SURVEY: FRANCE

The grand illusion

Jun 3rd 1999
From The Economist print edition

France is changing, but cannot face up to it. Blame its exaggerated suspicion of the American way, says Sophie Pedder

WHEN “Astérix and Obélix against César”, a film based on a French comic strip about plucky Gauls who resist the mighty Roman empire, was released earlier this year, the French seized upon it as an emblem of national assertiveness. Astérix, declared the highbrow newspaper Le Monde, was “a national matter of the greatest importance”. The film, it continued, was “a symbol of Gallic resistance to the Hollywood invasion”, the gritty small fighter against an imperialist assault. “We must sink “Titanic” with this film; French pride is at stake,” echoed Albert Uderzo, co-author of the original comic strip. The film pulled in over 8m people in its first two months.

But although Astérix may have clocked up this year’s best viewing tally so far, its audience was dwarfed by the 21m French movie-goers who streamed to see the American blockbuster “Titanic”. There is no way that Astérix could sink “Titanic”, just as there is no way that France as a whole—its businesses, its labour market, its popular culture—can resist globalisation, a force which the French regard with deep ambivalence as the bearer of the American way.

The French appeal to national pride over the Astérix release was nothing unusual. Hardly a week goes by without some politician or pundit calling on the French to defend the exception française, the French way. “We have the greatest respect for others,” declared President Jacques Chirac at a meeting of the Group of Seven industrial countries in Denver in 1997, in response to talk about copying America’s economic policies, “but we have our traditions, our model, and we wish to keep them.”

The French dirigiste model, based on a strong and ambitious state, at once the creator of riches and the guarantor of equality, retains a tight grip on the French mind. “The role of the state”, says Jean-Luc Lagardère, head of the Lagardère defence group, “has been fundamental since the 17th century, something I greatly admire.” Historically, France needed a strong state to fashion a nation from the successive waves of tribes that spilled across its lands. Faith in a dirigiste state was fortified under Napoleon, but taps a tradition reaching further back, to the Ancien Régime and to Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert.

Moreover, the republican values that inspired the French model were regarded as universal, and the need to spread them as a vocation for the French. “When we organised our state”, says Charles Pasqua, a Gaullist former interior minister, “we were bold enough to imagine that it was a model not only for France but for the whole world.” Abroad, the British simply ruled their colonies; the French tried to turn Africans into Frenchmen, with history lessons about “our ancestors, the Gauls”.

Even today, physical reminders of the power of the state are everywhere. No French village is complete without its dominant town hall, decorated assertively with a huge tricolor flag; no département without its grand préfecture, stately home to the unelected representative from Paris. At its various levels, the French state spends a hefty 54% of GDP, one of the highest proportions in the European Union, and employs one in four workers. Three-quarters of the ministers under Lionel Jospin, France’s present prime minister, are former civil servants. Even the state-sponsored “Plan” retains its name and its symbolic capital letter to this day.

To most Frenchmen, the dirigiste model remains a source of pride, not resentment. This owes much to the part the state played in the 30 years of spectacular economic growth after the second world war, which propelled a heavily rural economy into the modern industrial age. It turned France into the world’s fourth-largest industrial power, after America, Japan and Germany, and its fourth-biggest exporter. In terms of income per head, France overtook Britain in 1969, and has retained that lead to this day. Despite the heavy state, private enterprise has flourished. France is home to a host of profitable world-class firms, such as L’Oréal, the world’s biggest cosmetics group, Danone, the world’s biggest dairy-products firm, Vivendi, the world’s biggest water company, AXA, Europe’s biggest insurer, and LVMH, a successful luxury-goods group. Many of them are run by an elite of French former bureaucrats, trained to believe that any problem can be solved if subjected to enough rational analysis. The way the French educate their administrative caste does not appear to be an obvious handicap in the competitive world.

However, this survey will argue that the French model has reached its limits in several important respects. Increasingly open and competitive markets, both in the EU and beyond, together with stubbornly high joblessness, a greying population and disillusion about corruption among the elite, are putting the model under intense strain.

France needs to adapt its welfare state, its public service, its labour market, even its business sector. Indeed, it is already doing so, but in ways that the French find uncomfortable. This is because many of the changes involve embracing the values and practices of liberal American capitalism, which the French find difficult to square with those of their own dirigiste model.

French history has been, in large part, profoundly anti-liberal. Liberal economic thinking finds little echo in French history, and plays little part in the way the French see themselves. This does not mean that they cannot change—nor that the French should uncritically adopt the liberal model. France has its own traditions and political dynamics, and can surely find its own middle way. But it does make change more complicated, more wrenching—and all the harder to detect beneath the public talk about the need to preserve the French way. Fear of unfettered liberal capitalism often stops France from achieving, and certainly from admitting to, any change at all.

Mickey takes on Astérix

Many of these changes would require the French to adopt features of the American way. Since their respective revolutions in the 18th century, separated by just 13 years, France and America have had a profoundly ambivalent relationship: France is at once admiring, resentful and disdainful, fascinated, infuriated and threatened by America. For sure, France’s chief post-war foreign concern has been the construction of Europe, and the main motive for this the peaceful containment of Germany. But, these days, French preoccupation with Europe often stems as much from its desire to stand up to the Americans as from its historical fear of Germany.

French anti-Americanism has moved in waves throughout this century, intensifying politically in the 1950s under the twin influences of the French Communist Party and General Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle, the most recent embodiment of France’s universalist ambitions, once said that France would show the world how to “build an industrial civilisation which is not derived from the American model and in which man will serve as an end, not a means”. The French regard America as the epitome of liberal “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism. What sets their model apart from the individualist American one, they believe, are the values of equality and community. After a visit to America in the 1940s, Simone de Beauvoir wrote that she regarded “America as the country where capitalist oppression had triumphed in the most vile fashion.”

To this day, even conservative business chiefs punctuate their views on the French model with republican appeals to solidarity, cohesion and equality. “French business leaders, in general, have a much greater sense of their social responsibility than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts,” says Mr Lagardère. In French politics today there is no greater snub than to call somebody “ultra-liberal”—a set of beliefs associated with brutal, uncultured, unfettered capitalist American ways. What sometimes secretly seems to annoy the French is that America claims to be the inventor of the modern republican democratic state and of human rights, when they feel the honours should go to their own 18th-century philosophers.

Yet for all their insistence to the contrary, the French are increasingly adopting those American ways. Despite the prop of government money for France’s film industry, for example, little over a quarter of all cinema tickets sold last year were for French films, down from about half in 1980. French teenagers now dress in clothes from Gap, wear perfume by Calvin Klein, tune in to “Friends”, listen to Lauryn Hill, and surf the “Star Wars” website. In the Internet age, consumer tastes cannot be dictated.

It is not only in the realm of popular culture that Anglo-Saxon habits are creeping up on the French. Over the past few years, their famously dirigiste economy has been liberalised beyond recognition: markets in electricity, telecommunications and gas have been opened to competition, and one-time icons of the French state such as Air France, Aerospatiale and France Télécom have been partially released into private hands. Whisper it softly, but foreign investors now hold nearly half the shares in many formerly state-owned firms such as Société Générale, a bank, and Elf, an oil giant.

Moreover, French businessmen are starting to behave like American capitalists. When, earlier this year, Banque Nationale de Paris launched a hostile bid to take over two other French banks, Société Générale and Paribas, which themselves had just decided to merge, it provoked a bout of soul-searching. Many Frenchmen felt that BNP’s chief, Michel Pébereau, had behaved in an uncivilised, aggressive and thoroughly unFrench way. In foreign policy, too, the French are caught between their urge to resist “American hegemony” and the reality of needing America’s umbrella when things get serious. Hubert Védrine, Mr Jospin’s foreign minister, talks a lot about the need to counter world domination by a single “hyperpower”. Yet, when the crisis in Kosovo came to a head in late March, France did not hesitate to put its bombers under the direct orders of an American commander as part of the NATO force, even though it had pulled out of NATO’s military command structure under De Gaulle in 1966 and remains only semi-attached.

“We’ve Americanised ourselves without realising it,” says Dominique Moïsi, deputy director of the French Institute of International Relations, “and the more it happens, the more we resist it.” We are different, the French seem to be saying to themselves through gritted teeth, as if by doing so they can keep all things American at bay. Yet if the country is to build the dynamic and prosperous economy it wants, and is capable of operating, it has to accept some of the things it associates with the American way—and to find a way of doing so that does not undermine its Frenchness.

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