Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't be Wrong

This association became 25,000 members strong and coordinates dozens of similar organizations worldwide.

Given the deleterious nature of financial markets, the Tobin Tax is probably inapplicable, but the idea of taxing financial transactions has begun to gain currency among some Western democracies anyway, notably Finland and Canada.

Salaries are very rarely discussed in public in any context. When people do discuss them, they claim to earn less than they actually do. Although civil servants’ salaries are theoretically public, the system is so riddled with perks and bonuses that it’s impossible to actually know what any civil servant earns. By the same token, French tax offices have always had difficulty assessing how much money there is in the country. The switch to the euro brought a lot of cash back into the system because an estimated 80 per cent of all five hundred–franc bills were said to be stashed in mattresses and pillows across the country. When French protesters demonstrate, they never openly ask for money; they wrap it in another demand like better working conditions.

France is not what it used to be. France has never been what it used to be, and it never will. So we might as well enjoy it while it lasts.

Most European societies, including France, were built for war, and the idea of war remains in the fabric of society

’s easier to follow orders than to show initiative

Regionalization is essentially a form of decentralization à la carte: each commune, Département, and Region chooses the degree of initiative it wants with respect to a préfet

France’s political culture was built around a strong penchant for absolutism, authoritarianism, centralism, and a considerable dose of intolerance.

The old stock French are slowly coming to accept that much as immigrants have had to adapt to France, the French have to change their idea of themselves and accept the change.

One of the reasons it took so long to act was that positive discrimination and affirmative action are taboo concepts in a country whose central doctrine of citizenship is assimilation.

Chancellor Otto von Bismarck once said that the most important phenomenon of the nineteenth century was that America spoke English