Like many undecided British voters today (and quite a few exasperated Tory ones), I recall what it felt like after two decades of increasingly uninspiring and stale Right-wingers in power: I wanted them out. I was voting for the first time in my life, the year was 1981, and I cast my ballot for François Mitterrand, a hitherto lacklustre Socialist who’d promised Cabinet seats to the then powerful French Communist party.
The campaign slogan was “Changing all our Lives”, the promise by one of Mitterrand’s key acolytes, the future culture minister, Jack Lang, was that we would “cross over from darkness into the light”, there would be more justice and equity. Together with most of my friends and professors, we celebrated the victory of the Forces of Progress well into the night of May 10.
I was wrong. Barely 18 months after, a series of disastrous policies – three devaluations of the franc; exchange controls; the nationalisation of all banks, insurance companies, large industrial concerns, from steelworks to chemicals to engines to electronics; the lowering of pension age from 65 to 60; the effective handing over of the management of the Ministry of Education to highly politicised unions (who ever since have decided on most education policies); the delusion, still entertained today in Brussels, that technocrats are best placed to decide what cutting-edge industries will produce – the economy minister, one Jacques Delors, was warned that the IMF was considering paying him a visit.
France then embarked on a major U-turn, in which every austerity remedy was frenziedly applied to stem the debt haemorrhage. It soon became obvious that reversing popular policies would not be easy.
Some, like our profligate pensions system, are still defended tooth and claw by every union today. Others had led to a reconfiguring of France’s best assets: foreign subsidiaries of French banks, most notably at Paribas, had slipped the net rather than find themselves under the authority of Paris civil servants.
Large amounts of state money had been lavished on expensive albatrosses, like the V2000 video standard, that was supposed, thanks to the wonders of French technology, to beat Betamax and VHS, but soon disappeared without trace. (Ditto the Goupil French computer, ditto the Bi-Bop cellular phone, and so on and so on.)
Protectionism became the order of the day. Our foreign trade minister decreed that alien VCRs, mostly Japanese, would only be able to clear customs at Poitiers, a remote provincial town in Western France, picked for its bad train connections and the absence of container facilities: every crate had to be unloaded by hand. Taxes went up. Inflation did not slow down.
The rest of the world was looking in wonder at the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions: our sense of timing was atrocious.
To satisfy its core voters, the government fostered what we did not yet call culture wars. Socialist secret funds created an “anti-racist” movement, Touche Pas à Mon Pote (“Hands off my mate”), which encouraged grievance politics. The minister of culture (the ubiquitous Jack Lang) suddenly decided that graffiti was art, and launched public shindigs like the annual Fête de la Musique.
Mitterrand, himself the product of Catholic institutions, decided to abolish private schools: but there, he came across the brick wall of stubborn parents. In 1984, two million people marched calmly in the streets of Paris and other cities, and the reform was withdrawn.
This setback, like others, caused a ramping up of an “us” (le camp du progrès) against “them” (les forces de la réaction) mentality. Moral superiority was assumed. Public debate became polarised, decades before the era of Trump.
Jacques Chirac, who twice served as PM after the Gaullists had won the parliamentary elections, eventually replaced Mitterrand as president in 1995, but France has been paying the price of those 10 years of socialism ever since. Even more than the financial cost of our ever-ballooning debt (currently at 111 per cent of GDP), it lies in the illusion that it is more just to citizens to spend public money rather than try to build a self-reliant society, and that partisanship in a bloated state apparatus was better than the small, selfless cadre of neutral civil servants who rebuilt France in the thirty years after the Second World War.
The intractability of today’s French political debate is directly inherited from those years, and I don’t wish it on Britain: better the current lumbering lot than the bright-eyed ideologues who Know Better Than You.