The Daily Demarche: The French: Will They Ever Learn?

Smiley at The Daily Demarche says he's generally adverse to go after the French, it being too much like going after fish in a barrel. But sometimes it's impossible not to comment, he says. An excerpt (starting with his second paragraph) from his post on the most recent irresistible subject:

The latest from the country des droits de l’homme is the news that there is great unrest at the plan to remove a holiday from the French calendar in favor of a “Day of Solidarity.” This whole “Day of Solidarity” concept is a novel one: its origins stem from the horrible heat wave that killed roughly 15,000 elderly French citizens in August 2003 while their children decamped to the beaches of Biaritz and the mountains of Chamonix. Unfortunately, the avatar for the European “dream” of expansive social welfare, socialized medicine, and a human face to temper all that raw Anglo-Saxon capitalism was unable to keep its senior citizens from perishing in numbers not seen since the Normandy landings.

The French government, in a well-intentioned move, decided that rather than celebrate the traditional first Monday after Pentecost via a holiday, the French would return to work and employers would pay into a special fund designed to provide healthcare for the aged and infirm. French officials speculate that they would raise roughly $2.5 billion this year from "Solidarity Day." Unfortunately, this windfall ends up well short of the $7.5 billion per year necessary to fix the French health system.

But that isn't even the wacky part. What really blows my mind is that an estimated 55% percent of French workers, angered that the government has taken away one of their holidays, will not show up for work. Now, perhaps they have a point. Two other holidays, one on May 1 and another on May 8, happen to fall on weekends, so French workers will have no holidays at all in the first half of May. One can understand how aggrieved they must feel. The cruelness of it all - it is just so... unfair. How could the government expect its people to work in these conditions? So, in a fit of pique, most of France will now turn their back on a day designed as a reminder of the loss of so many of their society's elder members. You can't make this stuff up.

There's more, of course. Use title link.

Theodore H. White, in his 1953 book Fire in the Ashes: Europe in Mid-Century, wrote:

Every country is a mystery composed of the lives of many men. Yet none is more sealed to the understanding than the mystery of France.

...

The mystery of France is simple to describe. Here lies the richest and most beautiful land of Europe. Here lives some of its most illuminating minds. Here are men of courage and great tradition, toilers of dogged diligence and consummate craftsmanship. Yet nothing comes of this human material, France wastes and abuses all the talents she possesses.

...

...Frenchmen are divided in so many ways, with so many cross sections of cleavage, lacerated by so many feuds new and old, that they cannot find any way to gather in groups large enough on issues clear enough to make decisions. All political alliances in France are formed against something, not for something, and they are impotent because they combine men who hate each other only a shade less their enemy of the moment. French life does not divide; it splinters...

These divisions breed paralysis and paradox. The only way so many disparate people can live together at all is to grant to each other an almost total liberty and thus liberty is more complete, the air freer, the individual human more unfettered in thought and expression - even if more perplexed - in France than in anywhere else in the Atlantic Basin. This liberty has its counterface: a total social indifference to the hurts and aches of anyone outside one's own individual circle....

For anyone who wants to follow up, these snippets are from Chapter Five, "The Mystery of France."

In Fire in the Ashes, White looks at Europe overall, with emphasis on England, France and Germany. Mixed with history and overviews and analysis are chapters on specific men; notably there is a chapter on Pierre Bertaux, director of France's secret police and internal security forces. (I apologize for not knowing how to get this program to do the proper French letters on this, but in plain English letters he was "Directeur General, Surete Nationale.")