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Writer's pictureMichael Julien

In defence of the great French Republic, sick though it is - The Telegraph - 04.07.23

by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard


France has been unlucky. The incendiary mix of the culture war ideology and agitation from Snapchat and Twitter could set off much the same paroxysm in any number of Western countries, including Britain.


There may be something about the particular history of French relations with Algeria that makes it almost orthodoxy in the banlieues to reject the legitimacy of the French state.


Whether you attribute the trigger-happy methods of the French police to institutionalised racism, or to the banlieue sport of “briser du flic” (beat up cops), the two feed on each other in a vicious circle.


But such tensions are not unique to France. They are simmering in Antwerp, Rotterdam, Malmo, or Los Angeles, waiting only for a comparable spark.


France goes further than any in enforcing strict secularism in schools and state institutions. It is unusually self-confident in promoting its liberal “civilising mission” and its universalist Rights of Man as state doctrine. Yet even the strong Gallic brand is not enough to inoculate the republic against a breakdown of national cohesion.


This deformed rebellion of rival drug gangs – egged on by the Poujadist left of Jean-Luc Melenchon – has erupted even though French unemployment is at a 40-year low and business is crying out for workers.


It is hardly going to get better over the 2020s as fiscal retrenchment returns and monetary overkill by the European Central Bank pushes the eurozone into a second Lost Decade.


So yes, France is in trouble, as we all are in Europe, but before we join the misplaced media urge to write off the country as a borderline failed state, let us not lose sight of its formidable economic and strategic depths.


There is a reason why the world’s second-richest man today is Bernard Arnault ($200bn plus), the elusive head of the LVMH empire of luxury goods. Its posh brands of clothes, leathers, and spirits are selling better in China these days than German cars and machine tools, which the Chinese now make for themselves.


It is Germany that has suffered a fundamental rupture of its business model over the last five years – greater than Britain’s transition shock from Brexit – due to its over-reliance on discounted Russian gas, China’s fickle market, and fossil fuel cars.


French growth has persistently outperformed, albeit flattered by looser fiscal policy than EU peers. France led Europe in the EY survey of foreign direct investment in 2021 and 2022, with a record 1,259 new projects last year (the UK was second, but first in jobs created).


Taiwan’s ProLogium is to build a gigafactory for batteries in Dunkirk. Elon Musk is nibbling too, so long as French regulators leave Twitter alone. La French Tech has been something of a success. It is Germany that trails on artificial intelligence.


France is Western Europe’s farming superpower with an agro-industrial base that has been long nurtured, and this has acquired a high strategic premium since Putin’s commodity war.


French mega-subsidies from the Common Agricultural Policy are no longer threatened by the EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy. For better or worse (if you are green), pietistic pleas for sustainable land and pesticide use have been trumped by the EU’s drive for food sovereignty.


Nuclear dominates France's energy supply

France is a net exporter of electricity. The gas crunch of the last two years has vindicated the national decision to stay the course with nuclear power – still almost 70pc of electricity generation – when others panicked after Fukushima.


There was an anti-nuclear wobble under the Hollande presidency and the early days of Mr Macron. Failure to fund the nuclear ecosystem is one reason why a fifth of France’s 56 reactors were out of action for so long last winter on safety concerns. But Mr Macron has since got religion, launching an expansion blitz of 14 new reactors.


Yes, the pioneer EPR reactor in Flamanville is 12 years late and four times over budget. But if you are going to build these Hinkley monsters, it is better to build lots of them to achieve critical mastery of the technology and slash costs.


Dabbling in ones and twos, à l’anglaise, is an invitation to cost overruns, as Oxford energy guru Sir Dieter Helm has warned vehemently. French dirigisme has its merits.

One has to be careful about demographics but it is hard to put a good economic spin on the trajectory of the German workforce, expected to peak next year and then decline by 5 million over the 2020s, pushing the old-age dependency ratio above 50pc. Italy and Spain are scarcely in better shape.


France alone of the eurozone’s big four has invested in a respectable fertility rate (1.83) through a family tax structure and parental leave regime that makes it less cripplingly expensive to have children.


France did not slash its armed forces to the bone like Germany, Belgium, Italy, or Spain, during the austerity years. It has a nuclear deterrent capable of striking at every level, and has recently test-fired its own hypersonic missile.


Whether or not a UN Security Council veto counts for anything these days France unquestionably has global diplomatic cachet with its neo-Gaulliste third way, which is not to say that Mr Macron has deployed it skillfully over the last year. De Gaulle would not have been rolled so easily by Putin or Xi Jinping, and he would not have thrown Taiwan under a bus so carelessly.


Germany's shrinking workforce

In my view, Mr Macron deserves more than a little blame for the current tetchy mood in France.


His decision to ram through a highly contentious version of pension reform by decree power (Article 49:3) without a parliamentary vote, against the overwhelming public opposition, and in the face of an allied trade union front for the first time since 1968, has left people feeling that disciplined and peaceful protest gets you nowhere.


Needless to say, protesters with an average age of 17 pillaging Marseilles or Strasbourg, or launching fire bomb attacks on symbols of state authority for the exhilaration of it, are not concerned by the niceties of Article 49:3.


They are an anarchic threat to civil order that no country can tolerate. If the French republic, with all its deep strengths, cannot handle this menace, none of Western Europe’s composite cultural democracies are secure.


Schadenfreude is entirely the wrong emotion.



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