Half-Way Holiday is a French Farce

Pentecost, or Whitsuntide, is a Christian holiday particularly prized by the fervent: it marks the day, 50 days after Easter, on which the Holy Spirit descended on the disciples, who were so moved they started speaking in tongues. How strange that that cacophony would be echoed in modern France, the most ardently secular of countries. But on Pentecost Monday, the country is in a weird and chaotic state. Schools are out but parents in the private sector are working; trains are on reduced holiday schedules while the Paris metro runs normally; the Musée d'Orsay is closed, the Louvre is open. And the hapless government faces the latest demonstration of how legislative half-measures are no way to run a country.

The trouble began in the summer of 2003, when an extremely hot August led to the death of an estimated 15,000 mostly elderly people, many of whom might have survived if family members, as well as nursing home and medical personnel, hadn't been on vacation. The conservative government of the day declared a "day of solidarity" for the elderly: one additional day of work per year, it calculated, would yield an estimated €2 billion in additional social security revenue to be earmarked for improving retirement homes and other facilities for the aged.

The government's original intention was to make Pentecost Monday the new workday: after all, it always falls at the end of an almost exhausting series of May holidays, beginning with Labor Day on May 1, Victory (over the Nazis) Day on May 8, and Ascension, which fell this year on Thursday May 25 — necessitating yet another "bridge holiday" on the Friday. Still, there was so much carping about forcing people to work on Pentecost Monday that the government backed off making it mandatory, leaving it to employers to devise other solutions if they preferred. Some have taken that to the absurd end of dividing the extra day into a couple of minutes to be added to the end of every other working day.

As a result of the government's unwillingness to govern, only about 40% of French people are working today, mostly those in the private sector (civil servants, of course, are on holiday). Various decrees have undermined the initiative: while shops may remain open, for example, they may not take delivery of goods to sell because trucks are forbidden to circulate. The post office is not working, but banks and hospitals are a mixed bag. Laurence Parisot, the president of MEDEF, the confederation of French employers, decried the "economic incoherence" of the government. She had a similar criticism of its catastrophically ill-managed attempt earlier this year ago to loosen labor laws in a way that would have affected only young employees, which resulted in demonstrations, riots and finally a humiliating about-face — over a mild law that many experts thought would not have been very effective in the first place.

For an editorialist in the conservative Le Figaro, the current confusion reveals "a France that doesn't walk at the same pace, a country that doesn't respect the authority of its officials, a political class that is cowardly in the face of the diktats of public opinion." Many French people will be able to reflect on that latest expression of déclinisme from their living room easy chairs, which will be getting plenty of use in coming weeks anyway as the World Cup gets underway. For his part, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin is spending the day in Finland. He swears it's a "working visit."