 |
ZIV KOREN/POLARIS for TIME
|
FRENCH LESSONS: A scene from Jean-Pierre Jeunet's award-winning movie Amélie, starring Audrey Tautou, about a Montmartre waitress who brings happiness |
|
 |
|
France Is Different Because .. |
 |
 |
|
|
|
... it sees itself as different. That perception crosses over, though imperfectly, into reality. Leave it to America to idolize entrepreneurial zeal; the question of how one man prospers carries little weight in France, a country more interested in how politics manages the destiny of the nation. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
Posted Sunday, April 14, 2002; 15.05GMT
It's
no accident that France's postwar élite gravitated not into
business but into politics and civil service. It promulgated the idea
that if being American or even British is largely an individual enterprise,
being French is a collective mission — one into which the élite
has long presumed a special insight.
It has crafted a society that gives a large role to the state, which
built one of the world's best public health systems and an enviable
transport infrastructure, and preserved a rich cultural heritage.
France has given its people time not just to work, but to enjoy the
fruits of their labor — to the delectation of the rest of us.
But as the following stories show, France today is in many ways less
different than it considers itself to be. The fascination of politics
has waned as its main actors settle into readjusting the state rather
than reforming it. The civil service doesn't hold the allure it once
did for the country's best and brightest.
And the state may be hard-pressed to offer all the services the French
have come to expect. In the hit film Amélie, it is a Montmartre
waitress who brings happiness, not a Paris bureaucrat (which may account
for the movie's global popularity). She is hardly working alone. France's
vibrant corporations are profiting from globalization, even as its
politicians decry the trend. And a new generation is ready to redefine
the republic in its own image. The French, bolstered by the ideal
of being different, are sure to hold homogenization at bay.
|
