300,000 Frenchmen can’t be wrong
Allister Heath says that the US consulate in Paris is being besieged by people wanting visas to the land of the free and all because of a typically French industrial dispute It is easy to spot the US consulate on the rue Saint-Florentin, in the 1st arrondissement of Paris, by the lengthy queues of surly faces lining up to beg for a visa to travel to the Land of the Free. Astonishingly for a country where anti-Americanism is supposedly the national pastime, over 300,000 French citizens may make the trip to the consulate this year. By 9 a.m. every single working day, the queue is already more than 100 metres long, with burgundysuited executives from the provinces standing side by side with shockingly chic Parisian students, all waiting to knock on Uncle Sam’s door.
Until recently the French, like the British and nationals of 25 other countries, could travel to the US for business or pleasure on the visa-waiver programme. They just needed to buy a ticket, turn up to the airport and fill in an immigration questionnaire aboard the flight, remembering to tick the ‘no’ box when asked about any convictions for ‘moral turpitude’ or involvement in espionage or genocide. As long as their name and description didn’t happen to coincide with that of a wanted terrorist, getting into the US was then usually a smooth affair, putting to one side the legendary rudeness of US immigration officials.
Not any more; because of a typically French fiasco, involving prehistoric print unions of the sort that Britain destroyed in the 1980s, the government is still handing out obsolete passports instead of the shiny, new machine-readable or credit-card-style biometric kit that last October the US made a requirement for holders of new passports who wish to use the visa-waiver programme. The result is that anybody with a French passport issued after October last year — that’s 300,000 out of an expected 800,000 French visitors to the US — must now throw themselves at the mercy of consulate officials and shell out €85 for a visa.
Every other government, even the notoriously incompetent British, has got its act together and produced the new passports on time. Most galling of all is that the chaos was not caused by any refusal on principle to follow US edicts. The French, who are none too keen on civil liberties, did not really object to the new US measures or to including computer chips in passports; they merely failed to meet the deadlines. As Karl Hoffmann, a senior official at the US embassy in Paris, put it, this kind of mess-up usually only happens in Mali or Mexico.
The story of the passports debacle is hard to believe — except to those who, like me, grew up in France and regularly return to it, and then it is merely incredibly depressing. What happened was this: the Interior Ministry, after putting out the contract to tender, chose a leading private company called Oberthur, which specialises in credit cards, to produce the new passports. In most countries that decision would have been routine but, France being France, a massive row broke out. The state-owned Imprimerie Nationale, the national printers who would traditionally be entrusted with making the passports, were outraged. The company didn’t even own the technology needed to produce the passports, but that didn’t stop the printers’ trade union suing. The union bosses claimed that Imprimerie Nationale had a monopoly on passport production. To make sure that the government took notice, a motley crew of communist and socialist activists, local officials — and even an MP — took the law into their own hands and kidnapped the chief executive of the company, holding him hostage for a few hours. Rather than throwing the mili tants in jail, the spineless French authorities surrendered.
The result has been total chaos, much buck-passing in the upper echelons of France’s civil service — and no passports. The government now claims that a compromise has been achieved and insists that the first passports will be available in five weeks’ time, but this is little consolation for those queuing up in rue Saint-Florentin. For the sake of the 600-odd employees of the Imprimerie Nationale, hundreds of thousands of people are being inconvenienced, holidays ruined and the travel industry disrupted — but as ever in France, few are blaming the union militants, focusing their ire on the government instead.
No one should be surprised, meanwhile, that the French are willing to queue for hours in the freezing cold to travel to the US. For all their undoubted hostility to America (and the war in Iraq), the French aren’t completely anti-American. While the traditional view of the Gallic elite is that American culture is both inferior and corrosive, something from which France should be protected, the rest of the country disagrees. In fact, in some ways the French are the poodles of American culture. You can scarcely move in Paris for posters of James Dean, Michael Jackson or Tom Cruise, and it was France that surrendered its soil to Disney. The French increasingly travel to America for pleasure and business, love blue jeans and T-shirts and pepper their conversations with ever greater numbers of anglicismes.
Indeed, France seems to be moving closer to the US. America is the leading investor in France, supporting almost 550,000 French jobs, while France is the number two investor in the US, supporting nearly 600,000 American jobs. McDonald’s has 1,035 restaurants in France, serving 1.2 million people a day. ‘McDo’, as the French call it, is ubiquitous in French cities; the same is even starting to become true of Starbucks, especially in Paris, with its latest shop in the Boulevard Poissonière already teeming with trendy young things, including my old school-friends, who would not wish to be seen dead in one of France’s traditional cafés.
But there is much more to a country than its consumer culture or its economic ties. The fact that the French public has not turned against the far-Left trade unions responsible for the passport debacle is a clear demonstration of France’s intellectual eccentricity. And when it comes to their attitudes to capitalism, politics, work, the family, marriage, religion, nationalism, international relations and the future, France and America are continuing to drift apart. The French are now officially the most anti-capitalist nation on earth, a new GlobeScan poll shows: only 36 per cent agree that a free-market economy ‘is the best system on which to base the future of the world’, by far the lowest of any country, and 50 per cent disagree; in China, by contrast, 74 per cent of the population now support capitalism. The French have also become an astonishingly pessimistic nation: 83 per cent believe that their economy is getting worse, more than in any nation bar Zimbabwe, according to the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.
The French may increasingly prefer CocaCola to wine, and Gauloise cigarettes may be going the way of the dodo, squeezed out by the self-consciously American Marlboro Lights, but when it comes to those values that truly matter, especially attitudes to God and Mammon, French opinion is in virulent disagreement with American opinion. France will always be La France, regardless of how many of its citizens eventually make it to America this summer to enjoy the Anglo-Saxon delights of Disney World.
Previous page
