The banlieues are in revolt ... unemployment is high ... the universities are failing ... real incomes have been falling for years ... and the young are leaving in their droves. So is the 'French Model' doomed? And will any of the Presidential candidates dare address the problem? John Lichfield reports
Published: 14 April 2007

Brest, seen from the office window of its mayor, is a shining city of light: a white city sloping gently towards the shipyards and the sea beyond the Brittany coast. According to a beautiful poem by Jacques Prévert, a poem learnt by heart by all French schoolchildren, "Il pleut sans cesse sur Brest." (It always rains in Brest). Not today. On a dull day, Brest can seem like a city of a thousand colours, all of them shades of grey. Not today. Intense Atlantic sunshine has bleached all the greys to a Mediterranean whiteness.

On the wall behind the mayor's desk is a large reproduction of a 19th-century sketch of the Old Brest: the Brest destroyed by the bombardments and street fighting of August and September 1944 in a "storm of iron, steel and blood" (Jacques Prévert again).

Brest was built for warfare; destroyed by warfare; rebuilt, hurriedly in the 1940s in unforgiving concrete, for the purposes of warfare. And now? The Brest Arsenal, or naval shipyard, the city's principal raison d'être for 325 years, has built its last French warship. The Arsenal, partially privatised, will undertake repairs, fit out vessels launched elsewhere and, maybe, build foreign warships. It will lay down no more ships for the French navy.

The Socialist mayor, François Cuillandre, speaks to me enthusiastically of the new Brest that he hopes to see over the next decade: a tramway; a yachting harbour; a new venue for rock and jazz music on the sea-front; a new football stadium; improved air and rail links to Paris; and more private industry, linked to Brest's specialisms of hi-tech marine warfare and oceanic research.

On the presidential election - the principal reason for my visit to Brest - the mayor seems less enthusiastic. Even depressed. He has just flown home from a very difficult meeting of the Socialist high command in Paris.

Brest is, in several obvious ways, untypical of France. It has a relatively small immigrant community. Its unemployment rate is just below the national average. France's population is booming. Brest's is falling. The classic images of France - elegant cities of sweeping boulevards or small towns of sun-warmed stones - are not to be found in the workaday, 1940s-neo-brutalist streets of Brest.

And yet, in other ways, Brest is a microcosm of the problems facing France as it prepares for a watershed election on 22 April and 6 May. Brest is a town that was willed and built by the state as a naval base from the late 17th century. Its economy is still dominated by state spending but its future lies in entrepreneurship and innovation. Brest has re-invented itself once. It now has to do so again, while hanging on to a fierce sense of local identity and pride.

France has a tradition of state participation in the economy that no longer fits the mould of an era dominated by global competition and rapid technological advance. The "French Model" - re-built from the ruins of the Second World War and hugely successful for 30 years - was based on a kind of state-directed capitalism, run by an administrative and political elite. It was based on a culture of low risk (for those inside the system) and high levels of overall taxation and government spending. That model has been failing for 25 years. At the same time, it has generated many successes - from high-speed railways, to a thriving luxury goods industry, to a surviving and sometimes f thriving car industry, to an internationally acclaimed health service.

France, like Brest, knows it has to change. But how much? France is determined not to lose its identity - and the best of itself. And yet France, like Brest, has already changed more than the French (and others) sometimes admit.

In the words of Jacques Marseille, an iconoclastic French historian and political scientist: "France has difficulty in deciding where to go next, partly because it avoids talking honestly to itself about where it is now."

So what is the mood of the sun-kissed city of Brest as next month's election approaches?

This election is supposed to mark a new beginning in French politics. A new, more pragmatic generation of politicians is seeking power, not for its own sake, but to try - they tell us - to move France forward.

If so, no one seems to have told Les Brestois. Here, as elsewhere, there is a high level of interest in the elections. Voter registration has boomed. In other ways, the mood of ordinary people is reminiscent of the mood of the calamitous election year of 2002, when the veteran xenophobe, Jean-Marie Le Pen, rode a wave of pessimism and anger into the second round.

There is the same passionate suspicion of "Paris" politicians. There is the same desire for "change" in the abstract and the same refusal to believe that anything can change (and the same opposition to change that might disturb selfish or special interests).

The local campaign teams, for the front-running candidates - the Socialist Ségolène Royal, the centre-right candidate Nicolas Sarkozy and the centrist François Bayrou - are full of optimism and sunshine. For the ordinary Brestois in the street, "il pleut sans cesse".

Patrice, 55, a former sailor and ship-yard worker, says: "Of course, we cannot go on as before. Everyone knows that. We need a new start. We need to move quickly. The Chinese are moving. The East Europeans are moving. Others are moving. France has to move. "

Will he therefore vote for M. Sarkozy, who promises "rupture" with the past? "No, Sarkozy is too authoritarian, too repressive."

Patrice explains that he wants to see "reform" and a "new dynamism" in France but he is against almost all reforms: he is against the clamp-down on road safety, against restrictions on smoking, against cuts in fishing quotas, against controls on pollution in agriculture.

Mme Royal? "No. Oh no. She pretends to be a provincial but she is a provincial from Paris. She pretends to be close to people but she pays the wealth tax. We need people who are more practical, more rooted in the earth. Politicians who are more provincial. Maybe Bayrou. But his programme is too vague."

I talk to a group of students sitting on the front steps of the town hall. Brest, with 20,000 students in a population of 144,000, is a youthful and culturally lively city.

Yves, 21, an engineering student, says: "Sure everyone is interested in the election. Since the last time, when Le Pen got into the second round, everyone is determined to stop that happening again. Or at least, this time, they don't want to have to feel guilty that they didn't vote." Timothée butts in: "Yes, everyone has registered to vote. The trouble is they've no idea who to vote for. No one inspires them."

Yves says: "All the candidates talk about creating new opportunities for young people. Nothing much will change. All I can see for myself is a future of endless stages (work experience placements) or small jobs or going abroad. Maybe to London. People say it is easy to find a job in London."

Should France therefore not be more "market-oriented" in its economic policy, as M. Sarkozy has suggested: more like Tony Blair's Britain?

"Non, non, non," say Yves and his friends. They are attracted to London jobs but appalled at the suggestion that France should be more like Britain. There is "too much poverty" in Britain, they say. The hospitals are "falling apart". "Workers have no rights." The trains are falling off the tracks.

French gloom about Britain is outdone only by obsessive British gloom about France. After 10 years of living and writing about France - 10 years of great pleasure and interest - I sometimes catch myself wanting to suppress the negative and stress the positive. I know that the gloom will be enthusiastically covered elsewhere. I will therefore allow an Australian friend, who has been living in Paris for nearly two decades, to "speak up for France".

John Baxter, a much-praised film biographer and writer living in Paris, says: "I was brought up in Australia, where everything was homogenised, where everything worked efficiently but everything was, in a sense, fake, based on an idealised view of what Britain might once have been and probably never was. That's why I love France."

"I love the fact that here is a country which has so many different kinds of cheese that no one can agree how many there are and so many different types of wine that nobody can remember all their names. The French don't want to lose all that and neither do I."

This is the France that has attracted tens of thousands of British people to cross the Channel and start a new life in recent years. This is the France of "savoir-vivre" (quality of life) and reluctance to surrender national identity to the Bland New World of globalism.

And yet there is another country across the Channel or rather there are several other countries. There is the France of the "banlieues" or poor multi-racial suburbs, which exploded into three weeks of rioting in the autumn of 2005. There is the France - for all its talk of Egalité and Fraternité - of 25 years of persistent high unemployment and social exclusion.

There is a France of tumbling "real" incomes and reduced opportunities for the middle classes; a France of sink schools; a France of appalling universities; a France that talks of rural values while systematically polluting its countryside.

There has been much talk in this election campaign of the "French Model" and the need to protect it. After 11 years of doing nothing very much as President, Jacques Chirac in his final TV address to the French people urged them not to surrender "the French Model". François Bayrou, the enigmatic centrist candidate speaks - in the name of reform - of the need to preserve France's existing "republican project".

What is the "French Model" and is it worth preserving? Both Mme Royal and M. Sarkozy have - unusually for French politicians - suggested that France should be more like other countries. M. Bayrou mocks them - to huge applause at his public meetings - as "the man who wants France to be America and the woman who wants France to be Scandinavia".

There are many things to be said for the French Model. Public transport, the health system and many state schools (there are disastrous exceptions) work well. There is f an obvious paradox, however. France is the land of the paradox. If the French are so wedded to their "model" why are so many of them alienated from the "system"? In the first round of the last presidential election, in 2002, 40 per cent of electors did not vote and 35 per cent of the remainder voted for the extremes of left and right.

Professor Marseille, one of the few commentators who challenges the received wisdom, says: "The French Model - or talk of the 'French Model' - has become a shield, a set of blinkers, to avoid discussion of our difficulties and weaknesses. It is a form of institutionalised hypocrisy."

Many things have been blamed, by left and right, for France's poor economic performance and high unemployment in recent years: globalisation, high taxation, rigid labour laws, lack of French investment in France. (Foreign investment in France is booming: another paradox.)

Two of France's most damaging self-inflicted handicaps are fundamental aspects of the "acquis" or social model. They are apparently untouchable. At most, it seems, they can only be tinkered with. Presidential candidates mention them, without offering convincing proposals for reform.

It is a myth that personal taxation, for middling earners, is high in France. Income tax is relatively low. Pensions, the health service, unemployment benefit and sick pay are funded by the Social Security system, which is theoretically independent of government financing.

"Sécurité Sociale" or "Sécu" is paid for by a tax on jobs, which is split, unevenly, between workers and bosses. Even after Sécu, people on average salaries do not pay a huge amount in personal taxes in France: 29 per cent, compared with 26.5 per cent in Britain. The great burden of Sécu falls on employers. French companies, large and small, pay the equivalent of 42.3 per cent in tax on top of each salary - compared with 10.5 per cent in Britain. As a result whole categories of jobs do not exist in France. Toys R Us employs 40 per cent more staff in its US stores than its French ones.

François Bayrou, to his credit, is the only candidate to suggest that the system should be radically changed. He has vaguely suggested that social costs should be paid for by a new form of VAT. This would almost certainly fall foul of European Union rules.

There is, however, another, even more fundamental, explanation for France's persistently weak economic performance since the early 1980s. (France's Gross Domestic Product was 25 per cent higher than Britain's in the 1970s. It is now 9 per cent lower.)

"Work creates work because it creates wealth," points out Professor Marseille. "France for many years has taken the opposite view that idleness creates work. It doesn't."

France's extraordinary economic performance from 1945-1975 - when it consistently outgrew the United States - was based on hard graft. In the 1950s and 1960s, French workers, on average, worked 10 per cent more than American ones.

Over the past 30 years, France - partly by accident, partly by design - has created a low-work model. Young people enter the work-force late; able-bodied, experienced people retire early; the standard working week has been reduced to 35 hours. Unemployment is high.

The British "employment rate" - ie. those adults who are in work - is 72 per cent. France's is 58 per cent. France works 617 hours per inhabitant per year, according to the OECD, compared to 800 hours in Britain, 865 in the US, 796 in Denmark.

Those French people who do have jobs work very competitively and very well (or France would be on its uppers). But there are simply not enough French people with their shoulders to the wheel (not counting the five million state employees, many of whom have their shoulders to unnecessary wheels).

A low work rate means lower growth, lower wages and lower purchasing power for those in jobs. Lower purchasing power means higher unemployment. France has invented the most vicious of economic circles.

Of the leading candidates, only Sarkozy has campaigned to reverse this job-destroying machinery and put France back to work. He has not made it entirely clear how he would do so, other than proposing to nibble at the margins of the 35 hour week. He now prefers to campaign on simpler flag-waving issues, such as immigration and national identity and crime.

All in all, in the name of Egalité, France has become a bizarre mixture of nominal egalitarianism and entrenched privileges. If you are "within the system" in France, life can be good. Your job is secure. The state school and health systems work well. You do not, as the English middle classes do, pay for education and healthcare twice.

If you are stuck on the outside - white, brown or black - life can be very hard. Outsiders, especially the children of immigrants, but also now many of the children of the middle classes, find it difficult to reach the first rung of the ladder. Hence the youth and student unrest of the past 20 months.

One of the reasons France has been so resistant to change is that the system has, until recently, benefited the vast bulk of the middle classes. As middle-class incomes and opportunities decline, this is no longer so. Hence the anger this year; hence the confusion; hence, also, the possibility that things may move forward at last.

Before every French election and referendum in the past 10 years, I have visited a pretty little town of warm and weather-beaten stones, a few miles east of the great bend in the Loire. I go to Donzy because it is France's weathervane - the only town that votes consistently like the nation. This year dozens of journalists and TV crews have descended on Donzy; it has become one of the most internationally celebrated small towns in France.

To visit Donzy is to be reminded that, in terms of quality of life - the "douceur de vivre" (sweetness of life) advertised on the notice in the town hall square - France does many things right. Donzy, a town of 1,713 people, is still recognisably a community and a living social and commercial centre. It has two flower shops, a hardware shop, a jewellers, a newsagents, a bakery, a pâtisserie, two hairdressers, a hotel, a restaurant, two guest houses, a pizzeria, a tobacconist, a chemist's shop, an electrical goods shop, a plumber's, two banks, three garages, a porcelain shop, two antique shops, a gift shop, an estate agent, a grocery, a butcher, a charcuterie and five bars.

It also has two doctors' surgeries (although it is struggling to find a second doctor), a heated indoor swimming pool and a sports centre. What town of Donzy's size in Britain or America, where business rules, could boast all those small businesses? Or the public services?

Each time I go to Donzy, I have lunch with Thierry Flandin, 51, the local councillor for the département - the Nièvre - to which Donzy belongs. He is a farmer, a centre-right politician and a thoughtful observer of politics (in Britain as well as France). Unusually - especially in provincial France - M. Flandin does not blame all of the country's problems on the Paris politicians. He suggests that the French people must share the blame.

"We have the politicians we deserve," he says. "The country has complained for years that the politicians have promised the heavens and done nothing but most attempts at reform have been blocked on the streets with broad public approval.

"In truth, there is a profound fear of moving forward, a sense that, if we do so, we may lose many of the things that make us French. But there is also a very unhealthy mood in the country which prefers to reject all politics and politicians rather than to look seriously at the problems which face us."

All the same, M. Flandin detects a slight shift in the mood this year. The middling voters of Middle France - both centre right and centre left - are more anxious, more unpredictable than in previous years, he says. The system's once comfortable "insiders" want change because the system no longer serves them.

But how much change? They are nervous about the kind of radical change that M. Sarkozy appears (sometimes) to threaten. They are unconvinced that Mme Royal offers any coherent change at all. Hence the attraction to the centrist candidate, François Bayrou, who talks of pragmatic, consensual reform but is probably the most traditional and cautious of the front-runners.

Professor Marseille believes that the attraction to the "safe" Bayrou option will wane. "There is a new lucidity, a clarity in the electorate this year. They know that the decisions cannot be put off again," he says

"The middle classes have been a barrier to real change in the past. Now they are suffering. Their salaries are low. The boom in house prices is forcing them out into the suburbs where transport and schools may not be so good. They find that their children are no longer guaranteed the standard of living that they had. There is a new willingness to accept change."

Peut-être.

Le Pen still hovers menacingly. The frustration and nihilism of some of the kids in the suburbs has not gone away. Any serious attempt at reform of "Sécu" or early retirement or the short working week will be challenged on the streets. None of the leading candidates seems to have created the popular fervour needed to cut through France's thickets of illusion and deferred hard choices. Both Sarkozy and Royal have turned away from the plain-speaking and fresh thinking of their early campaigns. They prefer instead to touch hot-button "values" issues such as "family", "nationhood" and "crime".

No one is asking - or should ask - France to stop being France. Parts of the French Model - high investment in public services; reasonable guarantees of job security; protection of cultural identity - are respectable, even sensible, social choices.

France needs to start generating, once again, the wealth to pay for such choices. The potential is vast. The French who do work are among the most innovative and productive people in the world. Many others would like to work equally well - or just to work at all. French banks are awash with French savings but they are reluctant to invest them in France.

There is no good reason why it should rain "sans cesse sur la France". Even a minor shift in the blocked machinery of the past 25 years may be enough to start France moving forward again. But who is going to unblock the machinery?

The Socialist mayor, François Cuillandre, speaks to me enthusiastically of the new Brest that he hopes to see over the next decade: a tramway; a yachting harbour; a new venue for rock and jazz music on the sea-front; a new football stadium