France Is Messier than You Think

France Is Messier than You Think

Next we will debunk the narrative that France works well because it is a Cartesian rationalizing-rationalist top-down state. As with the Russians, the French were lucky that it was for a long time a failed aim.

I spent the past two decades wondering why France, as a country managed in a top-down manner by an oversized state, could fare so well in so many fields. It is the country of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, after all, the grand dreamer of a state that infiltrates everything. Indeed the current culture is ultra-interventionist, sort of “if it ain’t broke, fix it.” For things work—somewhat—in France, often better than elsewhere; so can France be used as evidence that central bureaucracies that repress municipal mess are favorable for growth, happiness, good science and literature, excellent weather, diversified flora with Mediterranean varieties, tall mountains, excellent transportation, attractive women, and good cuisine? Until I discovered, reading Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France, a major fact that led me to see the place with completely new eyes and search the literature for a revision of the story of the country.

The story was actually staring us in the face: the nation-state in France was largely nominal, in spite of attempts by Louis XIV, Napoleon, and the national education program of Jules Ferry to own the place. France in 1863 did not speak French (only one in five persons could), but rather a variety of languages and dialects (a surprising fact: the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1904 went to the Frenchman Frédéric Mistral, who wrote in Provençal, a language of southern France). The lack of linguistic integration—like the variety in cheese (of which there are about four hundred different types)—expresses the difficulties in centralizing the country. There was nothing ethnic or linguistic to bind the place—it was just the property of a king and a weak aristocracy. Roads were horrible and most of the country was inaccessible to travelers. Tax collection was a dangerous profession, requiring tenacity and sagacity. Indeed, the country was progressively “discovered” by Paris, in many cases after its colonies in North Africa and elsewhere. In a thick and captivating book, La rebellion française, the historian Jean Nicolas shows how the culture of rioting was extremely sophisticated—historically, it counts as the true French national sport.

Paris itself was barely controlled by France—no more than the Rio slums called favelas are currently ruled by the Brazilian central state. Louis XIV, the Sun King, had moved the government to Versailles to escape the Parisian crowd. Paris only became controllable after Haussmann in the 1860s removed the tenements and narrow streets to make large avenues that allowed for police to control the crowds. Effectively France was still Paris and “the desert,” as Paris didn’t care much about the rest of France. The country was only centralized after long programs and “Five Year Plans” of roads, rail systems, public schools, and the spread of television—a Napoleonic dream of integration that, begun by De Gaulle after the war, was only completed during the reign of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in the late 1970s, at which point the decentralization started taking place.3 France might have benefited from its two decades or so under a large centralized state—but the argument could equally be that it benefited from the happy condition that the large state spurred growth and did not overstay its welcome.