‘I want Sarkozy to be right’

31 March 2007

Theodore Dalrymple, who lives in France, says that the presidential frontrunner faces an awesome range of problems — unsettlingly similar to those that will confront the Prime Minister unlucky enough succeed Gordon Brown

Not surprisingly, a lot of commentary in France has remarked on the triumph of presentation over substance in this election. To adapt slightly the phraseology of latter-day French philosophers, the politicians are powerful signifiers who yet seem to signify very little. That is why people can be passionately pro- or anti-Sarko without really believing that he will change very much if he were elected: for they are arguing about symbols, not things, which (in the French state at least) are more or less eternal.

In promising a break with the past, Sarko is at least acknowledging that something is profoundly wrong with France. The question is, how profoundly? When I think about it, I swing in my mind like a pendulum, between Pangloss and Schopenhauer.

On the one hand, France is still in many respects a more pleasant and civilised country to live in than Britain. Where I have a house, people take three hours off for lunch, and I simply don’t believe that their productivity would rocket if instead they furtively ate a sandwich between telephone calls of allegedly supreme importance. French productivity per hour of labour, after all, is far higher than British. Activity is not real work, and much activity actually obstructs real work.

In no small part, France is more productive because it is less plentifully populated with aggressively and triumphantly ignorant people than Britain (though a fast deteriorating educational system might yet reduce the difference). Ordinary social interactions are also more pleasant in France than in Britain, and since most of life is a succession of small things, this is important. Its everyday culture is markedly less crass and vulgar than Britain’s. Mass public drunkenness as the highest form of entertainment seems scarcely to exist. In marked contrast to the British, the French seem actually to like their children, with the unsurprising result that their children are more likeable than their British counterparts. And, oddly enough, for a country which is often criticised for its hostility to entrepreneurship, small shops seem to do better here than in Britain.