7 I know I just poured scorn on the French habit of asking rhetorical questions, but sometimes they are quite effective. Don’t you agree?
8 This seems to account for the baffling popularity of The Benny Hill Show in France, even today. Three centuries ago, most French people’s idea of culture was a bunch of actors and actresses chasing each other around the stage making lewd gestures.
9 And in doing so, seem to have reduced the number of French weekends to three a month. Which may go some way to explaining why Robespierre, the man behind the most radical changes, had his own head removed in 1794. You don’t mess with a Frenchman’s weekends.
The French protesting after being told that they
will have to work on Friday afternoons.
THE
2ND
COMMANDMENT
Tu Ne Travailleras Pas
THOU SHALT NOT WORK
THOU SHALT NOT WORK
‘LIFE IS NOT WORK. WORKING TOO MUCH SENDS YOU INSANE.’ That was said not by a French anarchist, artist or ‘aristocrat, but by a president, Charles de Gaulle, to André Malraux, a former minister of culture. Quite a political statement.
The French say that they work to live, whereas Anglo-Saxons live to work. What they mean is, while we think that getting into the office at five a.m., skipping lunch and staying on till midnight to close that deal with New York is a virtue, the French have better things to do.
And they’re right. Given the choice, who wouldn’t agree to earn less money if it meant that they got the chance to lie in for two extra hours in the morning, enjoy a long gourmet lunch, and then spend the evening nibbling at the earlobe (and other nibblable bits) of their loved one?
This is exactly why I came to live in France. I was working for a British company that regularly offered me promotions and rises, and I felt very proud of myself until I noticed that I didn’t have weekends or evenings any more and couldn’t remember what my girlfriend looked like. Mainly because I was drinking so much as soon as I left the office that most evenings were a blur.
I took a job in France with less stress, less responsibility and less money, and immediately clicked into the French philosophy: hard work is just too much hard work.
Très Long Weekend
Looking in a French diary, you might get the impression that no one in the country is ever at work. Trying to phone an office on a Friday afternoon will usually confirm this.
French workers get the following bank holidays: New Year’s Day, Easter Monday, 1 May, VE Day (8 May), Ascension Day, Pentecost Monday (the first Monday in June), Bastille Day (14 July), Assumption Day (15 August), All Saints’ Day (1 November), 1918 Armistice Day (11 November) and Christmas Day. In a bad year, 1 and 8 May can fall on a weekend and aren’t replaced by a weekday off. But in a good year, they might fall on a Tuesday, so that workers will take a pont (a ‘bridge’, an extra day off to make it a long weekend). That way, the first and second weekends in May and the Ascension Day weekend (between mid-May and mid-June) will be four days long, and then Pentecost Monday could make it four long weekends out of six. In a good year, the French take almost as many days off in May and June as some Americans get in a year – and still have almost all their holiday to take.
Most French people in full-time work get five weeks’ paid holiday a year. Some get even more – in my last journalism job, the company gave us thirty-seven days a year – seven and a half weeks. (All this on top of the bank holidays, remember.)
This calendar, combined with the ‘work to live, don’t live to work’ attitude, can lead the French to take what you might call a relaxed attitude to work. By Friday lunchtime, they’ll be mentally engrossed in their weekend. Come May, it’s almost summer so there’s no point over-exerting themselves.
But if you work with the French, this isn’t necessarily a problem. When they are actually working, they’re very productive. You just have to choose the right time to ask them to do something. Don’t bother trying to get anything done between twelve and two p.m. on any day, at any time after eleven a.m. on a Friday, or between 1 May and 31 August. Simple, really.
God Save the Thirty-Five-Hour Week
The working week was reduced from thirty-nine to thirty-five hours in France in 2000, but this didn’t mean that all full-time workers suddenly stopped an hour early every day. Companies introduced the policy after negotiation with their workers. Some firms settled on five seven-hour days, others gave a half-day off per week or a day off every fortnight.
My employer gave us the time as holiday – an extra twenty-two days a year. This meant that I now had fifty-nine days’ leave a year, plus eleven bank holidays – a total of fourteen weeks per year.
All this, I should add, with no reduction in salary.
When I boasted to friends and family, I could feel the waves of jealousy flooding across the Channel and the 10 Atlantic.
Contrary to popular opinion amongst employers, the idea of the thirty-five-hour week was not to bankrupt all of France’s businesses. It was to create jobs – since the working week had been reduced by about 10 per cent, logically, a team of ten people would now need one new colleague to make up the hours. Companies were promised large subsidies to take on 10 per cent more staff, and the government hoped to create seven hundred thousand jobs this way.
This worked fine for companies with lots of people doing the same job, but I was working for a magazine with a staff of ten. To make up our lost hours, our
