Today sees the launch of Salut! Forum, a series of occasional guest columns. If you want to contribute, tell me. In the first, Philip Howells* takes a long, critical look at the France Nicolas Sarkozy has promised to reform. Too harsh? A bit gloomy? Or spot on? You judge.
Recently my wife and I returned from France to England, something we've done countless times during the last 12 years.
The difference this time was that it felt very final. Paradoxically neither of us felt an overwhelming regret at leaving, even though as we drove down the mountain the sky was almost wall-to-wall blue and the snow covered mountains glistened as beautifully as you can ever imagine. We were sad, but not to the extent that made us want to turn round and go back because part of the sadness was the realisation that some of the French people we'd been prepared to live alongside were fundamentally unfriendly.
The personal hostility started a couple of years back when the French and the Dutch rejected the EU Constitution and a few other countries like Britain were saved from doing the same - as they surely would have done.
The mother of a close friend of mine in the village addressed me curtly outside her shop with the accusation that it was my fault. What she meant was that it was Britain's fault that the EU Constitution had failed to be accepted, that it was wrong for Britain to be enjoying financial and political success outside the Euro currency whilst France and the rest of the EU suffered.
Faced with such an attitude, logic has no purpose. It would have been a waste of time to remind her that it was her people, not mine, who'd rejected the Constitution, even more pointless to remind her that no-one forced the French to enter or create the EU in the first place and futile to note that France like the UK could have resisted all the events which had led France to the parlous state she was in then and remains in to today.
I did point out that all the polls suggested that had the UK voted in a referendum, it was likely that it too would have rejected the EU Constitution - but for the entirely the opposite reasons that the French people did. They rejected it because they perceived it as too much like the Anglo-American model; the UK would have done the same because they perceived it as too Gallic!
I remain implacably opposed to the EU as a federal government.
Whilst the good sense of a free trade area is undeniable, the fact is that I share no feeling of like-mindedness with a Frenchman, a Spaniard, a Greek or a German. We share a geographical proximity, but to my mind nothing in the history of the European nation states commends itself as a model worthy of emulation - indeed only the UK can show consistent success in all the important fields of international politics, finance, public order and, dare I say it, enterprise.
I believe the tribulations of the French began in the aftermath of the French Revolution when their legitimate revolution against a corrupt and ineffective King degenerated into state-sanctioned violence of such ferocity and scale that it scarred the nation for years afterwards. In that climate the Empire under Napoleon was a mere caprice but nevertheless a caprice which lasted till today and in which many of the causes of the French malaise can be found.
The French never accepted that Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo by the British and the Prussians was their defeat. They like to think it didn't happen or if it did it was Napoleon's defeat, not the nation's.
Although the years between 1815 and 1870 are considered relatively peaceful in military terms, they were far from peaceful politically. Throughout Europe there were minor revolutions and ructions, the worst in 1848 when much of Europe was convulsed by unrest of the population at large.
As the wounded military pride of the French festered after 1815 so towards the second half of the century the German states were beginning to feel a cohesion which Otto von Bismarck eventually made a realisation. Before that realisation was complete the French decided to remind the upstart Germans who the military bosses were in Europe and embarked on the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 with glee, confident that their traditions would win out over the newcomers on the military block.
They were proved rudely wrong and soundly thrashed. In the peace that followed, France lost the regions of Alsace and Lorraine, a sore which irritated and worsened for the next 40 years. Thus when the nations of Europe took up arms over what today would be an insignificant incident in the Balkans, France saw the chance to take revenge of the Germans and recover not only Alsace and Lorraine but their lost pride as well.
Once again, the French military caste thought too much of itself and not enough of its enemy and France was almost bled to death. Far from being a conclusive defeat, the First World War ended in a stalemate, a general exhaustion and although they'd not conquered on the battlefield, the French were determined to put the Germans down once and for all in the peace that followed.
By implacable and inflexible politics which eventually forced both Lloyd George and Wilson (the US President) to give up, the French imposed a regime of reparations in gold plus the return of Alsace and Lorraine (along with other Rhineland regions including the Saar).
For a few years, support from America and Britain enabled the Germans to pay the reparations but after the crash of 1929 it was clear that no nation had the either gold or reserves nor the means to earn them to fulfil the terms of the reparations. In fact, the humiliation France sought to inflict on the Germans at Versailles was so outrageous that even if neither the Wall St crash nor the Second World War had occurred the Germans would have finished paying the reparations demanded by the French in the early years of the 21st Century.
The scale of the reparations and the manner in which the German politicians accepted them have long been accepted by historians as fundamental elements among the causes for rise of the Nazis and thus the Second World War - so France should burden its share of that responsibility too.
France was totally unprepared for WW2. Her population had fallen way below that of Germany despite numerous schemes promoting motherhood and large families which successive governments ran in France with the sole aim of replacing the generation that was lost in WW1.
The military had no such forethought and came to WW2 in much the same frame of mind as they'd had in WW1. Their defence was static, based around fixed installations along the German border but ending at the border with Belgium because Belgium was regarded as friendly. Of course, in 1940 the Germans invaded France through Belgium but the simplicity of the concept failed to engage the French military mind - except in a few forward thinking junior officers like Patton in the USA and de Gaulle in France who saw that the future of warfare lay in mobility.
France was beaten in about eight weeks of fighting. The remainder of the war was fought by the British Empire and later by the Soviet Union (after she'd changed sides) and the USA (after it had been attacked by the Japanese).
When the peace came in 1945, the Americans realised that the Communists (who'd consistently organised in France for political power throughout the war and were directed from Moscow by Henri Thoreau) were probably the largest single political party in France. The US foresaw that their new enemy, the Soviet Union run by the Communist party, would have fellow-travellers in power right up to the Atlantic coast.
The only serious opposition came from a nascent party gathered around de Gaulle and with American money he came to power and kept the Communists in check.
However, for de Gaulle this was the opportunity to extend the illusion under which France has laboured since 1815, that she is a great nation. And he did it, through the Fourth and Fifth Republics pretty well. He converted the Iron and Steel pact of 1952 into the EU in the likeness of a Greater France. He recreated the bureaucratic carnage Napoleon had originally put in place (the prefectures of today are pretty well the same as those Napoleon set up) and laid the foundations of the modern French state as leader of the rest of Europe. He also kept the UK out.
Since then, despite Britain's eventual membership of the EU, things (in an historical context) haven't changed much.
Until, perhaps, this year. Firstly, Sarkozy has won the Presidential election. That was the easy part - the big challenge lies ahead - to force through the root and branch reforms that are necessary in France - including turning the French people from being the workshy nation of Europe to a nation of workers. He must also completely overhaul the system by which French civil servants are a class apart, more favoured in both their working careers and in their retirement. Unless he can do all this and more, France is destined to become the Museum of Europe, or worse.
It's a massive task, for Sarkozy has inherited a politically poisoned chalice. Ironically it has to do France's lack of that much-derided element of the British way of life, freedom. Ever since the French threw out absolute rule by monarch (as we did too of course) they've wallowed in bureaucracy. Unlike the British who managed to channel their political desires into a handful of groups, the French have indulged themselves ever since then in tiny factions. The result was that they never got around to seeing the big picture - in which personal freedom from bureaucracy was a major objective - and so the bureaucracy was allowed to thrive.
Now I'm not suggesting that British political history is a progression of orderly governance but equally we've never equalled France's achievement when for years she had more governments than Christmases.
Even today France suffers from an extreme form of the malaise which it took Margaret Thatcher's ruthlessness to knock out of British life, and few commentators doubt that the first strategy Sarkozy has to master is how to defeat the power of the French trade unions.
A friend, director of sports in one of Grenoble's suburbs, recently told me how the unions' grip on council work combines with the state's heavy tax burden to stifle all individual enterprise. Few freelancers in Britain or America would believe that in France you have to register as a freelance something before you can start work at it.
And British businessmen frustrated at the quarterly VAT returns can count themselves lucky for in France there's no minimum limit below which you don't have to register - or collect VAT. Everybody does - and it's one of Europe's highest at 19.6% - and there are almost no exceptions to it.
Another French friend has described the importance of building up your state pension means that changing your job after the age of 40 is financial suicide.
And then there's the disgrace of a dual level state pension which ensures that state employees not only contribute less, but retire earlier and then collect a better pension than ordinary citizens. Hardly surprising then that today the French state controls more than 50% of the GDP.
Taken together this is a sorry state of affairs and one over which I fear Sarkozy simply will not prevail.
But France faces an even bigger challenge - the EU. Ironically, for though it was founded by France in its own political likeness and fashioned to be a Greater France, the EU will now end forever the French way of life. Union-dominated bureaucracy has had its day.The deliverers of this end will be the new Europeans, the clutch of Eastern European states who have tossed off 50 years of real socialism, the Communist type and have no taste for a watered down French version of Socialism. To these people the simplicity of the Anglo-American work ethic (which says that as long as you earn your money doing a legal job and pay your taxes, the state won't interfere) is seductive.
Try selling these people the idea of registering as a freelance - or having a civil servant from the Town Hall watching to see at what time the managing director's car leaves the company he owns.
Above all, try explaining to these new Europeans why the EU should any more spend (as it did in the last year for which accounts are available) 1,600,000,000 euros on translation services - just because a bunch of academic retards haven't yet understood that language is a living thing and ordinary people know how silly they look calling a machine a télécopier when everyone else in the world including the Welsh (who have to invent words for modern equipment) calls it a fax.
To make things even worse, these peoples gained their democratic independence in the age of the computer and the internet. That means English is their second language. Presumably the Estonians have agreed with the Romanians that they'll both respect each other's written and spoken culture and speak English when they want to do business together. For pity's sake, why can the rest of Europe agree to such a simple solution?
Taken together these two factors mean that France in the next 20 or 30 years will either be a country re-born or a country in terminal decline. Survival will be painful, and it depends on the EU surviving also. If it does and if France can bear the trauma of making the change, the EU could be France's salvation.
If France doesn't change and survive then my guess is that the EU won't either - and that could be bad for us all.
* Philip Howells, Salut!'s first guest columnist on himself: A genuine War Baby, I spent the first 18 years of my working life in BOAC and British Airways Sales and Marketing in the UK and USA. After taking early retirement, I ran my own AV and video business and still make video progranmmes, concentrating on wedding videos. I play guitar and help out on euphonium in the training band section of Astley Youth Brass band. To join the band, kids must be able to open their instrument case.
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