France - the rotting Republic

[Blackleaf]

July 24, 2005

Investigation

The rotting Republic

By Brian Moynahan

The British love France — as a holiday destination. But its famous joie de vivre is being eroded by rising unemployment, a faltering economy and political scandals. And the country's president, Jacques Chirac, is at the heart of the mess

For anyone going to France over the summer holidays, the heart still has reason to leap. There's the cheap beer, wine and cigarettes at Calais for the booze cruisers, of course, and beyond lies the world's favourite destination, with the British alone making 12m visits a year. Trains get better and faster, with double-decker TGVs eating up the 460 miles from Paris to Marseilles in three hours. Better, that is, provided they are not on strike. The roads are as superb as ever. The once awful accident rate has been slashed by the Raffarin campaign against speeding and drink driving. Drivers touring by car will notice fewer road hogs — and more police with radar guns and Breathalysers at the ready. Jean-Pierre Raffarin himself, however, has gone, brutally sacked as prime minister by Jacques Chirac last month.

Those with second homes in France — 500,000 British, and one French family in four — have reason to be smug. Country-home values went up by 14% last year, and in the past eight years the average rise has been 95%, with 150% in sun- (and snow-) drenched Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur.

That all is well in la France profonde, the country's rural heart, seems confirmed by rising land prices. The value of the average hectare has risen by almost one-third to €4,790 over the past decade. But life is no longer as satisfying or simple as it once was. Between the well-ordered plane trees, beneath the white curtain of crisp linen napery, something has gone wrong. There is something rotten in the state of France.

It shows in little things. Respect for the grandeur of the office made it rare for the French to slag off their president in front of a foreigner they did not know well. Chirac lost that protection with his humiliation in the May EU referendum. "Il est foutu," they say, unprompted. "He's done for." His choice of Dominique de Villepin to replace the luckless Raffarin draws the same bitter scorn: the courtiers as well as the emperor are seen to have no clothes. Small wonder.

The non vote in May was a savage rejection of the country's elite. The silver-maned, poetry-writing new leader is — like eight of his ministers — an unelected functionary who personifies it. He opened himself to ridicule from the off with Napoleonic references to his first 100 days in power. "Has the man not heard of Waterloo?" they growl in the bars.

Warning signs of crisis multiply. Even in small towns, men in their twenties hang about the streets during working hours, a faintly menacing presence and a sign that unemployment among the young has reached 25% and will not budge. On city outskirts, the groups of aimless youths are denser and the threat more palpable.

Discuss a future trip by public transport, and a fatalistic shrug and a murmured ". . . et les syndicats?" follows, a reference to "the unions" and their promise of "mass mobilisation" if anyone meddles with their working practices.

Chat with a small farmer at a market, and the complaints go beyond the weather and the price of diesel to a real sense of disillusion with the nature of life here. In 10 years, agricultural income has fallen by 20%. Our own idea of the French farm as a couple of fields, worked by an aproned maman and a Gauloise-smoking papa, is more fanciful than ever. The average farm is half as large again as it was a few years back. Beef and grain barons, their "farms" highly mechanised, dominate the industry, which trousers one-quarter of common-agricultural-policy money.

The paysans — a proud word meaning "countrymen" more than "peasant" — have seen their numbers plummet to 600,000; at the beginning of the 1990s they still mustered 1m. José Bové, an Asterix-moustached former student activist turned part-time goat's-cheese maker and self-proclaimed protector of paysans, vows to prevent any further decline. He first gained fame when he trashed a McDonald's restaurant. The wine makers of Languedoc have taken to the shotgun, crowbar and dynamite stick to protest that the dusky grapes ripening in the Midi sun will fetch as little as €1 a litre when they are made into wine. Snapping up Mouton Rothschild, Latour and Margot can mean burnt fingers. Values of the 2004 vintage are down 30% and even more for 2003. In the Bordelais and Gironde regions, there is talk of subsidies for distilling wine into pharmaceutical alcohol, and grubbing up the vineyards.

Land prices have stayed firm only because of development potential. They are high where the town French and foreigners want to be — the Haute Savoie, the Gironde, the British enclave of the Dordogne — and low where they don't, such as the Loire and Franche-Comté.

The resentment of "townies" is growing. The British are not flavour of the month with Bretons — nor, as we shall see, with Chirac — who protested at St-Brieuc on Brittany's Armor coast, where they buy one in three of the houses put on the market. The problem, though, is general to much of France. "The 'countryside' is becoming more and more a residential area," says André Thévenot, president of a federation of rural associations, "and tensions between agriculture, tourism and residential use are increasing."

Pollution of idyllic landscapes, by pesticides and people, is growing too. The famous oyster beds of the Arcachon basin were closed owing to suspected pollution. Some resorts, unhappy with the tough criteria needed for a pavillon bleu, a coveted blue flag that covers sanitation, rubbish treatment and beach as well as water quality, are going for an easier, water-only fanion bleu, or blue pennant, instead. And what about the other foundations of French life?

Country people always knew and trusted their neighbours, left their doors unlocked and their roadside fruit stalls unmanned but for an honesty box, until much more recently than in Britain. Crime was a mostly urban affair, at its worst in the drab, high-rise housing estates on the rim of the big cities, where jobless, alienated young blacks and Arabs, sauvageons or "little savages" to the law-abiding, fight each other and the police. Prisons are full, at 116% of capacity.

But theft, if not violence, has moved out to the villages. As second-home owners in particular know, the new breed of housebreaker has become exactly that, smashing through roofs to bypass windows guarded by metal blinds.

The countryside is going through a crisis of identity, of fear of change and loss of prosperity, that mirrors that of France as a whole. It has a particular hold on the French imagination. Farm produce, the agricultural minister wrote, is "more than marketable goods". It is the "fruit of love", sustained by many devoted generations of farmers, who must not be allowed to fall victim to "a dehumanised and standardised world".

That is the rub. The world, dehumanised or not, will have its way. French farmers must change. The wine growers will be bankrupted — the market for vineyards in Roussillon has already begun to collapse — unless reforms sweep away the social charges and over-regulation that make their wine too expensive to sell. The French "social model", hugely expensive and restrictive, no longer creates jobs and growth, nor pays its way.

But real change is almost possible. Painful surgery is needed to restore the country to health, but it will not deliver itself to a knife wielded by a political class, and a president, mired in scandal and plump with perks, who search not for remedies but for scapegoats.

The Fifth Republic was created by General de Gaulle in 1958 to do away with the weak, vacillating, short-lived regimes of the Fourth. Its linchpin is the president, his finger on the nuclear button, the maker and breaker of cabinets as well as garden-party host in the resplendent grounds of his Elysée Palace. The old system saw four governments fall in a year.

The general brought stability. At 72, Chirac is the oldest leader among the western heavyweights, and sensitive about it: he gave his ecology minister a dressing down for revealing he wears a hearing aid. Together, he and François Mitterrand, whom he succeeded as head of state in 1995, have ruled France for the past 24 years.

But the "non" in the May referendum — the "child of fear and despair", the historian Nicolas Baverez has written in Le Monde — marks the onset of "the death of Gaullist France, corrupted by Mitterrand and then ruined by Chirac". Those are terrible words, all the more so because they are applied in the most serious, sober newspaper to a Gaullist like Chirac. They have, alas, the ring of truth.

This summer most of us travelling to France will pay handsomely for our lodgings — hotel or villa. So, in general, do the French. Not, however, the elite, whose self-serving shenanigans have done so much to undermine Gaullist France.

Chirac has lived in the great palaces of state for so long — a few months aside, he has held the office of prime minister, mayor of Paris or president without a break since 1974, when Edward Heath was packing up to leave Downing Street — that he is known as " the Resident of the Republic". He has every reason to stand for another presidential term in 2007, for he is, the wags say, "condemned to perpetual re-election". The moment he leaves the Elysée Palace, he loses the presidential immunity that has prevented magistrates questioning him in cases of alleged corruption and abuse dating from his years as mayor of Paris.

Respect for public life has been corroded by the constant drip-drip of corruption in high places for the best part of two decades. Housing is a case in point. Several hundred splendid apartments belonging to the Bank of France are let on privileged terms to bigwigs who have no connection with it. The city of Paris was equally generous in renting to Chirac, his close colleague Alain Juppé and Juppé's son, and to the children of Jean Tiberi, his successor as mayor of Paris.

"Liberty, Equality, Impunity," cynics say of the establishment's motto. Times are hard: the economy sluggish, jobs hard to find, drift and backbiting the political order of the day. The malaise runs deep. It comes out in the sullen bloody-mindedness that the French call morosité. It can be spotted by a slight curl of the upper lip accompanying the classic Gallic shoulder shrug.

Chirac's personal morosité is largely aimed across the Channel. Tony Blair, safely re-elected, saved from the Euro-hook by Chirac's very impaling, is a maddeningly smug figure viewed from the Elysée. "Never has Albion seemed more perfidious," notes Le Monde, "nor so lucky." And this was before London beat Paris in the battle to host the 2012 Olympic Games. Chirac has reacted so angrily that the columnist Georges-Marc Benamou has accused him of "brandishing the Anglo-Saxon model" as a "sort of Antichrist". Both the political right and left, Benamou says, display the same "Pavlovian reaction" and treat Anglo-Saxons with the "same sneering disgust".

British visitors can draw comfort that this is seen as a mere smokescreen. Benamou reminded his readers that "Anglo-Saxon" also embraces low unemployment, Charles Dickens, and the forces who landed in Normandy in 1944. Some of the fewish chuckles being raised this summer are from Deux Siècles d'Humour Anglo-Saxon, by Jean-Loup Chiflet, or John Wolf Whistle, whose jokes, such as George Best's remark that he had stopped drinking, at least while asleep, have added elegance in French : "J'ai arrté de boire, mais seulement quand je dors."

Implicit in political Anglophobia is fear and rejection of the outside world, and Benamou warns that the split between the "so-called elites" and the people is widening dramatically. The level of dissatisfaction is mounting, he says, adding the most chilling of French phrases: "La rue menacera un jour" — the street beckons.

Sympathy over the London bombings was heartfelt. "We are all Londoniens," they said, and Bastille Day celebrations were interrupted. But a tetchy defensiveness extends to French itself. The language is a glory, of course, whose rude good health matters to the world, and it is natural the French should wish to preserve and perfect it. The Académie Française was set up by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635 to do just that. The 40 "immortals" who make up its current membership, however, are showing signs of Anglophobia. One, Angelo Rinaldi, when urging people to vote against it, said that the European constitution would "destroy the last means of defending the French language". It was a "burst of the accelerator" on the way to an Anglophone Europe. "We are already far enough down that road," the venerable immortal added gloomily.

The then culture minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, spoke of the fight to protect the language from "the tyranny of uniformity" — longhand for "from English". He is now the foreign minister. A government body, the Commissariat Général de la Langue Française, busies itself with deporting Anglicisms.

It coins French substitutes for English phrases, publishes them in the official Journal of the Republic, and polices their use in advertising and entertainment as well as official documents.

"Hot money" is out, replaced by "capitaux fébriles". "Tanker" has been sunk by the term "navire-citerne" and, in cyberculture, "arrosage" has done for "spam" and "bogue" for "bug".

Chirac is so sensitive to the dominance of Google on the web that he asked his culture minister to create a home-grown search engine to rival it. Criticism of Google is said to rest on its supposed vulgarity in classifying its results by popularity, but few doubt that its Anglo-Saxon origins are to blame. Jean-No‘l Jeanneney, head of the Bibliothèque Nationale, notes snootily that Google is "the expression of the American system in which the law of the market is king".

Also upsetting the president is the power of the English-language satellite broadcasters CNN, Fox, Sky and BBC World. He noted their influence in what he calls the "war of images and airwaves" during the Iraq invasion, and vowed to set up a French satellite news station to challenge them. A commission was duly appointed, and a name agreed on. CII, for Chaîne d'Information Internationale, was due to start up last year. Cost has kept it on the drawing board.

Real shock at losing the Olympic bid is accompanied by fretting at the national decline captured by the title of Nicolas Baverez's bestseller, La France Qui Tombe. Baverez says that aversion to change, "incoherent regulation" from Brussels, and organised deflation in Euroland have reduced the continent to a "wasteland" without growth, jobs or innovation. Europeans are being "pauperised"; their buying power, four-fifths that of Americans in 1990, is now less than two-thirds, he says, and Chirac is no more than "euthanasia" for new ideas.

In a recent case of strangling red tape, the tycoon François Pinault abandoned plans to create a €150m rival to London's Tate Modern on the island in the Seine that once housed Renault's Paris plant. Instead, he has bought the Palazzo Grassi in Venice to display his art collection, citing bureaucratic meddling and delay for abandoning France.

In another much-read book, Adieu â la France Qui S'en Va, Jean-Marie Rouart bade a nostalgic goodbye to the France that has gone, and the sense of honour and spirituality that have gone with it. The French fret at the slump in the number of bars and cafes, down from 150,000 to 60,000 in 15 years. It worries them that Disneyland Paris draws twice as many visitors as the Eiffel Tower, and seven times the number who go to the Asterix fun park. They rail at "McDo's", but they eat there, in such numbers that France is now McDonald's best overseas market.

Pride in national cuisine has taken other body blows. Jamie Oliver and his show Le Chef Nu emerged as a big television hit, to the disgust of diehards who sniffed about the "adolescent" from the "land of mint sauce". The Michelin guide has been in trouble. A former inspector claimed that understaffing meant that some restaurants were not visited every year. Worse, the patron of a famous restaurant has handed in his three Michelin stars, which he had held for 28 years. Alain Senderens, of Lucas Carton in Paris, says the guide pays so much attention to "tralala" — decor, service, surroundings — that he cannot do a bit of honest turbot for under €100.

Visitors may get through August without too many problems. Strikers go on holiday too, and the strike season traditionally starts after the schools go back in early September. The trouble, when it begins, will likely be spearheaded by the cheminots, the 175,000 workers of the state railway, SNCF, who are set against any prospect of competition. Three hundred of them managed to delay the first dent in SNCF's 70-year-old monopoly last month. They blocked the track in front of the inaugural private freight train, operated by Connex, for five hours before gendarmes were able to move them. A series of strikes is planned against the so-called Fillon reforms, which would pluck some of the feathers from their bedding.

French railways, when they run, are the best in the world. SNCF still has 18,000 miles of network, and its regional services reach small towns of the sort that lost their stations and track when Dr Beeching wielded his axe in Britain back in the 1960s. Its commuter trains are modern, comfortable and clean. Its TGV, the 185mph-plus train â grande vitesse, makes snails of other country's expresses. So healthy is demand for its jet-busting services that double-decker carriages have been built to cope.

It is a matter of particular pride that this pioneering brilliance is the product not of an Anglo-Saxon free market, but of state enterprise. The inaugural TGV service, from Paris to Lyons in 1981, was seen as a triumph for the French system and its tradition of state guidance.

That was then, at the start of the Mitterrand era. The world has moved on, the French economy has stagnated, but the railways remain, in their pomp and at constantly escalating cost, with frightening unfunded pension liabilities. Over the Mitterrand-Chirac years, the unions have extracted perks galore: the 35-hour week, bonuses, retirement at 50 for drivers, full pensions after 32½ years' service.

Under the Fillon reforms, public-sector staff would work for 371/2 years before getting a full pension, with a 40-year stint needed in the private sector. But the cheminots regard their short hours and short working life as non-negotiable. These are acquis sociaux, acquired rights that

are an inalienable part of the social order. To ask them to work longer for reduced pensions is seen as a slap in the face for all France stands for. "Should we accept that?" they ask their fellow countrymen. "Would you?"

The health service is in a similar crisis of unsustainable excellence. NHS survivors taken ill in France have good reason for gratitude: indeed, as well as inflating property prices, not speaking French, and bringing "their cement and tattooed workmen with them on the ferry" to avoid using French workmen, the French (probably rightly) suspect that some British come to France precisely to be ill.

Edited July 24, 2005 by Blackleaf

[Blackleaf]

Waiting lists are often short enough for same-day appointments. Doctors still make home visits. Patients can flit from one doctor to another to find the one who is the most agreeable. Specialists can be consulted without referral. Hospital patients often have their own room, and mothers stay in for five days after giving birth.

Patients pay upfront, but almost all costs are reimbursable, by public-health insurance topped up by the state or private insurance and mutuals. Given such largesse, the French have naturally become pill-popping hypochondriacs, supporting a profusion of pharmacists — monopolists who are fighting a legal battle to stop supermarkets selling even vitamin pills and herbal remedies — at crippling cost to the state.

The deficit in public-health insurance soared from €2 billion in 2001 to reach €13 billion last year. The population is ageing, treatments are ever more sophisticated and expensive, and demand is rampant. Bankruptcy looms.

Doctors are well aware the system is moribund (Douste-Blazy, a cardiologist before he was foreign minister, memorably described it as "mad") but they have also taken to protesting, ingeniously crossing the Channel so as to be noticed in the general furore.

A group of 300 surgeons went to the Pontin's holiday camp at Camber Sands in East Sussex earlier this year to protest at low pay, long hours and skyrocketing liability-insurance premiums.

"We have so many strikes in France," explained Philippe Cuq, their president, "that we thought we could get more coverage if we went into exile in England."

Plenty of remedies are available. Patients could be charged a small, nonreimbursable amount for each consultation. The CSG social contribution could be raised. Health care and insurance could be opened to competition. But the latter smacks of Anglo-Saxon liberalism, and the government fears the howls of protest that increased charges would surely bring.

That something has to give is not in doubt. The French often refer slightingly to the lack of job security in Britain. But in France, 23% of under-25s and 40% of immigrants have no jobs at all. Those who are employed work less and less. The number of hours worked, which has been climbing in Britain and America for 20 years, is still falling in France. And, where over half of 55- to 64-year-olds are still at work in Britain, the figure in France is 37%.

Overprotection, with employers faced with high social charges and tight redundancy rules, makes companies loath to take on permanent staff. The result is that 19% of the hours worked, and three-quarters of newly created jobs, are in emplois instables, for staff hired on contracts of less than a year. The young and unskilled are trapped at the bottom of this two-tier job market.

Initiative is sapped by a system where the state soaks up almost 55% of GDP (gross domestic product). An opinion poll revealed that half the young wish to join the civil service: why work for the persecuted entrepreneur when you can do the persecuting, sometimes for as little as 32 hours a week, with a safe pension to come? The so-called "Ashford effect" drains the most dynamic from France to Kent. Over 300,000 now work in England. Employers look increasingly at "delocalisation", moving parts of their business abroad.

At Varages in the Var in southern France, the mayor has been on hunger strike to draw attention to the collapse of the local earthenware industry. It has been hit hard by manufacturers transferring production to Tunisia. In the textile towns of the Vosges, the talk is of a "tsunami". Chinese quotas ended on January 1, 2005, and imports of Chinese pullovers are up fivefold since then, trousers four times, and shirts by 168%. Four factories shut within 10 days in the early summer, with production lines for medical textiles — such as sterile bandages — relocated to the Czech Republic. The town of Thiers, which makes 70% of French cutlery, has also been devastated by Chinese imports. In its golden age, the industry employed 12,000. That is now down to 2,000, and it continues to bleed jobs. Surviving firms have already begun subcontracting production to China, which offers a five-to-one cost advantage. It is feared that Chinese companies will buy up local firms for their technical and logistical

expertise, and use them to distribute made-in-China cutlery.

"Labour in France costs me €22 an hour," says Bertrand Ballu, a businessman in Normandy who has begun manufacturing in Slovakia. "Over there, I pay €4 an hour. And there's less red tape, less bureaucracy, less tax. I'm badly viewed here for giving work to people who aren't French. But a business can't grow under French conditions." He points out that each €10 he pays to an employee in France costs him a further €4.50 in social charges, and that, after tax, the employee gets only €8.50. Slovakia has no asset-based professional tax, unlike France, and company taxes are 19%, against 37%.

There is talk of adopting the Danish "flexsecurity" system. Employers are free to hire and fire, but workers are protected by generous unemployment pay, provided they undergo compulsory training if needed, and accept suitable jobs when offered. Nobody expects a radical overhaul, however, and the same stagnation affects social issues.

Le Pen's relative success in 2002 showed the tensions that surround immigration. Exactly how many immigrants there are in France — and how many of those are Muslim — is not known. Figures of up to 5m are bandied about, but it is taboo in a secular republic to collect racial and religious statistics.

"Our ancestors the Gauls", in theory at least, applies to Algerians and Malians as well as the white français de souche, born and bred. To distinguish between them, it is feared, leads to communautarisme on Anglo-Saxon lines. Chirac has firmly put down suggestions of "positive discrimination". All French people were equal before the law, he said. France did not recognise ethnic minorities, and "to appoint people because of their origins is not acceptable".

Evidence suggests that Muslims, though many are now second or third generation, are becoming less rather than more French. An increasing number, now 85%, say they only eat halal meat. Headscarves, once rare, are now commonplace, at least out of school. Many immigrant areas are virtual ghettos, dangerous for visitors to stray into, disfigured by high unemployment, violent graffiti, Aids, crime and a rampant drugs culture. "Little by little," a priest said of one high-rise estate, "everyone feels caught up in this return to a savage state."

The satellite dishes that pepper the balconies are tuned to African and Arab stations. Here the French are the foreigners: babtou to Africans, gaori and gouère to Arabs, roum to gypsies.

While washing his father's car recently, Sidi Ahmed, an 11-year-old boy, was shot and killed by crossfire in a gang war at La Courneuve, in the outer Paris suburbs. "We are not Chicago," the mayor said, but drug-trafficking is rife in what is now a crumbling estate but was a showcase when it was built in the 1960s.

This summer has also seen murder and mayhem between gypsies and Arabs in Perpignan. But France has had no race riots on the scale of American or British cities. To its credit, the government has dealt firmly but tactfully with the issue of radical Islam. It set up the French Council of the Muslim Faith as an official body to allow Islam a public voice, while changing the law so as to deport jihad-preaching imams. Plans were announced this month to bear down on illegal immigrants, and to restrict legal inflow to those with needed skills. Firmness has largely seen off the issue of Islamic headscarves in state schools. The consciously secular republic has forbidden religious symbols since the early 1900s. It could hardly concede to Islam what was denied to Catholics. In the event, only 47 pupils, three Sikhs included, have been excluded from school. The struggle centred on Strasbourg. Just 17 of the 500 girls who were veiled a year ago have persisted.

That France still has talent by the bucketful is not in question. Anyone in the Toulouse area may catch a glimpse of a giant A380 overhead, the new flagship of Airbus, the French-inspired saviour of Europe's airline industry. The French have always had a strange affection for Rover, and greeted its demise with real sadness, but Peugeot has done its fair share to save a slice of British car manufacture. The French have world-class companies in rocketry, insurance, hotels, drinks, food and cosmetics. They remain a dominant force in fashion, design, architecture and engineering. Their quality of life is close to unbeatable. That's why so many foreigners go there.

What has gone wrong, the wellspring of morosité, lies in the Elysée and in public life. It is rarely obvious on the surface — surly waiters and out-of-sorts garage mechanics have always been with us — but get into conversation, and dissatisfaction bubbles up. During the Mitterrand-Chirac years, the mayors of great cities — Nice, Grenoble, Lyons, Cannes, Bordeaux — have left under a cloud. In Paris, multiple allegations have accompanied Chirac's long tenure as mayor. His chosen heir, and former deputy mayor, Alain Juppé, is currently barred from holding public office.

Elf, the state oil company, has been plundered of €305m. The highest-profile figure to be prosecuted was Roland Dumas, Mitterrand's foreign minister and later president of the constitutional council, the body that granted Chirac his controversial immunity. Dumas' conviction for receiving misappropriated public funds was lifted on appeal. The former head of Elf claimed that Mitterrand, who was his golfing partner, agreed to fund his €5m divorce from secret funds, and that Mitterrand ordered Elf to pay $15m to Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrat party in Germany.

Some of the fallout has been hilarious. Elf's go-between in the Helmut Kohl affair was known as Dédé la Sardine; a suspect swallowed his mobile-phone chip when authorities caught up with him in the Philippines; and a helicopter was chartered to search the Himalayas for a vacationing judge to block proceedings into a payment made to the wife of Jean Tiberi, Chirac's successor as Paris mayor. But tears mingle with the public laughter.

The payment of kickbacks by building contractors to the main parties, of the left, right and centre, was so commonplace under Mitterrand that parliament twice voted its members blanket amnesties. Public life was suborned, the president himself leading the way with illegal phone taps, and having his mistress and illegitimate daughter housed at taxpayers' expense. A close friend was alleged to be involved in a big insider scandal. His prime minister, Pierre Bérégovoy, committed suicide after an undeclared loan was made public. His minister for urban affairs, the businessman Bernard Tapie, was convicted of tax evasion. So was Mitterrand's son, Jean-Christophe, who acted as his father's adviser on African affairs; he was given a suspended sentence last December.

Mitterrand was at pains to protect his reputation beyond the grave. At the last gasp of his presidency, he had the official Archives de France sign away its rights to his presidential papers for 60 years in a secret protocol. Access can only be granted by his chosen trustee, and the Archives had no oversight to ensure that state papers were not transferred into his personal archive, of which his daughter, Mazarine, is the gatekeeper.

Chirac, however, will be open to questioning the day he ceases to be president. Allegations of misdeeds at the time he was mayor include vote-rigging, the employment of staff in his RPR party at municipal expense, and kickbacks to party funds on public housing and school-refurbishment contracts. In a video cassette released after his death, Jean-Claude Méry, a businessman, gave details of kickback schemes, and said he delivered Fr5m in cash to Chirac.

The present mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delano‘, has filed a complaint that at least €700,000 of work was carried out by city gardening services to beautify the homes of individuals close to the RPR. In the frais de bouche (dining expenses), Fr14m is alleged to have been drawn for private meals over an eight-year period, with a further Fr2.4m in cash being drawn for aircraft flights.

At the same time, the economy has drifted. Mitterrand started off in 1981 with a call for a "clean break with capitalism", nationalising banks, insurance and big industrial groups, at a time when the rest of the world was starting to privatise and deregulate. Reality intervened in the form of inflation, devaluation and deficits. Unabashed, Mitterrand enthroned indecision and inertia in the formula "Ni... ni..." — neither fresh nationalisations nor privatisations.

Jacques Chirac muffed the chance to carry out much-needed surgery when he first came to power in 1995. He set out ambitious plans for deregulation and a flexible labour market, but backed down when they aroused union fury. He called early parliamentary elections after two years, lost them, and found himself locked in a five-year cohabitation with a socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, who happily introduced the 35-hour week.

He beat Jospin in 2002, but has drifted away from market reforms and towards the social model, pouring the scorn he once reserved for socialists on "Anglo-Saxon liberalism". His "neo-Gaullism" means little now, beyond a hunger for national grandeur, and mistrust of Americans.

The French note a joie maligne in London's attitude to their discomfiture. It has no place. France matters. At a time when Europe is undergoing its own identity crisis, it matters more than ever. The vigorous self-examination bodes well. The French are asking questions, of Europe, of their leaders and themselves, with fresh openness and candour.

To mention corruption used to invite the lift of a lofty eyebrow, and a remark of how prim and unworldly were the British. The investigating magistrate in the Elf case was Scandinavian-born Eva Joly. "I've never understood these immense cases which drag on for ever," a tribunal president told her. "I imagine you chose fraud because you're a Norwegian Protestant."

No more. Times are getting bleaker for those involved. Christine Deviers-Joncour, Roland Dumas' former mistress and the self-styled "Whore of the Republic" in the affair, has put her Paris flat up for sale, to help pay off €1m in back taxes, and €3.5m in restitution to Elf. It is no longer heresy to be Eurosceptic.

Before things really recover, however, and the années fric — the years of easy money — are laid to rest, Chirac has to see out the rest of his wounded presidency. And every sign is, that, as he has before — to Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, to Raymond Barre, to ƒdouard Balladur — he will spend most of his energies on doing down his rival on the right, the vigorous if relentlessly self-publicising interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy. Chirac would do better to look around at the country into which so many of us are being decanted on holiday. He, more than anyone, has the opportunity to go out and fix France.

KICKING UP A STINK

The French press has an endless supply of stories about the alleged shortcomings of the elite — including Chirac himself. Nepotism, phone-tapping, back-handers, grace-and-favour accommodation: throughout the Mitterrand-and-Chirac years, successive French governments have been mired in scandal.

ALLEGATIONS

Fraudulent voter registration.

Illegal kickbacks on public-housing projects and the building or repair of schools in ële-de-France.

The abuse of city-of-Paris gardening services for private purposes, with public losses estimated to at least d700,000.

The use of cash to pay for food and drink, and airline tickets for Chirac and his family.

BOGUS

Gérard Colé, whose salary was paid by Air France while he was an adviser to Mitterrand, has said: 'Everyone employed in the cabinet who wasn't a civil servant had fake jobs with Air France, Air Inter, the RATP [Paris transport], the postal service, the railways, banks or insurance companies.'

FAMILY AFFAIRS

Mitterrand employed his son Jean-Christophe as his Africa adviser. His son was fined and given a suspended sentence for tax evasion last year. At pains to prevent various revelations, Mitterrand also appointed his illegitimate daughter, Mazarine, as guardian of his private archive.

THE ELF

Money from the state-owned Elf oil company was allegedly used to pay CFA Fr100m (the currency of 14 African nations) to Omar Bongo, the president of Gabon — in cash.

About Fr1.1 billion passed through the accounts of Alfred Sirven, who handled Elf's black funds. On arrest, he swallowed his mobile phone's Sim card, so his calls could not be traced. At his trial, he said: "I know enough to bring down the republic 20 times," but he kept quiet. Given five years in prison, he was released on bail.

PHONE

Mitterrand set up an anti-terrorist unit at the Elysée Palace, which illegally tapped the telephones of about 200 people, including judges, politicians, lawyers, journalists and the actress Carole Bouquet. Attempts were made to hush this up as 'secret défense', but documents exist bearing the word 'vu', or 'seen', in Mitterrand's handwriting.

www.timesonline.co.uk