Gaspard Koenig: France is run for the benefit of the old

In The Imaginary Invalid , Molière, the French playwright, portrayed the miserly hypochondriac Argan. Just like Argan, France is today being probed and prodded by every economist or policy maker in the world, while refusing to take its medicine.
At least the doctors seem to agree on the symptoms. The International Monetary Fund, the OECD, the EU and even the Cour des Comptes (the French public audit body) have all issued similar diagnoses. They each point to the notoriously rigid labour market, the unsustainable public debt, the record public spending (now at 57 per cent of gross domestic product), low profitability in the private sector and over-regulation. There is too much – way too much – state intervention, at every level.
This is all the more enraging given the resilience and obvious potential of the French economy. In spite of a shaky business environment, which is regularly unsettled by threats of nationalisation or a pompous defence of the exception culturelle, France remains the fifth-largest recipient of foreign direct investment in the world – and so a net beneficiary of globalisation. The country is fundamentally rich and healthy.
But our Imaginary Invalid continues moaning about its own misfortune, which led Maureen Dowd, in a piece for the New York Times, to deplore the “gaze de navel” that seems to have infected the French psyche. In fact, the real trouble lies, as Molière hinted in his play, in a conflict of generations.
It is a story common to other countries. On one side, we have the baby boomers born shortly after the second world war who control most of the country’s structures; the average age of a French MP is 60. They had it all: sexual revolution, complacent neo-Marxist ideology, easy employment, rising property prices, generous social transfers, free and high-quality health services and a generous retirement. They are designing a society that looks like them: fearful, risk-averse and inward-looking, Nationalism is also on the rise, echoed by politicians from all stripes, from industry minister Arnaud Montebourg to the leader of the far-right National Front Marine Le Pen.
On the other side of the argument is the “deficit generation”, or Generation D. Given that the last time the French government passed a balanced budget was in 1974, anyone born after that point should qualify. We have been living with the prospect of ever-increasing debt, while being excluded from a two-tier job market. Unemployment among under-25s has reached 25 per cent, the sort of level that helped trigger recent revolutions in the Arab world. We cannot dream of climbing up the property ladder. We expect little from public health services or from the state-run pension system, which will both be bust long before we reach the age to really need them.
Meanwhile, we are told to pay for our parents’ lavish way of life. Today’s discussions on the virtues of the “French social model” are a rhetorical scam for the baby boomers to cling to their advantages. The welfare state is their welfare – and their children’s burden.
Recent social unrest in France only betrayed the violence of this generational conflict across all social layers: suburban jeunes rioting in Paris after football matches, young Catholics upset over gay marriage, up-and-coming entrepreneurs branding themselves as “Pigeons” (French slang for “suckers”) and defying the government over the rise in capital gains taxation. Generation D, in its various shades, is desperate to take power.
We feel angry but we are certainly not navel-gazing. We are emigrating, not just to the UK (there are more French citizens living in London than in Nantes) but also to Canada or Australia. According to a recent poll, half of all French people aged 18 to 24 would like to live abroad.
The D in Generation D also stands for DIY, or, as we say in French, débrouillard. We are used to taking care of ourselves. We take advantage of the loopholes in the system, like the tax-efficient auto-entrepreneur (“self-employed”) status, which is overwhelmingly used by under-35s to create businesses. We increasingly distrust civil service careers.
We feel European and speak globish. We are not that politicised: we are just waiting for the Leviathan to crumble. We are, in the classical sense of the term, liberals. At the end of Molière’s play, Argan pretends to die before finally consenting to his daughter’s wedding. Now that the economy has stalled, it is time for France to wake up to its children.



Gaspard Koenig is a novelist and the director of Generation Libre, a Paris-based think-tank