Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Preface
- 1 The misunderstood French welfare state
- 2 Corporatist welfare states: the residue of the past, or the wave of the future?
- 3 The “treason of the intellectuals”: globalization as the big excuse for France's economic and social problems
- 4 France's break with socialism
- 5 Persisting inequalities
- 6 The protected people
- 7 The excluded: immigrants, youth, women
- 8 The French exception
- Appendix: Some major pieces of social legislation, France 1893–2003
- Notes
- Index
3 - The “treason of the intellectuals”: globalization as the big excuse for France's economic and social problems
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Preface
- 1 The misunderstood French welfare state
- 2 Corporatist welfare states: the residue of the past, or the wave of the future?
- 3 The “treason of the intellectuals”: globalization as the big excuse for France's economic and social problems
- 4 France's break with socialism
- 5 Persisting inequalities
- 6 The protected people
- 7 The excluded: immigrants, youth, women
- 8 The French exception
- Appendix: Some major pieces of social legislation, France 1893–2003
- Notes
- Index
Summary
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H. L. MenckenA few years ago, it was Europe that was being presented negatively by a large part of the French political elite: the euro was going to destroy jobs, and the loss of sovereignty would be terrible for the French economy. All of this was false. Today, we are looking for another devil – one who now has the face of globalization.
Denis Kessler, the vice-president of the French employers' association (MEDEF), 2000.The French are trapped in the illusion that they are in no way responsible for their problems. Neither in the general nor in the particular. Responsibility is hell, therefore it is other people. The scapegoats have been refashioned over the years: Les “gros,” les “patrons” [the wealthy, bosses], les “puissances d'argent,” le “capitalisme”, “les Boches” [Germans] and “les deux cents familles” have given way to “globalization,” Maastricht Europe [the city where the EMU and the euro were agreed upon], to “elites.”
Journalist François de Closets, in Le Compte à rebours (The Countdown) (1998).Since the 1960s, social politics in France has been colored by much more than the traditional class debate. Solidaristic overstretch dates back to the Right's time in power during the 1960s and 1970s.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- France in CrisisWelfare, Inequality, and Globalization since 1980, pp. 54 - 87Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004