Michel de Rosen, a former senior civil servant and now a business leader, publishes
L'égalité, a French fantasy
at Tallandier.
FIGAROVOX.- Do you maintain that there is an “egalitarian fantasy” among the French?
Michel de ROSEN.
-
No people talk as much about equality as the French.
France is the only country in the world to include equality in its national currency.
There is a scathing gap, for the French, between their imagination of equality and its reality.
Our fellow citizens overestimate the level of inequalities in France.
They believe our country to be very unequal, whereas of the top ten economic powers in the world, France is the most egalitarian.
The ratio between the 20% of the population with the highest incomes and the 20% at the bottom of the distribution is 4.3 in France against 5.1 in Germany and the United Kingdom, 5.8 in Italy and 6 , 8 in Spain.
Conversely, the French overestimate the pioneering role of France in the advancement of equality in the world.
Thus France adopted the right to vote for women long after many other countries.
France prefers apparent equality to real equality.
The minimum wage, which is the same in Paris and Lozère, is a perfect example.
How did we come to such an overestimation of inequalities?
Because in France, the subject of equality has become almost obsessive.
I see four main causes for this French tropism:
• Catholicism: The Catholic Church has always had a complicated relationship with inequalities and wealth.
However, France is the “eldest daughter of the Church”.
• The Revolution: no Western country has known such a radical caesura as the French Revolution, which radicalized the relationship between “France from below” and “France from above”.
•The old regime.
In "The Old Regime and the Revolution", Tocqueville has masterfully shown how, over the centuries, royal power has never ceased to equalize the situation of the French in order to strengthen centralization, in the logic of " I only want to see one head ”.
• France is a literary country where style is worth more than deeds, words than reality, a beautiful quarrel than a friendly agreement.
France therefore wants to be egalitarian.
But this pseudo-equality has come at the expense of social mobility.
That is to say?
Since the beginning of the Fifth Republic, governments on the right and on the left have done a lot to reduce income inequalities.
But they have done little to enhance social mobility.
On this criterion, OECD studies show that France's performance is mediocre.
Compared to the situation in most other European countries, in France, a rich man's son has a higher probability of being rich and a poor man's being poor.
Our society is more immobile than the others.
This situation feeds anger, rage, revolt.
In short, France has chosen to reduce static inequalities rather than dynamic inequalities.
Be careful, the French are royalists but also regicides!
Let us stop our modesty on the refusal to establish ethnic statistics.
We only manage well what we measure.
What evolution do you recommend?
The biggest inequality in France is unemployment.
We must aim for full employment.
There are two priorities for this: learning and continuing education.
We need a real national mobilization in these two areas.
On the issue of emigrants, your proposals are bold ...
Being myself the grandson of Russians and the son of a stateless father until the Second World War, I know the great privilege of being French.
We must act.
Let us stop our modesty on the refusal to establish ethnic statistics.
We only manage well what we measure.
Establishing statistics on the subject, at the regional and local level, will allow better integration of those who are on the fringes of the Republic.
Let us have the courage to listen to Branko Milanovic, a left-wing economist, who proposes to authorize large flows of migrants under certain conditions: duration fixed in advance, rights different from those of national citizens.
Third axis: Clarify rights and duties.
For example, create an obligation to speak French in France.
Some of these suggestions will be shocking.
But we have a duty to find solutions that will avoid both total closure and total opening.
The leaders of the right as of the left have not made the necessary educational effort, neither on work, nor on public finances.
In the end, can we say that the state has failed?
It's all too easy to beat up on the state - and officials - after serving it.
It is the ruling classes that are responsible.
The leaders of the right as of the left have allowed public finances to drift, work time slump, and increase immigration.
They did not make the necessary educational effort, neither on work, nor on public finances.
Who reminds the French that there is no hidden treasure and that the money of the State is that of the French?
Who criticizes the fact that half of our citizens do not pay income taxes?
Romain Gary said
"With maternal love, life gives you at dawn a promise it never keeps"
.
With equality, the French Republic makes a promise to the French that it cannot keep.
Do you think Emmanuel Macron's policy is going in the right direction?
The reforms of labor law, permanent training and capital taxation are going in the right direction: they promote the competitiveness of France and therefore the employment of the French.
On the other hand, the pension reform was too ambitious: this requires a less Hegelian reform, more operational.
