Prime Minister François Bayrou has put the cat among the pigeons in promising to cut two of France’s national holidays in order to rescue the country’s finances.
Predictably enough, his proposal on Tuesday to axe the Easter Monday and 8 May holidays triggered howls of protest from the left and the populist right – with his own centrists and the conservative right expressing at best guarded support.
In a country with such a strong tradition of worker protest, the sudden removal of two statutory days off was never going to be an easy sell.
Essentially, men and women would be made to work two extra days a year for no increase in salary. The gain in productivity would help pull the country out of its ever-deepening hole of debt.
The French are indeed very attached to their jours fériés.
The month of May is awaited with glee every year, not just because it heralds spring – but also because of the succession of long weekends that regularly occur.
If 1 May (Workers’ Day) and 8 May, marking the end of World War Two, fall on a Tuesday or Thursday, then the weekends become four-day treats because the Monday and the Friday will automatically be taken as holiday too.
On top of that there is Ascension (always a Thursday) plus Easter Monday and Whit Monday (or Pentecost).
If the Church calendar obliges, an early Easter can combine with 1 or 8 May to provide not just a pont or bridge – meaning a four-day weekend spanning a Monday or Friday, but a veritable five or six-day viaduc (viaduct).
November is another feast of feasts, with All Saints’ on the first of the month and Armistice on the 11th offering relief from autumn blues. And on top of that, there are the famous “RTT” days, which many get in return for working more than the legal 35 hours a week.
But before we lapse into humorous self-satisfaction about “those incredibly lazy French and their God-given right to endless downtime”, we need to bear in mind a couple of other considerations.
First, far from the popular image, the French actually have fewer national holidays than the European average.
France has 11, like Germany, the Netherlands and US.
Slovakia has the most, with 15, and England, Wales, and the Netherlands have the fewest, with 8.
Ireland and Denmark have 10.
Second, according to the UK’s Office for National Statistics, French productivity (output per worker) is 18% higher than the UK’s, So any gloating about holidays from across the Channel is misplaced.
Third, this is not the first time in recent years that France has proposed to axe national holidays. It has happened before – and worked (kind of).
In 2003, the conservative government under President Jacques Chirac wanted to do something radical after the deadly heatwave of that summer which killed 15,000 people.
So Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin decided to turn Whit Monday into a Day of Solidarity. People would work instead of taking the day off, and the money gained by employers would be paid to the government for a fund to help the elderly and disabled.
There was an outcry, and a few years later the change was watered down so that now the Day of Solidarity is voluntary. It is all highly confusing, and no-one really understands how it functions, but non-Whit Monday still generates €3bn (£2.6bn; $3.5bn) every year in receipts.
Another precedent goes back to the 1950s and Charles de Gaulle.
Newly appointed as president, in 1959 he axed the 8 May Victory in Europe holiday, saying the country could not afford it. It was reinstated in 1981 by the Socialist François Mitterrand.
Bayrou looks to scrap two holidays in bold bid to cut debt
So when on Tuesday the Greens accused Bayrou of trying to “wipe from the collective memory the eradication of Nazism”, it was quite easy for minister Benjamin Haddad to retort: “Actually, it was De Gaulle who first did this, and I seem to recall he played a certain role in eradicating Nazism.”
None of this means that Bayrou is any the more likely to see his proposals become real.
The truth is that the prime minister is in a position of almost total impotence – running a government with no majority in parliament, which could fall at any minute if the opposition groups so decide.
But, in an odd way, this very powerlessness has given Bayrou the freedom to say what he thinks.
If there is little likelihood of his budget proposals getting voted through the Assembly – and the chances are virtually zero – then he might as well give the French the unsugared truth.
The economic situation is dire, he said.
Every second that passes, France has €5,000 more debt.
Today it stands at €3.3tn. In these circumstances, Bayrou believes maybe we need to re-think the way we live. And work.
