A compatriot and colleague sent me the following angry email. Possibly written with all the bitterness of someone who has sold up everything in Britain to make their home in France and too late realised their mistake, it could be read as a classic piece of French-bashing. But I don’t think that’s the author’s intention and certainly is not mine in publishing it. I think it has wider implications. Read it first:

“Last year this reporter earned a stunning €1,919 for her words and pictures submitted to the excellent French News. Then, as a thoroughly fair sort of Brit, she felt she should register this lucrative enterprise with the State – not wishing to work on the Black and keen to contribute to this fine country.
“This, dear reader, was the beginning of a great mistake!
“Tax – of course - you declare it – no problem but then there is URSSAF – not a branch of the US military but the people who issue the Siret number you need to work independently in France and RSI another – pay us now outfit.
“As corny papers say “imagine my surprise” when the kindly folk of URSSAF demanded, in January, a whopping €1,333 leaving the correspondent a mere €586. Soak the rich eh – and the poor and struggling while you are about it too.
“Then in February another parasite invaded - RSI – which also want to gorge on whatever mean reserves of food this damaged body has, with a demand for €1,077.
“So far my freelance work has cost me €491 more than I have earned. So next year I plan to give up my hobby of supporting the Republic – it is better, and cheaper not to work at all.
“And of course the princely sum of €1,919 has already been added to the family’s income.”

I doubt this will be news to anyone who has moved to France and tried to set up some freelance work. We all have similar heart-wrenching stories which tend to be the stuff of ex-pat dinner-time conversations while enjoying a few glasses of excellent French wine – a “residents’ rant” blog would be soon over-loaded. There are in fact ways round the problem quoted above, but they are technical, long-winded, requiring huge amounts of time, effort and above all a good understanding of administrative French. Indeed many Chambres de Commerce provide induction courses (in English!) to help and explain the French system to the woefully ill-equipped Brits. But what interests me here is not the particular case but the wider implications of the naivety of so many British people (in whom I include myself) who set up here without understanding what ‘protectionism’ or ‘anti-competitive’ really mean in everyday life. Many French people consider us entirely, possibly dangerously mad.

My brother-in-law is an inspecteur du travail in the Limousin, and from time to time has to go out with the gendarmes on dawn raids against British residents who have, for example, set-up a gîte without going through all the administrative palaver. Or, a speciality in the Limousin, bought a small lake stuffed with carp which they then charge other British anglers to come and fish. Or an elderly lady who imagined she could buy antiques from those oh-so-tempting street markets and re-sell them to British neighbours and “friends who come round for tea”. How naive can you get? This is not Britain (which, by definition, all these people decided to leave) and in France an Englishman’s home is not his castle. My French family (and I suspect many others) get somewhat steamed about those who set up in France without thinking through the consequences, without really understanding what they are doing, often without really understanding the language. For like the language, the French learn their administrative system from the cradle: it’s second nature.

France is famous for its cuisine and its social protection – and just as there’s no such thing as a free lunch, you can’t have this high level of social protection without serious cost. Having a nanny state means paying the nanny: and even if the French complain about it, they accept it as a fact of life – just as an entirely matter-of-fact education inspector once explained to me that if I wanted to be paid for teaching English three hours a week at my local primary school I would of course have to pay an amount equal to five times “salary” in charges. She wasn’t particularly shocked and not at all embarrassed to tell me this – that’s just how life is and it’s naive to imagine otherwise. Which explains in part why the majority of young French people dream of becoming fonctionnaires, it may not be the best income but it’s a totally secure one, with every wrinkle and stress-factor of the administration taken care of. They reject with much manifesting horrors such as the Contrat premier embauche, seen as Contrat premier pas vers la jungle.

Indeed the author of the rant above began her diatribe with the words: “What the French Republic could learn from Zoology”, arguing that the “French Ministry of Finance could do well to study Darwin”. Again the arguments she puts forward are totally reasonable – from the British (Darwinian) point of view. But they ignore the fact that the French don’t like and are deeply suspicious of Darwin (usually misquoted in translation as advocating the survival of the strongest, since there seems no easy equivalent in French of the word “fittest”, which has nothing to do with strength, and in any case the phrase was not Darwin’s but Herbert Spencer’s. Darwin used it first in the 5th edition of “Origin of the Species” and then only reluctantly, usually in combination with his preferred “natural selection”) – indeed for many French people Darwin is mixed in with Malthus, jointly responsible for all that is wrong with the anglo-saxon world. Much French thinking, especially in the press, believes that nature, and especially human nature, is red in tooth and claw and for that reason should at all costs be avoided, not learnt from. As in 18th century gardening, the thought is still that nature must be tamed, pruned, ordered – in a word civilised, as proof of man’s superiority. The pinnacle of this civilisation, the proof man’s superiority is of course the French state – an entirely artificial construct which rains the benefits of education and health care on all, while simultaneously providing obligatory periods of leisure – things unknown in the jungle.

It’s satisfying to see that the on-line news journal Rue 89 has taken up an idea I launched five days ago, that “devoir de mémoire” should be focussed not on the deported children but rather on the adults who rounded them up. They knew where the children were going and what horrible death awaited them. When I suggested that each adult should be given the name of a member of the milice (and be encouraged to wonder whether he/she knew anyone like that today) I was being perfectly serious, although no one has commented on it so maybe you all thought I was yet again being facetious - but it is actually where the mémoire in question should be. The contributor to Rue 89 is particularly well placed to make the same suggestion since he himself was rounded up, on the 16th July 1942, by the French police.

He says: “Such reminders of History are extremely useful at a time when police officers and gendarmes are working non-stop tracking down the sans papiers and, sometimes, separating them from their children.” Then, having added that of course the periods are different he writes a beautiful phrase which doesn’t work in English: “Pourtant les mauvaises manières n’en perdurent pas moins, et les fonctionnaires d’autorité de la République ne se risquent jamais à transgresser les ordres qui ne sont en rien compatibles avec les traditions humanitaires du pays des droits de l’homme.” In simple terms, people still dare not disobey orders which are in flagrant contradiction to French humane traditions. He is absolutely right and that is the root of the problem.

“Devoir de mémoire” in any country and any language usually refers to the victims, who are no longer with us: it’s too easy to remember them. It should refer to the oppressors, who are still amongst us and whose continued existence and well-being we are aiding and abetting - by not remembering that.

As perhaps the last word on mémoire, the Holocaust and how both interact with new generations, I strongly recommend Tony Judt’s excellent piece (in fact the transcript of a lecture given weeks before the French President’s decree for 10 year old children, but broadly on the same subject of how we tackle and teach this very difficult subject) in the New York Review of Books (and for anyone unfamiliar with Tony Judt and interested in why Europe is the way it is, please read his monumental and more than excellent “Postwar: a History of Europe since 1945″ which has just been published in French as “Après Guerre”).

France looks as if it is poised to go into one of those peculiarly franco-français spins which leaves other nationals gasping for words. This particular spin is caused by the event I wrote about in the previous piece – the President’s insisting, without consultation, that every 10 year old be saddled with the memory of a French child who died in the Holocaust. Whatever one thinks of that decree per se, it was the final straw for many Republicans, and sparked an appeal trumpeted throughout the land for “Republican vigilance”. This call-to-arms was signed by many senior French politicians (Ségolène Royal, François Bayrou, Dominique de Villepin). Their basic premise is that under President Sarkozy, republican values are in danger. That debate, for me, is where the downward spiral starts.

I have written in Prospect that the republican values (equality and laïcité particularly) are the bed-rock and defining principle of present-day France. But they do not export – or even translate – well. Anglophones, for example, tend to read laïcité as secularism – which it isn’t, it is something far stronger and in many French people touches a nerve far deeper. Hence the passion behind this petition for the defence of the republic, which looks like becoming another major row in France.

But many people outside France believe that these “values” are the product of a by-gone age, and are now hampering France as much as its Code du Travail or its unaffordable social security system. Arthur Goldhammer, an American blogger on French politics, feels that: “vaguely [Sarkozy] senses that the old republican rhetoric is out of whack with the realities of contemporary France, and he is right.” Or it may be that, as ange scalpel suggests in a comment on the previous piece, Sarkozy is consciously trying to unpick key republican values: something he could never have alluded to during the election campaign but which, he may feel, have no place in today’s world. Something many non-French would agree with. Sarkozy is clearly influenced by “foreigners” to a far greater degree than his predecessors: as well as the rag-bag of American influences, Rue 89 yesterday gave a fascinating insight into the close links with Canadian billionaire Paul Desmarais, and not just financial: in 1995 when Sarkozy was rejected and reviled by mainstream French politicians, traversing what he likes to call the desert, “a man invited me into his family in Quebec. We spent hours walking through the woods and he told me: “You’ve got to stick in there, you will get there, we must build a strategy for you.” On Sunday Sarkozy rewarded Desmarais with France’s highest honour, the Legion d’honneur, saying: “If I am president today it is partly thanks to the advice of Paul Desmarais.”

It may be that people like Desmarais and others have suggested to Sarkozy that the notion of “the Republic one and indivisible” is, as Goldhammer says: “a pious wish, not reality”. The real question is whether a country prefers to live mouthing pious wishes or staring reality in the face. The second choice is not necessarily superior: many French people appear to prefer the former, even knowing, deep down, those pious wishes are hot air, for they also know that if they are forced to adopt the latter and stare reality in the face, France will lose a large part of its Frenchness.

If Nicolas Sarkozy is extraordinary for one thing it is for continually grabbing the headlines – literally occupying all the space. Increasingly he does this by making apparently off-the-cuff and controversial remarks on a subject for which no one is prepared. He creates a storm of protest, then a day or so later he explains himself, putting his controversial speech into a much more common sense, although often populist, context. But while all that’s going on, the important things like reforms are forgotten.

On Wednesday night he did this during a speech at a dinner for France’s principal Jewish council, CRIF. He announced that from September this year every 9 or 10 year old child, during their last year in primary school, will be given “the memory of a French child who was a victim of the Shoah” to carry with them. Virtually no consultation, no preparation, no if’s or buts. What the President decrees happens, and now every little Mohamed is going to be given (confié) the memory of a little dead Shlomo to carry around with him for a year.

And as he obviously hoped, nobody is talking about anything else. Push to one side for the moment the rights and wrongs of yet again forgetting all the gypsy children, all the Communist children, what’s important is M. Sarkozy’s manipulation of “Le devoir de la mémoire”. I’ve written in Prospect about this, to me strange phenomenon which seems to have taken hold of many people in France. The duty of memory. Not “lest we forget” but “you must remember”. Memory becomes confused in the popular mind with history; memories are mostly based on emotions, so history is reduced to a series of emotional events – slavery, colonialism, especially the War in Algeria, and Vichy France. The President further works on the emotions by always picking children. Last year he decreed that children should listen to the adolescent Guy Moquet’s last letter to his parents before he was shot. Now he has taken this duty of memory a stage further by decreeing that all French ten year olds will be saddled with the morbid memory of a child his/her own age who was murdered in horrendous circumstances and with whom he/she is now supposed to identify.

An extraordinary imposition on a child’s psyche to saddle them with guilt for something they had nothing to do with, that happened 55 years before they were born. Far more salutary to decree that all French adults will be confié the name of a French adult responsible for rounding up those 12,000 children and make it a duty to think on how any human being, let alone one who has had the benefit of a French education, comes to do that. But of course adults vote, children don’t.

Many people, particularly in the professions affected – teachers, historians and child psychologists – have protested. Simone Veil, herself deported to Auschwitz as a child, has strongly protested. But that’s the clever ruse that Sarkozy is developing more and more: you make a statement that incites immediate reaction and revolt, which in turn makes some people believe you are doing something radical. You then justify the controversial outpouring with a second statement that clarifies and seems a step in the right direction, so that the protesters are made to look like dreadful old reactionaries. Thus having made his decree on Wednesday night, on Friday morning the President says that this is all part of moral education: everyone, he insists, must recognise and respect everyone else, especially their differences.

Now that statement is truly revolutionary in France. Recognising that people are different, with different faiths and different histories, is admitting the diversity of French society. Only a few years ago that was taboo. Azouz Begag, when he was Minister for Equality of Opportunity, made it his mission to bring that word into the French vocabulary and he had a huge problem getting it accepted. In a nation where everyone is equal (it says so above every town hall) you cannot admit diversity – and now Azouz’s implacable enemy has adopted the word for himself. But that too is part of his technique.

It is certainly grotesque. Leaders of the opposition are calling it surreal, ubu-esque. I think of it more as the stuff of Jacobean drama, perhaps the sub-plot to one of those gloriously energetic plays whose characters have names like Malateste, Ambitioso, Supervacuo or Sarkozy. Like a Jacobean play, Neuilly is a story of a ruler, his courtiers, his family, rivalry, revenge – and loads of Kensington gore.

Nicolas Sarkozy began his extraordinary, ambition-driven career in Neuilly, a well-heeled suburb of Paris – aged 28 he was elected mayor. Neuilly town hall was his base for nearly 20 years and now, with municipal elections looming, he nominated someone very close to him to be his successor there, the dashingly handsome David Martinon. Martinon rocketed into public view as Sarkozy’s campaign director during the presidential election campaign last year, and as a reward for victory was made the President’s spokesman. He interprets for the world what the President is thinking. Martinon is also close to Sarkozy’s second wife Cecilia, and it is rumoured that he owes his position to her influence. So far little different from a Jacobean sub-plot, for crucially of course everyone in the pit knows that Cecilia’s influence first faded then was cut off abruptly by divorce. The wheel of fortune turns inexorably at court, and can turn alarmingly fast.

Now enter Jean Sarkozy, the ruler’s 21 year old son by a first marriage. Although brought up largely in Corsica, he could be seen as Neuilly natural. His father put him to work alongside David Martinon in the Neuilly campaign. Right from the start it went wrong. “Martinon non non” was the cry that greeted the hapless courtier when he arrived to start canvassing – a protest from his own party. Soon the honest Neuilly-burghers were telling the press “A candidate who wanders round our town with a GPS in his hand doesn’t impress.” Then the ruler’s self-assured, enarque spokesman, used to people hanging on his every word, was said to be having a hard time with a splinter faction of his own troops led by – the ruler’s son. The son of the first wife was putting spokes in the wheel of the second wife’s favourite. Then on Saturday a poll placing Martinon second to an “assorted right” candidate ignited rumours that he must go – or perhaps had already gone. On Sunday Jean Sarkozy somewhat gleefully announced that a triumvirate was taking over. On Monday Martinon announced in two brief and bitter sentences his definitive departure. When Jean Sarkozy was asked his reaction he said “Look at my smile.” Now the daggers are outat the palace : the ruler is away in the distant département of French Guiana and at home the court is saying Martinon cannot remain as the President’s spokesman. No reason is given, he must simply go – unlike say Daniel Bouton, who remains immovable at the head of a huge bank despite its catastrophic performance in every respect. Martinon has done nothing wrong. It is mere revenge, as in the best Jacobean tragedy. The favourite of the woman who ousted Jean Sarkozy’s mother from the marriage bed duly despatched, his corpse thrown to the circling press vultures.

I use that bird deliberately because by coincidence (or is it? Is this really the centre falling apart?) in the same week another female power within the court, the darkly beautiful Minister for Human Rights Rama Yade, called the press “vultures”. In an untypical outburst she accused the French press of relentlessly, irresponsibly digging up dirt about the President (she should try the British or American press). They are clearly hoping, she believes, for a kill. Vulture however was ill-advised choice of metaphor – hounds might have been kinder: after all they bay for the blood of an animal still up and running with a chance of survival; vultures, as I understand it, gather only when death is inevitable and imminent. Does Mme Yade sense the President is already no more than carrion?

Perhaps not consciously, but Sarkozy running away from the press on Monday – he who normally walks so confidently towards them – indeed looked like a doomed creature. The press simply wanted a statement about Neuilly, nothing to do with the President’s private life. It is quite absurd for Sarkozy to claim it is not his problem: certainly it is only a sub-plot, but Martinon was his nomination and is/was his man, who had worked hard to build good relationships with many of the same people asking for a statement. Sarkozy’s own son has himself assumed a major role in this chaotic tale and nobody believes that the father was not party to the son’s actions. And Neuilly was Sarkozy père’s fief for 20 years. Contrary to what M. Sarkozy says, it has everything to do with him

One can of course pooh-pooh the whole thing as a piece of ephemeral theatre. But like any good sub-plot it echoes in a minor-key all the elements of the main story: the ruler’s attempt to control everything, even who is to be mayor of a Paris suburb. The anger that control engenders in people, and when things unravel Sarkozy is fast-vanishing dust in the middle-distance (a family trait: his son Jean allegedly has the same tendency on his motor-bike). The influence of his court, of his three wives to whom, paradoxically for a control-freak, he seems to capitulate easily. And finally the bloody despatch of a key member of the ruler’s team – for David Martinon will, I fear, be swiftly followed by others and, as in any good Jacobean drama, we will soon see a stage littered with corpses. But certainly Neuilly is only a sub-plot – the real tragedy is elsewhere and on a much larger scale: all those changes that France must embrace if it is to get out of the downward spiral.

On that subject I like what Theodore Zeldin, a British member of Jacques Attali’s committee on making France more competitive, told the FT at the weekend:
“He [Zeldin] is enthusiastic about the possibilities for change but expresses frustration with the commission’s intensely technical discussions of subjects and the cobwebs of laws and regulations preventing new initiatives. “The tendency of experts is to fiddle around with their expertise rather than trying to find new solutions,” he says.
“His solutions are far more radical: founding new towns with affordable housing near the coast that can draw food, energy and water from the sea; posting school teachers to foreign countries for a year to experience different cultures; inviting the world’s 100 richest people to the Elysee Palace and asking them to create a global university.
“In reforming France, or any other country, Zeldin argues it is vital to avoid, rather than provoke, confrontation. It is better to allow old problems to wither while encouraging new possibilities to emerge alongside.”

But tragically such fresh ideas are shoved aside in what is fast becoming a tale of unbridled personal ambition and bloody revenge.

Two interesting snippets this morning: Christine Lagarde, the Minister of the Economy, apparently handed in her resignation on Wednesday, but Nicolas Sarkozy refused it. According to a short despatch in Le Monde, he told her she could go after the local elections in March. Mme Lagarde is said to be utterly fed-up with the President’s “contradictions” - for example promising off-the-cuff to feed public money into Arcelor-Mittal’s steel works at Lagrange which is threatened with closure and his scarcely veiled attempt to get Daniel Bouton, president of SocGen, to leave. I would guess her anger is partly because Sarkozy is using the State to interfere in private companies far more than she (and others) believes he should, and partly because he is interfering too much personally with her job, making decisions that affect her without consultation and taking the words out of her mouth, as it were.

The other piece is the legal action Sarkozy is taking against the web-site of the Nouvel Observateur, a monthly magazine. The web-site published a story that eight days before his marriage to Carla Bruni, Sarkozy sent a text message to his divorced wife Cecilia saying: “If you come back, I’ll cancel everything.” Two things - firstly as we all know, the French President is untouchable by the law while in office, yet apparently he can still issue writs. You can’t hit me but I can hit you. Hmmmm. Second thing I wonder what he means by “everything”. “J’annule tout” - does that include his presidency?

In which case there must be many French people wishing Cecilia would return. There is a growing feeling, reflected on the radio this morning, that things are falling apart. I think most of that is press hype, but it is feeding off a real feeling of disillusion amongst a growing number of people. Yesterday a woman interviewed said “We didn’t elect him so he could enjoy himself, but to get France back on its feet.” It is true that at the moment there’s a lot of the former and not much sign of the latter. Yesterday the government caved in remarkably weakly to the taxi-drivers, who had been on strike for only two non-consecutive days. Their proposed reform, part of Attali’s 306 recommendations to make France more competitive, is binned. Tomorrow expect the “no-smoking in public places” law to be watered down because cigarette sellers are complaining their sales are down! People should be rejoicing. And today, most important, the Plan for the banlieues: word is that it is as woolly as its many predecessors. That really is tragic - I have slight sympathy for taxi-drivers, less for cigarette sellers but a huge amount for the people condemned to remain in those tower-block estates which surround so many French towns.

It is a remarkable piece of so-called democracy. Two and a half years ago debate raged throughout France as to whether or not to accept the European Constitution. the issue dominated the written press, there were television debates, the President answered questions live on TV and most importantly the web came into its own and “ordinary” individuals such as Etienne Chouard influenced thousands with his careful arguments posted on his site. Heavily influenced in particular by the web-debate, the result, as everyone knows, was the rejection of the Constitution. This time round not only is there no public debate, but even the French parliament passed the Treaty on the nod - the main debate was last night, almost unbelievably between 9.00 p.m. and 2.00 a.m. this morning. The vote was this afternoon. Hot-foot, the Senate will debate it this evening and vote tomorrow morning. People in Britain sometimes complain that British parliament is a mere tool of government, but at least there the Treaty is being debated over ten days.

It is extraordinary that politicians say they want the European people to feel involved, committed even - and then they pull a stroke like that.

One of the wisest things David Goodhart, the editor of Prospect, taught me was never to write about hot news: when everything’s bubbling all you can do is repeat what everyone else is saying, and usually that turns out to be wrong. He’s quite right and that is my reason for, until now, laying off the SocGen trader Jérôme Kerviel. But now at last I’ve found something which adds depth to the story.

I know next to nothing about banking, and even less about investment banking - the wonderfully astute Tom Freke of LoanStar refuses to reply to my emails, so I can’t call on his take. Instead I just want to point out a piece of the jigsaw supplied by this week’s Economist. When the story broke my instinct told me that one guy cannot lose that amount of money unperceived and that Kerviel couldn’t be the terrible lone fraudster headline-writers and his boss were far too readily calling him. When the examining magistrates (including the excellent Renaud Van Ruymbeke) decided that Kerviel should not be charged for fraud but for the lesser offences of abuse of trust, breaching computer security and falsifying documents, that seemed to me a major step in the right direction. Now the Economist adds to the malaise by telling us very simply about the internal cops working for Société Générale who should have cottoned on to Kerviel long ago: “the bank’s annual report for 2006 devotes 26 reassuring pages to its risk-management practices; more than 2,000 staff worked in the function that year and more bodies were added in 2007. Yet none of them stopped Jérôme Kerviel.” 2,000 people to watch how many traders? One longs to know what they were doing, and did they find and prevent lots of other abuses which are not publicised? To justify that many well-paid technicians they must have. But they either didn’t find or they colluded with M. Kerviel. Nor are the French blind about finance: as the Economist points out, “France’s financiers have helped develop the very markets the political elite profess to deplore. French financial innovation is considered world-class. In the 1980’s the Société Genérale was a pioneer in the development of sophisticated equity derivatives, based on the complex mathematics in which the elite French education excels. It drew on a steady stream of brainy graduates from the grandes écoles….”

The common cry now from hacks and M. Sarkozy is regulation – everything must be regulated. But it sounds as if it already is: if 2,000 specially trained in-house controllers working round the clock can’t find a Kerviel, how many does it take? Ah, but this one was exceptionally bright! “When challenged,” said Jean-Pierre Mustier, head of SocGen’s investment-banking, “he was clever enough to say that he’d made a mistake.” Wow! Now that really is clever! No wonder those 2,000 brainy controllers never suspected anything!

A few months ago I wrote in this blog about the extreme shortage of doctors in rural France and junior doctors’ general disinterest in working out here. That provoked an interesting series of comments from a young French doctor who, believing that rural France has no back-up medical facilities, wanted to know more about the free housing etc rural mayors are offering.  Until now I haven’t been able to answer her questions, but on Saturday I talked to my GP. He agrees the situation in rural France is frankly terrible and rapidy getting owrse, but only as far as front-line GP’s are concerned – medical back-up exists. Mayors of small towns are offering inducements to halt the slide into ghost towns. These include a help buying the practice (interest-free loans), free housing, someone to clean the surgery, free school canteen, stuff like that. But the main inducement, and this is where we delve into the arcane world of French administration, mayors can offer all sorts of deals on income tax and professional charges whereby the incoming doctor is exempt for three years and can thus accumulate a considerable sum.

But even this kind of deal fails to tempt most young French doctors, who, as my correspondent said, want the facilities of a larger town: good theatre, concerts, things I admit we don’t have close by (although there are compensations: last night I was treated to a private screening of “Atonement” – that is I had the cinema to myself. I asked the young woman who is manageress, front-of-house and projectionist (and not a glorified DVD player either, she handles a proper 35mm projector with reel changes) if that happens often. She smiled sadly and replied much too often). But if rural France doesn’t tempt the French it tempts other Europeans. My GP quoted two pretty major local towns (population 501 and 636) each with a Rumanian doctor. “They’re very nice, and not bad doctors,” he conceded, “but their French isn’t up to it. I’ve been present when a Rumanian doctor asked a patient which ear was troubling him – his notes said “fibrillation auriculaire”. I had to point out it was the patient’s heart, not his ears that was the problem.”

My doc reckons they’ll stay for the three years of their tax exemption and then, like Spanish doctors before them, go back home wealthy, or to another small town offering a further three years tax-free. It’s no solution, he says, but at least these GP’s coming from abroad are willing to work hard – French doctors have for years been practising what Nicolas Sarkozy now preaches: Earn more by working more. Paid per patient, they more they treat the richer they are. But apparently the money doesn’t count that much for the young French – it’s time off that’s important. “They want their evenings and weekends. The death of the French health service is the feminisation of the profession,” my doc continues, sounding more and more like an old reactionary, although he can’t be more than 35. He says 60% of medical students and young doctors are women: first of all they want long periods off work to have a family and then regular hours to watch them growing up. The very arguments put forward in the bastions of British maleness in the 1970’s and ’80’s. I don’t know whether they have been resolved. At one time many British women doctors were happy to share a practise with another woman so they each could work part time, but sooner or later someone has to cover weekends and nights.

The other solution is to get used, as the British have done, to foreign doctors. The contact may not be as good, but one advantage is that coming from poorer countries they perhaps won’t tolerate the absurd and expensive molly-coddling French patients have got used to. “Fibrillation auriculaire? Heart flutter? Nothing to worry about dear chap. You’re still alive and that’s what matters: if you’re breathing you can write a cheque. But about your hearing: we must fix that so you make it out for the right amount.”