Every so
often, the French become fixated on the price of some product or service. Going
back nearly 40 years, Jean-Claude Guillebaud, a journalist at “Le Monde”, wrote a series of articles on
Asia (Un voyage vers l’Asie – August
1979). The last article of the series, entitled
“Returning home” (Retour) and published
on August 30,1979 was arguably the most interesting. Seeing his home country
again through the distorting lens of the month-long trip he had just returned
from, he noticed…
“ ....on closer inspection,
that the pavements of Paris look decidedly less cheerful than those of Calcutta
or Chandernagor. Sombre figures with gloomy looks, reminiscent of the
atmosphere around a sickbed. The inescapable conclusion is that France is becoming
more desperately inward-looking by the day, grumbling loudly about the latest
scare stories and problems with petrol…”
(On trouve d'abord, à
bien regarder les trottoirs, que Paris a plutôt moins bonne mine que Calcutta
ou Chandernagor. Figures maussades et regards consternés : comme si on se
retrouvait au chevet d'un malade. On constate ensuite que s'accélère à vue
d'œil un incroyable recroquevillement de la France sur elle-même, ses trouilles
bruyantes et ses problèmes d'essence).
If the same journalist were to return home from the same trip today, he would find that nothing much has changed. The “problems with petrol” have reared their head yet again but the prices of other goods and services regularly give rise to outbreaks of anger and protest. Sometimes it is the price of basic foodstuffs or motorway tolls. This week, it is petrol and diesel fuel once again, after a recent spike in prices.
The scenario of such protests invariably follows the same pattern. The media fix on a convenient scapegoat: the government, the supermarket chains, the motorway concession holders or the oil companies. Spontaneously generated groups of citizens demand action to lower taxes or grant subsidies. The government of the day does its best to deflect attention from its own policies, makes small gestures of appeasement in the hope that the protests will die away, calls in the offending scapegoats in a blaze of publicity and obliges them to “do something” or threatens to change the law. Sometimes the protests peter out, sometimes they don’t and prime time news is full of pictures of angry farmers besieging supermarkets, dumping manure in front of government offices or ambulance or taxi drivers blocking traffic. The “offenders”, whoever they are, make small and temporary concessions and wait until the media spotlight has moved on before returning to business as usual.
The current protests are true to form. The government has been called upon to reverse tax increases on motor fuels. In an attempt to occupy the moral high ground, if has asserted that higher taxes are part of a grand policy to reduce pollution and fight climate change. But it has nevertheless agreed to subsidise the heating bills of the less well-off, even though economists point out that in terms of purchasing power, fuel in general and motor fuel in particular is a smaller part of most household budgets today than it was in the 1970s, as salary increases have far outstripped fuel price rises and cars consume much less fuel than they did then. But apparently it is a problems of “perception”, that people suddenly feel worse off because they have to pay €5 more to fill their tank than they did three months ago. The supermarket chains, that sell large quantities of motor fuel, keen to seize an opportunity to improve their image with consumers, have smugly announced that they will sell fuel “at cost price” until the end of November. TOTAL, the oil major that supplies most of the market, has conceded a small reduction in the prices it charges retailers, while protesting that its margins are “wafer thin”, an argument that carries little weight with most consumers who know only too well that the company’s profits exceed €1 billion a month. A lot of the country is likely to experience huge traffic jams on Saturday next as groups of protesters wearing eye-catching yellow jackets (gilets jaunes) organise what look like spontaneous protests that threaten to block the roads.
Most foreigners will probably consider this latest outbreak of anger and protest as par for the course in a country with a well-established reputation for such behaviour. Which it surely is. But it also highlights other enduring features of French society, which are a little more difficult to perceive. The first is that neither opposition political parties nor trade unions are behind it; none are in the front line of this latest protest, showing, once again, that they have been taken by surprise and are out of touch. Perhaps one of the reasons why the current, clueless, political opposition, on the right or the left, has been reduced, as so often in the past, to mudslinging or the mouthing of hackneyed soundbites instead of proposing credible alternative policies. And why trade union membership is one of the lowest in industrial countries.
Another feature of such protests is that they always concern products or services that people have to pay for out of their own pockets. At first blush, this may sound curious but, as I have written here before, the French live in a generally well-functioning society with good infrastructure and public transport, generous and universal provision for unemployment, health care and retirement, public education that is free from the age of five to the end of university and in which the most promising students can benefit from some of the best higher education in the world. The fact remains that they take most of this for granted in the seemingly unshakeable belief that it is their God-given entitlement and that, anyway, somebody else is paying for it. Which makes it appear all the more irksome when they have to open their own wallets a little wider to pay for something they want. An attitude typified by one motorist pictured on TV the other evening. She was using a mobile app. to find the cheapest filling station in her area and said that she might just be able to save enough to “visit her family over the weekend”. As if the government, the oil companies and “they” in general were all conspiring to stop her doing so!
In a way though, the biggest culprit is the government itself. Instead of playing the Great Provider or the courageous Make-Our-Planet-Great-Again climate change fighter and, through its lack of transparency, encouraging the wildest conspiracy theories about its hidden agenda, would it not be preferable to explain the bare facts, just for once? That the public services of the highly valued “French social model” from which all French people benefit have to be paid for by higher national and local taxes than in most other countries, as well as a little too much debt that must be paid off in the not too distant future so as not to overburden future generations. Even within the EU after all, there are a number of countries not too far away like Greece, Romania and Bulgaria, whose people can only dream of the standard of living currently enjoyed by most people in France. Not to speak of the richest country in the world, the United States of America, where the very of idea of universal health care and a guaranteed pension is often roundly denounced as a socialist chimera.
Instead of following the time-honoured tradition of telling people only what they want to hear while spending far more money than the country has earned, like most senior French politicians over the past 40 years, Emmanuel Macron seems to want put things in perspective and has found his very own words to do so. In a TV show during the presidential campaign, he told one startled Uber taxi driver that it was better to have a low-paid job than no job at all. Not the language one normally expects from a candidate for his country’s highest office. More recently, he told a young man in a crowd who was complaining about not having a job that he only had to “cross the street” to find one! “The country would be better off if we stopped complaining”, he told a group of pensioners a few days ago, after visiting General de Gaulle’s house at Colombey-les-deux Eglises, adding, “you don’t realise how fortunate you are”. The trouble is that the French are, as yet, unused to such plain talk and take it badly. The media immediately pick it up and accuse him of insensitivity and arrogance; opposition politicians seize a further opportunity to characterise him as “the president of the rich”. Maybe he and his government should follow in Jean-Claude Guillebaud’s 40-year old footsteps and take a month-long trip to Asia, starting in Eastern Europe. They would surely return with a clearer idea of France’s enviable position compared to the rest of the world - and how best to express that fundamental truth to its frequently grumbling and inward-looking inhabitants.
