Like many undecided British voters today (and quite a few exasperated Tory voters), I remember what it was like after two decades of increasingly uninspiring and stale right-wingers in power: I wanted them gone. I was voting for the first time in my life, the year was 1981, and I cast my vote for François Mitterrand, a hitherto bland socialist who had promised cabinet seats to the then powerful French Communist Party.
The campaign slogan was “Changing all our Lives”, the promise of one of Mitterrand’s key acolytes, future culture minister Jack Lang, was that “we will pass from darkness to light”, there would be more justice and fairness. Together with most of my friends and professors, we celebrated the victory of the Power of Progress late into the night of May 10.
I was wrong. Barely 18 months later, a series of disastrous policies – three devaluations of the franc; foreign exchange controls; the nationalization of all banks, insurance companies, large industrial concerns, from steel mills to chemicals to engines to electronics; lowering the retirement age from 65 to 60; effectively handing over management of the Ministry of Education to highly politicized unions (which have since decided on most education policy); the delusion still entertained in Brussels today that technocrats are best placed to decide what cutting-edge industries will produce – Economy Minister Jacques Delors has been warned that the IMF is considering a visit.
France then embarked on a major turnaround in which every austerity measure was frantically applied to stop the bleeding of debt. It soon became clear that reversing popular politics would not be easy.
Some, like our extravagant pension system, are still defended tooth and nail by every union today. Others led to the restructuring of France’s best assets: foreign subsidiaries of French banks, notably Paribas, slipped away rather than come under the watch of Parisian civil servants.
A large amount of government money was spent on expensive albatross such as the V2000 video standard, which, thanks to the miracles of French technology, was supposed to defeat Betamax and VHS, but soon disappeared without a trace. (Like the French Goupil computer, like the Bi-Bop cell phone, and so on and so forth.)
Protectionism has become the order of the day. Our Minister of Foreign Trade decided that alien VCRs, mostly Japanese, would only be allowed to clear customs at Poitiers, a remote provincial town in western France, chosen for its poor train connections and absence of container facilities: each crate had to be unloaded by hand. Taxes went up. Inflation has not slowed.
The rest of the world looked on in awe at the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions: our sense of timing was terrible.
To satisfy its core constituencies, the government promoted what we have not yet called the culture wars. Socialist secret funds created an “anti-racist” movement, Touche Pas à Mon Pote (“Hands off my mate”), which promoted a policy of grievance. The Minister of Culture (the ubiquitous Jack Lang) suddenly decided that graffiti was art and started public events like the annual Fête de la Musique.
Mitterrand, himself a product of Catholic institutions, decided to abolish private schools: but there he ran into a brick wall of stubborn parents. In 1984, two million people marched peacefully in the streets of Paris and other cities and the reform was withdrawn.
This failure, like others, caused the rise of “us” (le camp du progrès) against them” (sil de la reaction) mentality. Moral superiority was assumed. Public debate had polarized decades before the Trump era.
Jacques Chirac, who was prime minister twice after the Gaullists won parliamentary elections, eventually replaced Mitterrand as president in 1995, but France has since been paying the price for those 10 years of socialism. Even more than the financial cost of our ever-increasing debt (currently 111 percent of GDP) lies the illusion that it is fairer to spend public money than trying to build a self-sustaining society, and that partisanship in a bloated state apparatus was better than a small, selfless cadre of neutral civil servants , who restored France thirty years after World War II.
The unmanageability of today’s French political debate is directly inherited from those years, and I don’t wish it on Britain: better the current clumsy bunch than the bright-eyed ideologues who know better than you.