8/9/2023 0 Comments Serenity by jan bonfireSarkozy’s racaille are of North African or African descent, predominantly Muslim. Unfortunately, to economic division is added ethnic and cultural division: For the fact is that most of Mr. It wants to be left alone to commit crimes uninterrupted by the police, as is its inalienable right. The only fly in the ointment (apart from the fact that the rest of the economies of the world won’t leave the French economy in peace) is that the portion of the population whom the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, so tactlessly, but in the secret opinion of most Frenchmen so accurately, referred to as the “racaille” - scum - is not very happy with the settlement as it stands. It is therefore politically unassailable, either by the left or the right, which explains the paralysis of the French state in the present impasse. And since there are many more employed people than unemployed people in France, this is a settlement that suits most people, who will vote for it forever. But their relative efficiency has been bought at a price: the creation of a large caste of people more or less permanently unintegrated into the rest of society.Ī Martian observing France dispassionately, without ideological preconceptions, would come to the conclusion that the French had accepted with equanimity a kind of social settlement in which all those with jobs would enjoy various legally sanctioned perks and protections, while those without jobs would remain unemployed forever, though they would be tossed enough state charity to keep body and cellphone together. In other words, the French are much more efficient economically than the British. The state in France is certainly larger and more intrusive than elsewhere, leading to a dampening of economic activity, but it is a difference of degree rather than of kind.Ī French employee works 30% fewer hours than a British worker, and a much smaller percentage of the French population than the British works at all, yet total French output is very nearly equal in value to British. The outskirts of most cities in France, including such venerable ones as Nimes and Montpellier, resemble small town Midwest America far more than they resemble their medieval or classical and historic centers. In any case, the difference between France and other Western countries is smaller than is often claimed both by the French and by everyone else. After what happened recently in New Orleans or in Birmingham, who would dare to assert that what is happening in the suburbs of Paris could never happen chez les Anglo-Saxons? But at the very least, the events in the suburbs of Paris should puncture French complacency that they have developed a model of society vastly superior and more humane to that of supposedly savage economic liberalism. No one should gloat over riots in other countries, since such Schadenfreude is usually soon punished by riots nearer home. Fortunately, the French social model avoids this miserable chaos, at least in theory (which, as every Cartesian intellectual will tell you, is what really counts). The term “Anglo-Saxon” is now almost synonymous in the parlance of that elite with “savage liberalism,” a state of affairs which is alleged to prevail on the other side of the Channel, and to an even greater and more terrible extent on the other side of the Atlantic, in which an economic free-for-all leads to mass discontent, grotesque economic inequalities, lawlessness and endemic instability punctuated by violent civil disturbances. Its social conscience is something that the French elite has long taken pride in. If the trend of the last few days continues, geometric progression being what it is, it won’t be long before the rioters will have to go to Germany or the Low Countries to express their social conscience in a practical way. The productivity of the rioters has been increasing rapidly of late, and France looks like it will be breaking its record for burnt-out cars: 1,295 on Saturday night alone and 750 on Friday night, 500 the night before, and 300 the night before that. It may be difficult nowadays to get people in what the French call the Hexagon to work on Friday afternoons, but not to riot, at least not in the “sensitive” quartiers that surround most towns and cities. When it comes to rioting, there’s no 35-hour week in France.
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