Saturday French Bashing - Road to the Middle Class

IT’S BEEN A rough week in France. First of all, the French are determined to teach Apple Computer a lesson and tell them how to sell iPod and iTunes in France. According to the Sydney Morning Herald:

French politicians have approved an online copyright bill that will require Apple to break open the exclusive format behind its market-leading iTunes music store and iPod players.

This is a great relief. Finally someone is coming to the rescue of battered consumers and teaching our big American tech giants how to run their businesses. And there is nobody as qualified as the French to do this.

Of course there is always the danger that Apple will just decide not to sell iPods and iTunes in France. And why not? The French, being a cultured people, surely do not need the ersatz music offered by cowboy American corporations. They can make their own music.

The iTunes kerfuffle is bad enough. But then also this week the president of the French Republic couldn’t take it any more. As reported by Tom Braithwaite and Tim Smyth in the Financial Times “Jacques Chirac stormed out of a meeting at the European Union summit...because he had been "profoundly shocked" to hear a French industrialist speaking in English.”

Despite the appearance that the French president often presents of being an arrogant old man completely out of touch with his nation and the times this incident makes it clear that he is, in fact, profoundly sensitive. Anyone would get upset when subjected to the kind of insult President Chirac suffered when he heard

Ernest-Antoine Seillière, the head of the Unice employers' organisation, explain he had decided to deliver his speech in English because it was "the language of business".

As usual in such cases, the politicians are trying to shut the stable door long after the horse has bolted. The rule at Alstom, the French electrical manufacturer is that email is conducted in English and that any meeting at which a non-French person is present is conducted in English. Braithwaite and Smyth agree. According to their source Jean-Loius Muller:

the rise of English in French boardrooms appeared unstoppable: "I witnessed a meeting at [engineering group] Alstom where there were only French managers in the room but English was still the language."

Business French has become peppered with anglicisms - from "les roadshows" to "le spin-off" - and few managers prefer "une marge brute d'autofinancement" to "le cash-flow".

It’s enough to make a grown Frenchman cry. And what is worse, we know that this is just the thin end of the wedge.

Sooner or later (cue the Fram oil filter guy) the French are going to have to ditch their vaunted Social Model and accept reality, the Anglo-Saxon (and rapidly becoming Indo-Chinese) cowboy model.

They can do it now, or they can do it later.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
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The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

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Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
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I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

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The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
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