France Is Different Because ...

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.