The belief that government, of itself, can make life better is the great heresy that now threatens the very future of France. From the guillotine, which removed peoples’ heads, to the employment law, TEPA, which removed income tax on overtime, government interventions have seldom rewarded the intended beneficaries. Beheading people did not make the unbeheaded any happier, apart from the executioner, paid per severed skull, and a few psychopaths on the Committee of Public Safety. Cutting income tax on overtime became an inducement for inefficiency during regular working hours, leading to more overtime and less tax revenue.
TEPA was the brainchild of an intellectual, Myriam El Khomri, a graduate of the Montesquieu University of Bordeaux. Montesquieu once observed that useless laws weaken valuable laws. Quite so. It is surely a kin of Kromri’s law that makes it illegal in France to eat lunch at your desk, truly encapsulating the madness of modern France. That madness was fully on display on September 18 with the national strike against austerity measures and for increased public expenditure, (yes, really).
I spent last week amongst the ordinary people of Rue Daguerre, in the Montparnasse district of Paris. They stayed working while public servants went on strike in accordance with the unions’ brainless adherence to cargo-cult economics. This was the sect that South Sea Islanders created after they had looked up and then saw, lo, American aircraft landing and then unloading goods, freely, and for nothing!
But if the people of Rue Daguerre look up, all they can see is the accursed heights of Montparnasse Tower, the 200-metre monstrosity authorised in 1967 by the Minister for Culture and famed intellectual, André Malraux. Like most intellectuals, he passionately believed in state-subsidised art-centres, yet 70 art workshops in the old bohemian centre were destroyed to make way for the new tower that was intended as a statement of French eminence: In other words, a pioneer for the El Khomri insanity.
Indeed, wherever you see intellectualism triumph, there you’ll probably see poverty prosper: And thus the fate of France today. But in Rue Daguerre last week, while public transport stopped, the ordinary residents toiled as ever, in the scores of food shops, cafés and restaurants, and the reason why outsiders love Paris and France, with its boundless courtesy, its warm welcome, its splendid food, and the great wines that so enrich ordinary people’s lives. More to the point, fine cooking and outstanding wines are the product of ordinary people’s intellect: The scourge of France is that base and corrupting class known as “intellectuals”.
No intellectuals were in evidence as as the fresh seafood arrived from Normandy, including the bizarrely-named Utah Beach Oysters, the molecular contents of which the prudent should probably refrain from speculating too closely about. But at least a score of premises on Rue Daguerre street are now closed and shuttered, presumably victims of the taxes that are the curse of modern France. Across the country, some 20,000 villages are now with a single shop or café. Of the 200,000 bars and cafes that existed when Malraux authorised the Montparnasse, under 40,000 survive today. To be sure other factors have been at work, but tax and gratuitous regulations have been the most corrosive.
The result today is as plain as a Montparnasse Tower on Lombardy’s plain: Italy’s per capita income (PCI) is now level with France’s. Before the accession of Macron at the Élysée, Italy’s PCI was 10 per cent lower. “Our sad record is that we are the most spendthrift country in the world and people simply don’t realise it,” admitted Jean-Claude Trichet, ex-president of the European Central Bank. His pessimism is shared in Tokyo. Last year, Japanese finance houses liquidated a net €41 billion of French debt, in part because because they took fright at the political chaos in Paris. France now has to pay higher borrowing costs than Spain and Portugal, both of which the ECB had to rescue and restructure.
Quite simply, the cargo cult economics of communism, which laid the Soviet bloc low in 1989, are now destroying France. Macron has allowed public spending to become so uncontrolled that too many people are dependent on the State for reform to be possible. The ordinary checks and balances of democracy no longer function once enough people believe it is possible for a state borrow its way out of debt. Indeed, the very reason why Macron backed Christine Lagarde for President the European Central Bank was that she would, if needed, authorise endless borrowing for her native country. But she is limited in her ability to wave a magic wand over France’s cargo-cult President. Both European law, an admittedly moveable feast, and the far more inflexible beast of an economically-ailing Germany, will not tolerate any more financial finagling by poor Macron, whose many woes are hardly diminished by tabloid allegations that his wife is in fact a man.
Sébastien Lecornu, Macron’s latest prime minister, is his fifth prime minister in eighteen months. The prime minister before Lecornu, François Bayrou, a biographer of King Henri IV, like Lecornu had neither a majority in parliament nor a functioning cabinet, yet nonetheless he was told to push through €40 billion of emergency cuts. Worse still, a recent poll shows that 65 per cent of the French public are so deluded as to think it is possible to repeal the recent pension reform, and revert to retirement at 62. Oui, voilà, le cargo-cult!
With Macron’s popularity now showing at 17 percent, the President and Lecornu might take inspiration from Bayrou’s biographical muse, Henri IV, formerly Henri of Navarre, variously both a zealous Catholic and an ardent Protestant during the religious wars at the end of the 16th century. After the King Henri III was assassinated by a mad monk, Henri of Navarre was merely the ninth cousin-once-removed of the dead king; Not exactly a crown-promising adjacency. Yet advised by his artful mistress, Gabrielle d’Estrées, Henri somehow or other (yet again) switched religions, and as Catholic and with a bit of Gabrielle-inspired footwork, became Henri IV.
Alas for Macron, neither a mad monk nor a scheming mistress can rescue him or poor France from the crisis born of an addiction to theories based on manna from heaven and goods wantonly falling from the skies. Meanwhile, beneath the shadow of the Montparnasse Tower, the traders and shopkeepers of Rue Daguerre, good people all, must soldier on: They most certainly do not deserve the fate ordained for them by the false gods of bad politics and even worse economics. But the reckoning is coming, and God help them when it does.
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
Dollars and the old clerical flaws: does Leo XIV have questions to answer?