Samizdata

No link I regret to say but the BBC is reporting that exit polls in France indicate that fire-brand nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen has edged out the socialist Prime-Minister Lionel Jospin into second place in the presidential elections behind front-runner Jacques Chirac. At the moment it appears as if Chirac and Le Pen will be contesting the presidency in a head-to-head fight. This could get very….well, interesting.

Many years ago I visited Bergen, in Norway, and the locals told me that the weather for my stay was by far the best it had ever been. Well, now I’m in the south of France, in a town called le Boulou (they call it a ‘village’ here), just south of Perpignan. The weather is the worst it’s ever been. On Wednesday night there was a, by South of England standards, regulation noisy thunderstorm, with lots of rain, as you’d expect from a thunderstorm, and there was further heavy rain the next day. This turned the pathetic little smear of dampness they call their river into a real river! A raging torrent the width of a football field in fact. Le Boulouans couldn’t sleep for the din! The weather is now improving, and by the time I leave it will have recovered its normal warmth and sunniness.

Meanwhile France is … France. The food shops are far better than in England, but finding a job is far harder than in England – two facts which may be related. Employing other people is a nightmare of expense and bureaucratic awfulness. If you aren’t something like an enarque or a multinational or some such, the only way to get ahead economically is to run a Mom and Pop store of some sort and do your own labouring. Thus France abounds with these, and they’re run like crosses between ordinary businesses and art galleries, being expressions both of love and “greed, for want of a better word” (see my previous posting about Wall Street). France has the same inane cartoons on TV as England. It also, more famously, has the same currency as nearby Spain, which I have to admit is a convenience if you live twenty minutes by car from Spain, as my hosts do. The internet seems to work.

Le Boulou seems to be a real ‘community’. People know each other, perhaps because they still shop in the same local Mom and Pop stores that the English have abandoned for supermarkets. Tomorrow I am attending a rugby match, which will presumably abound with local spirit, rugby being at its strongest in this part of France (France having just beaten England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Italy, i.e. everybody, in the recently concluded Six Nations Rugby Championship). I’m looking forward to this game greatly.

I’ve not been able to meet any local libertarian intellectuals so far. It would seem that they’re all on holiday, elsewhere.

Great news item via Reuters in Paris (no link yet, sorry):”a Paris bank employee who works for 37 hours a week, has 37 days holiday a year and sometimes wonders what to do with all her free time.

“When I go down to visit my family in Brittany for a long weekend they ask whether I actually have a job at all,” she says of the new leisure granted to her and millions of other French by a four-year-old law that has shortened working hours.

As certain columnists like to say, you couldn’t make it up.