The ‘American’ in France

ROGER COHEN
NYT,October 18
PARIS

Not only is Christine Lagarde France’s finance minister, ready to forsake her native tongue, she is, she says, “happier doing this in English.” With that, right off the bat, she declares in ringing Anglo-Saxon: “We are trying to change the psyche of the French people in relation to work.”

A hopeless task, some might say. Deep in the Gallic soul resides the notion that work is exploitation, a ruse concocted by American robber barons, best regulated and minimized and offset by hours of idleness. The demise of the Soviet Union left France leading the counter-capitalist school.

But Lagarde, 51, tall and striking, is not known as “the American” for nothing. Think of her as the face of a new France ditching its cold-war hangover. The sobriquet reflects her linguistic skills, her background as a highflying executive for the Baker & McKenzie law firm and her Chicago-cultivated candor.

In an interview, Lagarde says that more than two decades at a U.S. corporation taught her: “The more hours you worked, the more hours you billed, the more profit you could generate for yourself and your firm. That was the mantra.”

The equivalent mantra in the French bureaucracy might be: the fewer hours you work, the more vacation you take, the more time you have to grumble about the state of the universe and the smarter you feel, especially compared to workaholic dingbats across the Atlantic with no time for boules.

So Lagarde, appointed four months ago by President Nicolas Sarkozy, is aware that she faces a big challenge: “What was really striking to me when I came back from Chicago in 2005 was that the law on the 35-hour week had passed and been internalized by individuals and, I think, had produced disastrous effects.”

What effects? “People did not really talk about their work. They talked about their long weekends.”

Lagarde’s goal, she says, is to slash France’s chronically highly unemployment — now about 8 percent — to 5 percent by 2012 and increase the proportion of the total population in jobs to 70 percent from 63 percent. Rehabilitating work is central to this ambition.

Tax cuts, the termination of unemployment benefits for those refusing two valid job offers, later retirement, incentives for those working more than 35 hours, a slashing of the bureaucracy associated with job-seeking and improved professional training are among measures enacted or envisaged. Legislation to reverse the 35-hour week is possible.

“I think we have to go around it,” Lagarde says of the law. “To demonstrate that it’s not a holy principle and it can be modified, varied, mitigated and possibly reversed.”

Not without a fight, however. French workers are expected to take to the streets today in what will likely be one of many big strikes against the Sarkozy-Lagarde reforms. Former governments have caved as Bastille-storming specters rose.

Not this time, insists Lagarde. “We certainly have the resolve to see reforms through,” she says. “A significant majority voted in support of a reform program that was completely advocated, advertised, trumpeted.”

France, she suggests, is changing in the image of a president whose approach “is not being constrained by rules, principles, protocol, straitjackets.”

The country, long hung up in a left-bank bubble filled with quaint notions of reversing globalization, now wants “to take advantage of a globalized world, rather than be defensive.”

To which I say: hallelujah. Without a dynamic France, Europe cannot be revitalized, and a Europe in a Gallic funk is bad for everyone. If an overbearing America has been a problem, an underperforming Europe has been its complement.

Better European performance, Lagarde thinks, is linked to exchange rates. “There is a competitive disadvantage in having a strong euro versus a relatively weak yen, a deliberately weak yuan and a low dollar,” she says ahead of a G-7 meeting tomorrow.

Another problem Lagarde faces is with a potential insider trading scandal at the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company, the partly state-owned parent of Airbus whose stock plunged after delays in the A-380 superjumbo jet. She insisted there had been no government wrongdoing.

Still, small shareholder losses incurred as executives cashed in, and the impression of a cozy relationship between private and state capital, will not help Lagarde in her revolutionary efforts.

This revolution, she insists, must begin in the French head. Lagarde has become the anti-Descartes by declaring the French should think less to work more.

“What has escaped my critics,” she says with a smile, “is that clearly before action, there must be thinking. But we have been splitting hairs and talking about the sex of angels for long enough. We know the solutions to all our evils. So let’s roll up our sleeves.”

Hallelujah — and as we Anglo-Saxons say vive la France!