at a twenty-first century high.
Cue much gnashing of teeth and a growing chorus of indignation from the far left and the far right – fronted by the quasi-marxist Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the chameleon-like populist Marine le Pen, both, until last year, friends of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. If there is a lesson to be learned, it may be that the Centre cannot present itself as such – as, say, La Partie du Centre – but only as a current tendency expressed by one or other of the two parties on either side of the dialectical divide.
Last year, Macron won a second term in the Élysée, but only by the skin of his teeth. Marine Le Pen ran him a close second, while Mélenchon, in charge of a rag-bag coalition of the Left, came in a respectable third. Two months later, in elections to the National Assembly, the pattern was reinforced, with Macron’s En Marche party (rebranded, as Renaissance, a title absolutely no one uses) remaining the largest single party but in a minority overall. The consequence was inevitable. The President’s authority plummeted overnight, while his enemies schemed (separately) to make his life, and that of the centre, unworkable and miserable.
Thus, as Tony Blair would say, we are where we are. The government is weak, but still in charge, and the Assembly is a madhouse, driven entirely by ambition.
It should be said at once that the Macron government has made serious mistakes, mostly arising from the President’s aloof, yet chippy manner. He can’t help himself. In 2017, having introduced himself as head of state by addressing members of the Assembly and Senate from the throne room in Versailles – built for the Sun King Louis XIV – he recently chose the same venue at which to greet 200 international business leaders, including Elon Musk, beneath the rubric “Choose France”.
Just last week, in seeking to persuade the current crop of deputies and senators to give up their foolish antipathy to his reign, his address was delivered in the Great Hall of the Legion d’honneur where, six months previously he granted Volodymyr Zalensky the Legion’s highest rank, the Grand’Croix, for which the embattled war leader, bent on acquiring heavy weapons, was no doubt supremely grateful.
On the subject of Ukraine, Macron’s record is decidedly mixed. Photographs of him taken at the wrong end of Putin’s Big Table during his cartoon-like attempt to dissuade the dictator from launching his invasion, will last long in the nation’s folk memory, rather like the image of François Hollande on his chauffeured motor scooter when setting out to visit his mistress.
Later, having learned his lesson, Macron shouldered his way into Nato’s front line (though, humiliatingly, he still had to take second place to Boris Johnson, a man he despised as a political bad joke). France has since become a main supplier of big guns and missiles to Ukraine, but Macron remains the most likely top European leader to call openly for a grand peace conference – probably not to be held at Versailles – at which Zelensky would barter land for peace.
On Africa, the picture is far from mixed. France is on the run from its residual empire, once predicated on the use of the French franc and the assurance that any revolutionary nonsense would meet with a firm response from the Légion Étrangère and gendarmerie. This is not Macron’s fault. The tilt from Paris began long before he got his feet underneath his ornate desk at the Élysée and has gathered pace during his term in office because of the spread of Islamist violence and the arrival in force of Russia’s Wagner mercenaries. What is beyond dispute is that he has done nothing to reverse the process. If the current President is not the reason why what used to be known as French Equatorial Africa has turned its back on the mother country, he has certainly been left to carry the can. It must be galling for him to have to beg the new military junta in Niger for permission to keep the French embassy open in Niamey.
With la Rentrée underway, Macron and his ministers are struggling to come up with a legislative programme worthy of the name. There is much rhetoric concerning a more robust industrial strategy. There will be healthcare reform and a new, more determined approach to climate change built around green energy, including a wave of new-generation nuclear power stations. Red tape and bureaucracy are, in theory at least, moving into the government’s sights, along with a necessary reappraisal of the military. What is lacking, up to now at least, is the necessary legislation to get any of this underway. But that may come. Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne has survived the summer and wields a mean clipboard.
All in all, France is not at the crossroads (it never is). More accurately, it is another kilometer or two along a bumpy road marked by route barré signs that the Opposition – united only by their loathing of Macron – hope will make government a hopeless quest. What Left and Right fail to see is that the man in their sights has more than three-and-a-half years remaining of his time in office and French presidents are not best known for throwing in the towel. “What is going on?” critics once asked of the state of the UK under the seemingly hapless Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson. Wilson’s answer passed into legend: “I know what is going on. I am going on.” Emmanuel Macron is cut from much the same cloth, but by a better tailor.
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