Leaving a meeting at The Times last spring I was approached by a youth who politely asked, in a French accent, where he might buy the weekly magazine Loot. I knew a likely newsagent, and we fell into conversation as he accompanied me. His name was Alex, he was about 20, and working as a kitchen porter near Tower Bridge. He could not find work in France. Loot (Alex had been told) had listings of accommodation to let, and he needed a room. In the end he found one; I know because we kept in touch.
He came round for a cup of coffee a few weeks later. At the time Dominique de Villepin, the French Prime Minister, was trying slightly to loosen employment protection laws, making it easier to hire and fire young people under the age of 26. The aim was to make young workers (who find work hard to get in France) more attractive to employers; but Mr de Villepin was encountering such fierce popular opposition, including from the trades unions and from students, that he was destined finally to abandon his plan.
I assumed Alex would support the thinking. He was himself a victim of youth unemployment in France; he had chosen Britain where there is much less job security; and his family were in business: he wanted to start a business himself.
But to my surprise Alex hated de Villepin’s plan. It would allow employers to “exploit” young workers. It was preposterous. Alex said the economic logic had been explained and he understood it. But he simply couldn’t stomach the idea of employers “exploiting” workers through a “loophole” in the law – and nor, he said, could most of his friends of his own age.
Alex is not stupid. He is articulate, economically literate and quick-minded; and he would consider himself a freethinker: in no way doctrinaire. What was blocking his mind had little to do with the intellect. It was more like an emotional failure: a failure to punch his way out of a cultural box. The “protection” of workers by the State was for him a given: an assumed good. Job security was an assumed good. A France like that could still prosper in a competitive world. No right-thinking Frenchman wanted to be exposed to “exploitation” for employers’ profit.
Alex and his kind are the future of their country. If anybody is ready to accept the free-market shock being proposed by Nicolas Sarkozy, it should be them. Yet de Villepin’s plan was met by a widespread sense of national revulsion. It is hard to believe there has been since then, or could be by some wave of the electoral wand, the deep emotional change required for Mr Sarkozy’s presumed economic revolution to take root.
In 2000 I spent some four months on the island of Kerguelen in the sub-Antarctic. This French possession is uninhabited save for a small station manned (then) by 57 men and two women: scientists, meteorologists and servicemen. Most of my friends were young science graduates doing their equivalent of national service in research work. All were French. One could not have wished for more genial, independent-minded or intelligent company.
But the general mood was not optimistic. Few had jobs lined up for when they returned, and most were anxious about where or whether they would ever find work. There was a pervading dislike of the entire French political class, and little trust in the competence or even good faith of government. So again I say, if anywhere within the culture were to be found the seeds of iconoclasm towards the Protecting State, one would have looked for such seeds among these clever, modern, unconservative graduates. I detected no such ideas, no impatience to make the ideological or emotional leap.
The Britain I remember in 1979 had that impatience. It would be wrong to say the Tories had persuaded the country of Thatcherism – we hardly knew what that was – but of one thing we were sufficiently persuaded: that the old way wasn’t working, wouldn’t work, and had to be abandoned. In the air was a hatred and fear of the trade unions, a detestation of suffocating state bureaucracy, and a furious contempt for the incompetence of nationalised industries and utilities. Britain, it seemed to many of us, was sick, and might even be dying.
I don’t think France is anywhere near that state of mind. I don’t think France is ready. I don’t sniff in the wind in la France profonde (though I begin to in urban Paris) that palpable sense of having reached the end of a road. The changes France needs to embrace will be convulsive. The pain will be intense, the dislocation bewildering and cruel. We British found that when Thatcherism arrived. But even at the low point of Thatcher’s first term, even when she personally had become a figure of loathing across much of Britain, you almost never heard anyone suggest a return to what had gone before. There was a sense, in 1979, that we had burnt a bridge behind us, and had wanted to.
Is that what the French feel? After next weekend’s second ballot for the French Presidency, I think a victorious Nicolas Sarkozy would quickly find that France had voted for the man, but not the plan. The nation would have willed the end while remaining unready to will the means. Mr Sarkozy must realise this already. He will either climb down, executing the graceful U-turn that Margaret Thatcher rejected, and opt simply to enjoy the trappings of office; or else defiantly give it a go, and charge onward like the Light Brigade.
Such a charge would be magnifique but it would not be la guerre, or indeed la politique. Within a year, cars would be burning, farmers would be protesting, students would be rioting, unions would be striking, business would deserting the free-market cause, the electorate would be reconsidering, and an embattled presidency would be running up the white flag. Like Lot’s wife, France would be turning again, for another look. And, far from advancing the cause of economic reform, Mr Sarkozy would have set it back. It might take another political generation in France before anyone in mainstream French politics dared to go down that road again.
It is possible, you see, to win too early. Ted Heath did in 1970. After his failed confrontation with the trade unions it was a decade before anybody dared take them on again – and only gingerly at first. Mrs Thatcher had learnt that lesson when she backed down in the face of the miners’s first confrontation with her Government; she began stockpiling for their second. I am afraid a narrow Tory lead in 2009-10, but with no majority, might also be a win too early. David Cameron must seize the opportunity presented by Sir Menzies Campbell’s demented undertaking to talk coalition with Labour only, and let him.
I rooted for a Republican victory when George W. Bush sought his second term. A win for John Kerry last time would have left American neoconservatism alive to fight another day. Give Bush rope, I prayed, so that he may hang himself and his argument. He is duly doing so. Let us hope there is another, final, US troop “surge” in Iraq, to test that strategy, too, to destruction.
And next weekend all true market liberals should be rooting for Ségolène Royal. France, before it turns to embrace the free market, must first despair utterly of the alternative. France must have no lingering doubt, no hankering to go back. It must with all its being reject its half-century affair with the all-protecting State. France must know in its heart as well as its head that there is no exception française.
France is on the road to that knowledge, rejection and despair, but it is not there yet. Ms Royal, still passionate for l’exception française, is the leader to take France all the way. Onward, Ségo, I say: onward to the presidency. And after that, onward to the buffers. And hit them good and hard.
Matthew Parris