When the unions say three million people turned out in protests against the French government's trifling plans to reform the pension system, and officials say it was fewer than a million, you can safely bet both are lying (or mistaken).
It was an impressive show of strength all the same and I wouldn't have wanted to be travelling or trying to use a variety of public services during yesterday's strikes and demos.
On the TV, a man marching in Paris explained that he had opted for a career in public services - I think he may have been a council pen-pusher - because he would be able to retire on full pension at 55.
The French have an interesting approach to work. They're actually good and productive at it when they are there, but they really don't want to be there a moment longer than they have to be. Given the choice between premium-rate overtime and more leisure, there simply isn't any contest.
The headline comes from the 2006 protests against another piece of limited reform: de Villepin's attempt to change labour laws to enable bosses to fire workers under 26 within the first two years of employment with a minimum of fuss.
It wasn't an especially well thought-out piece of legislation but the then prime minister's heart was in the right place: he felt easing the employer's bureaucratic obligations would make it more likely that young people would be offered work in the first place.
The revolt against that law - most of which was abandoned, humiliating de Villepin, an easy target for derision since he had never been elected to anything - involved lots of student unrest as undergrads protested angrily and often violently against what they claimed was an attack on their employment prospects. All the more pity, then, that one of their slogans, spotted by a friend in Paris, was à bas le travail!... down with work.
As it happens, I think the French have an extraordinarily healthy sense of the proper work-life balance. It's not for me, but then I don't dig coal out of the bowels of the earth or battle with the raging swell to bring home the daily catch (come to think of it, nor do most of the French).
The trouble is that France cannot afford its life of leisure.
In fact, there are two Frances - the one that hangs on to remarkable employment privileges, working 35 hours a week and being practically unsackable except on gloriously generous terms, and the one inhabited by my friend Marie-Noëlle the newsagent, who seems to put in 35 hours a day and needs to open her shop six days a week throughout the summer season.
The Sarko plan would increase the general age of retirement from 60 to 62, though not until 2018. I hear the gasps of envy from neighbouring countries, but still feel instinctively on the protesters' side.
Maybe they should hold out for nothing less than eternal life.
Recent Comments