The State of Suspicion

La Société de Défiance: Comment le modèle social français s’autodétruit
(The Society of Distrust: How the French Social Model Is Destroying Itself)
By Yann Algan and Pierre Cahuc
102 pages, Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2007 (in French)

Last November, France experienced an episode that summed up its society perfectly. President Nicolas Sarkozy’s new government had rolled out a proposal to reform the country’s retirement plan, which allows certain categories of workers to retire earlier and with higher pensions than others. These privileged citizens include workers for the country’s railroads, subways, and public utility firms. For both political and economic reasons, Sarkozy aimed to move their retirement packages more closely in line with those of the private sector. Unsurprisingly, the unions opposed the reforms. So, on November 14, Parisians found themselves without public transportation as trains across the country came to a halt. It was a situation that people in many countries would deem unacceptable; in France, it was just business as usual.

Although French economists Yann Algan and Pierre Cahuc’s important book, La Société de Défiance: Comment le modèle social français s’autodétruit (The Society of Distrust: How the French Social Model Is Destroying Itself), was published a month before the transportation strikes, it offers a prescient, almost scientific, explanation for them. Algan and Cahuc scoured several international surveys, including the World Values Survey and the International Social Survey Programme — both of which ask standardized questions to several thousand individuals around the world to compare the behavior and values of social groups in 26 developed countries — and compared those social norms with the efficiency of those countries’ economies. What they found was that the ways French citizens interact with each other has an impact on the economy that is unique among rich countries; and their findings haven’t soothed French egos.

The Society of Distrust reveals that the French think (more often than people in other developed countries) that their compatriots become rich by abusing an unfair and rigged professional system. Fifty-two percent of the French believe that "one cannot get to the top without being corrupt." In Britain, Norway, and the United States, that figure does not surpass 20 percent. Only the Russians and Poles are more suspicious of their fellow citizens (85 and 70 percent, respectively). In addition, the authors found that 20 percent of French people claim to have "no confidence" in the concept of justice in their country, versus only 7 percent of Germans and 2.2 percent of Danes. Lastly, 25 percent of the French claim to have "absolutely" no confidence in their legislature; on this count, France ranks 20th out of 24 countries for which data are available — behind only Greece, the Czech Republic, Mexico, and Turkey.

But French despair runs deeper. Algan and Cahuc found that the French, more often than people from other rich countries, claim to distrust their compatriots, employers, and colleagues. Experiments conducted by Reader’s Digest proved that a lost wallet in Paris is less likely to be returned to its owner than in most other wealthy capitals. In short, the French are more suspicious and less civil toward their countrymen than citizens in other rich countries. Why? For Algan and Cahuc, the deficit of trust is intimately tied to the functioning of their state and social model. Specifically, the highly centralized and corporatist nature of the French state translates into suspicion and distrust among its citizens. True, several recent high-profile scandals, such as a money-laundering scheme that saw 15 million euros embezzled by the chiefs of the most powerful employers’ organization, haven’t helped instill much faith in the French social system. Yet, Algan and Cahuc argue that there’s something more at work.

We have known, the authors recall, since Adam Smith that the efficiency of the market lies in the confidence of its investors. This lack of confidence from the French toward the state, political and economic institutions, and each other helps explain their distrust toward the market economy. But it also explains the statist, heavy-handed reflex of the government since 1945. Due to the lack of national solidarity, the state essentially bribes specific social groups and gives them advantages (such as favorable pensions) to keep them under control and buy their support. And that system hasn’t exactly produced a streamlined, reform-minded, or fair government. Naturally, when someone like Sarkozy attempts to halt some of these preferential programs, workers lose even more confidence in their government. And so the French again saw their trains grind to a halt last November.

As convincing as their analysis seems, Algan and Cahuc leave themselves open to criticism. Their conclusions are radical, and their biases clear. To find on the basis of mere opinion surveys that distrust and pessimism are stronger in France than in other developed countries is perhaps a little forced. In addition, Algan and Cahuc claim that this mistrust of government and each other is a relatively recent development, appearing only after World War II. Yet any account of the crumbling of French confidence and solidarity in the French political system deserves to be placed in historical context with the political heritage of France. A strong state is old hat in France, where people are long since accustomed to absolute monarchy, unlike countries such as the United States or the Scandinavian nations. That being the case, the authors do not adequately explore their findings of resentment and suspicion among the French, much less offer any new reasons as to why they may be coming to a head today.

It is true that France is not swimming in confidence. The fact that this word was at the center of the presidential campaigns of both Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal, his opponent from the left, is revealing. But to blame the French people for not believing in their country, as Algan and Cahuc do, is misplaced and unfair. This lack of trust can be blamed for the most part on the inability and unwillingness of French political leaders to manage the economic crises that destabilize the country, going back as far as the first oil shock of the 1970s. The lack of anticipation and vision provoked a phenomenon whose reverberations are still being felt today. As such, the distrust of which the authors speak is more likely the effect rather than the cause of the bad management of the country. To have such entrenched social inequalities in a country where the word "egalité" is bookended by "liberté" and "fraternité" is simply unacceptable.

Algan and Cahuc insist that the French have lost their sense of solidarity toward one another, unlike the citizens of other, more united developed countries. But solidarity is an illusory notion. Outside of exceptional national disasters such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and famine, the actual social tendency is to look inward, to handle one’s own problems more than one’s society as a whole. Individualism — the search for personal success, the lure of profit, even the minutiae of daily life — has been gnawing away progressively at whatever could be left of "solidarity" since the 1950s. In fact, all developed countries suffer, even if at different levels, the same hardships: a loss of confidence in the state, malfunctioning of the market economy, unreasonable increases in the pay scales of CEOs while average workers suffer. The French are perhaps not good citizens, but they are not alone.