Forty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong

Or can they?

This morning's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) offers a fascinating glimpse into the mindset of those demonstrating against the relaxation of France's stringent Code du travail:

The uproar began as a protest against a new law designed to relax a rigid French labor market that makes it difficult to fire anyone. In the process, however, the unrest has crystallized a deeper French anxiety. In better economic times, France maintained an elaborate system of social protections that cushioned citizens from the demands of the free market. The new law, which students call a symbol of "précarité," or precariousness, undermines that idea.

France's most famous period of violent protests in 1968 saw students rioting against what they saw as a rigid and smothering state. Today, it seems, they want the state back. Serge July, director of France's main left-of-center newspaper, Liberation, and a '68 veteran, says his country is gripped by "anguish about the future." It is also suffering from, he says, a "crisis of identity."

According to a recent poll, France is the only country among 20 surveyed where those who don't have faith in the free market outnumber those who do. Only 36% of those polled in France agreed with the proposition that the free market is the "best system on which to base the future of the world"—compared with 71% in the U.S., 66% in Britain and 65% in Germany. In nominally communist China, 74% said they favored the free market, according to the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes.

Police put the number of protesters yesterday across France at 1.05 million, more than twice as many as the previous biggest protest on March 16. Trade unions, which organized the rallies, put the figure at three million. A one-day strike to coincide with the protest disrupted hospitals, schools, rail services and air traffic, halted delivery of newspapers, dented production at France's biggest oil refinery and shut down the Eiffel Tower.

In short, France would seem to be a nation in collective denial of economic reality.

The French want their mommy—and, if she's not available, then the nanny will have to do.

UPDATE: Dan Harris offers further insight into French economics on the new-to-me (and excellent) China Law Blog:

I lived in France for two years and I can barely remember meeting anyone who liked free markets.   A few years ago, while riding the Paris Métro I saw by his name tag of that I was sitting across from a French Economics professor who was in Paris attending an economics convention.  I asked him why my favorite chocolate bar, Valrhona, cost around $7 everywhere in Paris, yet cost only $3 in Seattle, one of the more expensive cities in the United States.  The professor then gave me a great lecture on French microeconomics.  He explained to me that the store from which I bought the chocolate probably had at least one extra employee it wished it could fire but could not because of French laws.  He explained that the store's employee taxes probably equaled close to half of what it paid each employee.  On top of that, being an employer and being a business, the store had to pay all kinds of other taxes as well.  Then, (and this was five years ago, mind you) he said that the employees, due to minimum wage requirements and all but required raises, probably made at least $15 an hour.

I'm going to bet on China but I will continue buying Valrhona. 

You do have to wonder if anyone in France is worried at all about the message that their demonstrations are sending to countries like China where the citizenry appreciates the value of free markets. I know that if I were running a company in China I'd try to go head-to-head with French competitors everywhere I could, particularly in their home market.

Hmmm … maybe Dan Harris would like to advise Valrhona on outsourcing its chocoate production to China.

Incidentally, on the Valrhona website, there's an excellent history of the chocolate trade, which includes this revealing sentence: "In the 18th and 19th centuries, industrialization, a decrease in taxes and the development of transport made chocolate more democratic." [My emphasis.]

Plainly, the author of this little corporate history fully understands that less government interference in business—whether by cutting taxes or reducing regulation like the Code du travail—makes products and services more competitive in the marketplace. It's a shame he and the professor on the Métro aren't in a position to explain that simple economic fact to the 1.1 million people who demonstrated in the streets of France yesterday.