Vive le status quo: in France, the more things change....

Apparently hoping to cut off a growing public disaffection with his center-right government, French President Jacques Chirac called early parliamentary elections for June 1. Too late. The surly French electorate ousted Chirac's parliamentary majority and voted into power a Socialist-Communist-Green party coalition with the Socialist Lionel Jospin at its head. Now, hardly two months later, the signs are accumulating that the French are equally dissatisfied with Jospin and his government. A deep pessimism has taken hold of the country.

Things are indeed going badly. Unemployment continues its nearly decade-long swell, up to almost 13 percent. GDP growth continues its equally long slump, with prospects of falling below 2 percent this year. The French economy - 50 percent of which is run by the government - appears to be completely stalled, and the latest indicators are grim. To make matters worse, the impending European monetary unification imposes a budget deficit of no more than 3 percent while this year's estimated budget deficit for France is 3.5 percent. Some form of the long-postponed government cutbacks is now inevitable. The fact that the U.S. economy seems to have reached a kind of nirvana of low unemployment, high growth, declining crime rates, almost inexplicably low inflation, and a foreseeable balanced budget doesn't seem to make anybody in France feel better.

Jospin seems to be caught already in the same kind of political turbulence that destroyed his predecessor, Alain Juppe, and crippled Jacques Chirac. Rejecting the massively unpopular "politics of austerity" of the right, Jospin rode into power on a wave of classic Socialist promises: the end of privatizations, an increase in the minimum wage, the reduction of the workweek from thirty-nine to thirty-five hours without a reduction in pay, and a reduction of the value-added tax. He even suggested that he felt his government was not bound by the Maastricht Treaty, setting the terms for monetary unification, which was signed by the previous Socialist president, Francois Mitterand. Once in office, Jospin increased the minimum wage by 4 percent, promised the creation of 700,000 new government jobs, and then let the national assembly go off for the summer. The gamble, clearly, is to jump-start consumer confidence and the economy in order to generate the revenues needed to carry out the Socialist program.

Somebody, at least, has to be optimistic, and it might as well be the government. Only what the French have been given to see is a government that doesn't really believe in what it has been saying and is starting to look a lot like the previous government. Jospin ratified Maastricht, went ahead with the privatization of the national telephone monopoly, France Telecom, and agreed to the shutting down of the Vilvorde factory in Belgium by Renault, in which the French state is a majority shareholder. A number of Jospin's Socialist and Communist colleagues are up in arms.

Most revealing, however, may be the furor over Jospin's proposal to limit the state allocations of $300 per month per child to those families who make less than $50,000 per year (90 percent of French households). A sharp public reaction has government officials anxiously backpedaling. As if in a replay of Juppe's misadventures with French protestors, the government seems stymied by the public. The political logic of what are called "acquired rights" - entitlements - implacably reasserts itself. Anything which is seen as dismantling an entitlement, even if it targets only "rich people," is seen as setting a precedent for rolling back other entitlements and is thus massively unpopular.

One consequence has been the increasing popularity of the extreme fight politics of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who expeditiously blames France's problems on immigrants and would start his regime by deporting them all. Le Pen's National Front Party won 15 percent of the vote in the last elections, and it seems likely that, if Jospin's government continues to falter so soon after the French repudiation of the center right, this figure will only increase.

France is stuck in a political-economic malaise that few people see changing any time soon. The most pessimistic suggest that it will all end with violence in the streets before the deadlock breaks; the specter of the "events" of 1968 is conjured up again and again. Optimists, of which there are few these days, suggest that the Socialist government is on a learning curve and that only the Left can bring about the kind of structural changes France needs. Indeed, the Socialist campaign rhetoric gets reworked almost daily. The language coming from some of Jospin's ministers sounds more like the "politics of competition" than the "politics of solidarity." The new minister of education, Claude Allegre, for example, recently dared to call the educational system "a mammoth," off of which it will be necessary to "cut the fat" to "make it more muscular."

The question, however, is whether these little steps will be enough. The French resistance to "the market" is deeply rooted; for them, deregulation is an "Anglo-Saxon" idea. A Colbertian dirigisme of the state is the French counterforce, and it manifests itself almost everywhere in French attitudes.

Take, for example the internet-computer revolution that has largely driven the American economic boom. Back in 1981, France Telecom instituted the Minitel, an interactive national computer network that provides a host of services, including a national telephone directory, reservations for trains, planes, and performances, and of course "sex talk." Charging by the minute, Minitel generates tremendous profits that France Telecom shares with the companies that use this service to peddle their wares. The internet, on the other hand, is not "owned" by anybody. Anybody can set up shop on it, and the access costs are a mere fraction of Minitel charges. The internet is inherently structured like an open - read "Anglo-Saxon" - market as opposed to a state-owned - read "French" - monopoly. Neither France Telecom, nor the state train system, nor the state-owned Air France or Air Inter seems to have any interest in promoting the internet, which would undercut a tremendous source of revenues. Almost by instinctive reflex, French ministers are already talking about taxing commerce on the internet. Private citizens, having assumed that their current technology is not only good enough but more importantly "French," have almost completely resisted the internet. Having been in certain ways ahead of the game with Minitel, France now has less internet presence than Finland. There are no legions of French eighteen-year-olds setting up companies and dreaming of becoming the next Bill Gates. French capital markets shun high-tech ventures; international money eschews France altogether. France is hostile territory for free-floating capital and risky start-up ventures. France is hard-wired into a dangerously outmoded Minitel-like political economy.

The Minitel/internet situation and the crippling logic of "acquired rights" reveal a problem that runs to the core of French social and economic life. By preserving state monopolies - economic as well as political - at the cost of developments that will bring about real structural change, France is mortgaging its future. It is preserving a status quo that has little room for the young, leaving them more likely to be unemployed, more likely to feel alienated from the famous "social solidarity" demagogically touted by the Right as well as the Left, more likely to be pessimistic and ill-adapted to life in the twenty-first century. The vicious political circle of "acquired rights" and future-phobic dirigisme stifles creativity, innovation, imagination, and optimism - the fundamental capital of the young.

Jorge Pedraza teaches French and modern literature at Williams College.