Why are the French in denial of reality?

by Richard Pooley

“The overwhelming majority of French people believe that retirees don’t cost the public too much, that France can still spend much more on its public services, that it can raise taxes on business owners and shareholders, that Putin’s Russia isn’t our enemy, and that the European Union costs us far more than we get from it.”

So begins a 30 October post on the website* of Jacques Attali, the 83 year old economist who is perhaps most well-known in France for the time – 1981 to 1991 - he spent as Socialist President Mitterrand’s special adviser. So special that he sent notes every evening to his boss on economic, political and cultural matters, and attended every cabinet meeting. Many regarded him as the second most powerful man in France. He went on to be the first head of the European Bank of Reconstruction & Development (EBRD), and advised Presidents Sarkozy, Hollande and Macron. He remains one of France’s most influential intellectuals.

He is right to mock most French for what he calls their “denial of reality”. It is however a bit rich for him to do so. One could argue (and many French people do) that Attali instigated the French belief that there is no cost in people having a retirement of twenty-three years on average, that the country can afford to increase public spending to whatever it needs to maintain their superb public services, and that French companies and multi-millionaires can easily pay higher taxes. It was in the first two years of the Mitterrand presidency that the retirement age was reduced to 60, the working week was cut to 39 hours, and paid holidays went from four to five weeks. In 1982 many banks and major industrial groups were nationalised. Public sector employment boomed. A wealth tax was introduced. Some of these measures were reversed but most survived. Indeed, the right-wing President Jacques Chirac cut the working week to 35 hours.

Now, it is true that Attali in 2007-8 headed the Commission pour la libération de la croissance française. Its forty-two members (which included the then Rothschild investment banker Emmanuel Macron) were tasked with finding and removing “the bottlenecks that constrain the growth” of the French economy. Their report recommended such things as the deregulation of working hours and the professions, the removal of taxi licensing, and the easing of restrictions on shopping on Sundays. The recommendations were unanimous and some of them were included in the Loi de modernisation de l'économie of August 2008. But in the end it was too little, too late. The French were not going to accept smaller government.

My article on Only Connect in April 2023 was entitled France: “A paradise inhabited by people who think they're in hell” I tried to explain why the French were revolting against President Macron’s attempt to raise the official retirement age from 62 to 64, by 2030. Forgive me for reprinting and updating some of what I wrote.  

To illustrate how out of line the French were with other rich countries’ retirement ages I published the highly simplified, but self-explanatory, chart above.

And now in 2026 the French, with a life expectancy higher than most people on this planet, are demanding that they retire even earlier, at 60 rather than the current 62, and that the French state finds the money to pay for the resulting huge increase in the pensions bill.

State pensions in France are linked to one’s earnings and to the type of work you have done. Currently, you get 37.5% to 50% of your annual average earnings on retirement, up to a maximum of 48,060 € per year. There is no minimum pension. However, the least a complicated system is likely to give someone who has contributed to a pension but has other income is 9,000 € per year. For someone living alone with no other income the minimum is around 12,500 € per year. There are other benefits too (e.g. for elderly people in need) which don’t count as pensions but which ensure that hardly any retiree in France is poor in an absolute sense.

French trades unions claimed that Macron’s pension reforms would hurt the poor and the working class. This was untrue. The reforms increased the number of ‘qualifying years’ required to get a full state pension from 42 to 43 in 2027. Essentially a qualifying year is one in which you paid social security contributions or had a valid reason not to – e.g. being on maternity leave. So, if you started work at any age under 20, as most working class people did, you still get your full pension when you reach 62. Moreover, you can retire early if you are disabled or were in a job deemed physically demanding, which many manual working class jobs were (though aren’t now – e.g. train drivers).

It’s the well-educated, who maybe did not start full-time work until they graduated from a university or grande école as late as their mid-twenties, who find they have not worked enough years to earn a full-state pension when they get to 64 (let alone 62 or 60). But do they need a full pension?  Surely, they should have saved or invested part of the much higher income they have earned than their not-so-well-educated fellow citizens? But such “Anglo-Saxon” thinking is very unFrench.

A few years ago I was having dinner with a neighbouring couple in our French village. Hugues had retired earlier than 62, having worked for most of his life for SNCF, the French state-owned railways. Martine was still working as a psychiatric nurse. We started talking about the differences between the British and French pensions systems. His annual pension was then about 35,000 €. She expected to get a similar amount when she retired (which she now has). When I told them what I expected to receive from the UK once I reached 65 – below £9,000 a year – they were incredulous. How could I live on that? I explained that I, like about two-thirds of British adults, had a private pension built up over many years by deductions from my salary and contributions from my employer(s). They could barely comprehend this system.

Private pensions are almost unknown in France. Even our excellent French accountant found the existence of mine an oddity. Macron introduced tax incentives to get more French people to save for their retirement. But the vast majority of French people expect the French state to provide for them entirely when they retire. After all, they have contributed all these years through high income taxes and social security contributions. Their attitude can be summed up as: “It’s our money you are taking from us by delaying our retirement.” 

Agnès Poirier is a journalist and author who has lived both in London and Paris, writing for serious newspapers on both sides of the Channel. She said this in March 2023 when trying to explain why the French were protesting so fiercely about Macron’s attempts to reform their pension system:

"The French are very fortunate and probably don't realise how fortunate they are.”

Her view on why the French so readily take to the streets to protest is worth repeating:

“We French were born to confront authority. For better or worse, whether we like it or not, whether we are even conscious of it, the revolution of 1789 changed the way we see ourselves and relate to power. Compromise is an art reserved for others. Confrontation is what we seem to be born for, what we secretly seek, what makes us tick. Macron is the first to enjoy a dispute. In a room, he will always walk straight to the few dissenters and debate with them at length, for he believes in his power of persuasion. With the pension reform, which was badly explained to the public by the government, he has taken a gamble for the sake of the country’s finances and in the interest of future generations, who will be increasingly burdened by the cost of their elders’ pensions. Tomorrow’s youth will probably be grateful to him, but they are not born yet. Today’s young people, however, are tempted to join the protests.”

They still are. And tomorrow’s French youth will not be thanking Macron. His gamble failed. His reforms have been effectively rejected.

In his post, Attali said that “France will only emerge from its denial of reality through a catastrophe or a bold initiative.” He had made it clear at the beginning that the catastrophe would be an extreme left-wing (Jean-Luc Mélenchon) or right-wing (Marine Le Pen) presidency. These were the people who, like the majority of the French, denied reality. So, what is his bold initiative? I read his post several times. I couldn’t find it. Instead he waffled on about the need for “trusted third parties – a free press, independent science, and a respected judiciary – without which no one will be able to distinguish a fact from propaganda…” So much for French intellectual rigour.

I don’t have a bold solution to offer either. I had high hopes of Macron. He promised to reform the French economy, to help it grow through mild deregulation and less state intervention. The Left and Right were vanquished; the Centre had its chance. But Macron was too arrogant, too hectoring. He is an accomplished orator but a lousy communicator. The result? A hollowed-out political centre and a growing far Right and far Left.

Maybe it requires the catastrophe of a Le Pen presidency and government to make the French accept reality.

*https://www.attali.com – “France will only emerge from its denial of reality through a catastrophe or a bold initiative.”  My thanks to friend and OC reader David Lee for alerting me to this post and for sending other articles on the current dire situation in France. He himself lives there with his French wife. He was born and raised in Argentina by his British parents and has spent a lot of his life in the UK. So, he has direct experience of a nation’s denial of reality.