Après nous le déluge

© Simon Poulter 2016

When I first moved to Paris, five and a half years ago, I published a post romanticising about this city. It contained all the usual stuff about the timeless Parisian beauty, its overwhelming architecture and bountiful culture - basically all the things that you usually read about the place and, indeed, France in general. If they weren't so damned valid they would be bona fide, nailed-on clichés.

In the years since, though, I have managed to avoid  - quite deliberately - any of the lame old tropes that those, especially from my home island, trot out about France. You know, the lengthy lunches, the streets of Paris being minefields of canine excrement and impatient, horn-handy drivers, moody waiters, and an apparent national tendency to down tools at the slightest industrial provocation. And so on and so on.

As with any collection of national sterotypes, some fit and some don't. France - and Paris in particular - is no different. The 'Allo 'Allo generalisations are what they should be - mildly racist but mostly harmless comic motifs (although I must confess to yesterday seeing a man wearing a beret at a cafe, a first in almost 40 years as either schoolboy visitor or, now, resident). That said, the reputation for doggy poo, drivers and waiters in Paris, in no special order, appears to be enthusiastically upheld.

But there's more. When I first declared that I'd be moving to France, I was helpfully counselled by mostly fellow Brits that I would find it impossible to get anything done. Because, I was told, the French were always on strike, that their farmers burned sheep on motorways in protest, that their trawlermen blockaded the Channel ports over EU subsidies, and that old perennial, the air traffic controllers went on strike during the school holidays. This would maintain the popular belief that France remained the angry militant of Europe, long after such behaviour seemed relevant in the modern world.

So, for the most part of my five and a half years here I've hardly seen any such mardeyness. Until now. In recent weeks we've had a full-on, wintry blast of angry action. None of your uppity taxi protests here, or mildly aggravating work-to-rules by street cleaners. No, proper, crippling industrial chaos and tear gas-inducing street protests over President François Hollande's plans for reforms to the country's arcane labour laws. Flash riots in parts of Paris, strikes by oil refinery workers cutting fuel supplies, stoppages at water treatment plants, and then last week a strike by employees of the SNCF, the national rail company which halved the number of trains in and out of the capital (and is still in place today), with staff on the Paris Métro also staging sporadic walkouts.

© Simon Poulter 2016

Add to all this the dramatic flooding that saw the Seine break its banks in central Paris, threatening precious exhibits at the Louvre and the Museum de Orsay, as well as blighting homes in the southern Parisian suburbs, and you end up with a feeling that France is heading to hell in a handcart, even if the floods were a natural disaster. It's just that they were yet another disaster to affect this seemingly hapless country.

This week Euro 2016 gets under way in France, with the country hosting the first European football championships with an expanded format of 24 teams competing in ten city venues. With France clearly in the crosshairs of Islamic terrorism, the sense of national nervousness is palpable. Throw in an all-out, four-day strike planned by Air France pilots next weekend, more strikes on the railways and unions in other sectors appearing to dig in - as is the government in maintaining the need to drive reforms to employment laws - and the possibility of an utterly chaotic tournament has become very real.

Of course, we shouldn't get too carried away. The games will go ahead, the strikes won't achieve anywhere near their ambition of impacting infrastructure, and security will be tighter than ever at the games. But that won't improve the mood. The Charlie Hebdo attacks last year, and then the attrocities in Paris last November - compounded by the closely related events in Brussels - have inevitably led to an undercurrent of fear. The sight of properly tooled-up soldiers on residential streets have both reassured and reminded residents of the real risks France faces in equal measure.

From abroad, France is increasingly looking like a nation under siege from within. The stereotypes will no doubt be hardening. The strikes, the terror threat - even the floods - have given the impression of a country in trouble, led by a president and government unable to take control of that trouble and unable to bring about reforms intended to modernise the local labour market amid continuing macro-economic challenges for French companies.

The government's proposed changes to labour laws would make it easier for employers to hire and fire, but the unions claim that this will merely enable employers to bypass workers' rights on pay and working hours. These are all issues which historically contribute to the national reputation. True, there is a 35-hour week in place, but in Paris at least, the volume of people on the Paris Métro at 7am and again at 7pm would suggest that metropolitan working hours are a long way from the proscribed norm. And as for the apparent culture of endless lunches, I haven't seen that either. Occasionally you will see someone disappear for a couple of hours of gossipping, but en masse, most people are in and out of the works canteen within an hour and that's it.

Working hours and retirement age notwithstanding, the bigger issue at stake is the ability to staff up and staff down: the belief pushed by the government is that greater flexibility will in turn make employers more flexible to hire in the first place. But despite the wave of strikes and riots in recent weeks, and prevailing defiance from the militant CGT union, popular opinion is changing. An opinion poll published over the weekend revealed that a majority of French people are now opposed to the anti-reform protests and strikes, possibly as a result of the damage to the country's image that they've caused as it prepares to host one of the world's most prestigious sporting events.

Meanwhile, Hollande and his government remain equally defiant on the need to push through the reforms. "I fully accept that this law could be unpopular," Manuel Valls, the swaggering Spanish-born French prime minister told foreign journalists in a briefing last week. "Public opinion is worried. But we are at a key moment. Stars are aligned, with the economic recovery and the reformism that my government embodies," he outlined. "The question is how we reform this country," he went on. "Can a minority union block a law? If we were to retreat, it would mean paralysis . . . The French have gotten used too much to the fact it was enough to protest in the streets to block reforms."

Whether the government, or the unions, prevail, something has to give. France’s jobless rate currently stands stubbornly at 10%, the highest in a generation. Worse still is youth unemployment, which is currently at 24%, blighting a substantial proportion of the very electoral base that President Hollande had promised to address. Notably, some of the strongest protests in recent weeks have been amongst the student community in France - a stereotypical echo of the 1960s riots, perhaps, but an indication that the country's youth is feeling increasingly abandoned. In some communities, that has the potential to light some exceedingly dangerous fuses indeed. And may have done so already.

It would be wholly wrong to cast France as an unlivable, unworkable basketcase. And from my Parisian eyrie it would be wrong, too, to generalise an entire nation (as is often remarked, France is two countries - Paris, and the rest of the nation). But beneath the romantic veneer that drew me here - and has drawn all the other romantics, writers, artists, philosophers and dreamers throughout history - lurks a country that is not exactly dysfunctional, but on the other hand, doesn't help itself. I truly hope that Euro 2016 is a success, and that it passes without incident. I also truly hope that, one way or another, the country will find the path to the prosperity that other European giants mostly enjoy.

But, as the Paris floodwaters gradually recede, one can't help feeling all that positive about any true return to normality, because that normality seems to be - for the first time since I've been here - somewhat chaotic, and as ugly as Paris is an aesthetic treat. Après nous le déluge...?

© Simon Poulter 2016