La Rentrée

Sunday, August 31, 2014

     The return to classes, known as la rentrée scolaire, starts tomorrow in much of France.  In Caunes, classes at the ecole élementaire, to which children six to ten go, starts Tuesday.  For several weeks the supermarkets have been featuring bookbags, notebooks, pens and other school items in special displays designed to make parents spend part of their government allowance on them.

     There is also a rentrée au travail - the return to work after the month-long August vacation; and there is the rentrée literaire, the release of new titles by the publishing houses; and then there is the rentrée politique.

     In the Socialist Party ("PS"), the rentrée is preceded by the annual end-of-summer conference at La Rochelle, on France's Atlantic coast.  This year the conference has begun tumultuously, the recent firings of three rebel ministers opposed to reforms spearheaded by the prime minister, Manuel Valls, having fanned the flames of revolt through the party's ranks.  Valls was booed by activists from the party's more leftist wing from the moment he stepped off the train, although he tried to minimize the significance of the outbursts, calling them "healthy debate".  There is talk among political pundits of two possibilities for Hollande's beleaguered government, should it receive a no-confidence vote from the French equivalent of the House of Representatives, the Assemblée Nationale, in a few weeks: one is that the PS would dump Valls and reach across the aisle to bring in a prime minister from Sarkozy's party, the UMP.  However, the UMP need not accept the offer of cohabitation, in which case the government would have to call elections, three years before Hollande's term ends officially.

     The state of the French economy justly gives cause for concern: there has been -0- growth for the first two quarters of 2014, and public spending consumes 57% of France's gross national product.  The size of the country's debt is almost at the level of the gross national product, and the unemployment rate is holding at 10.1%.

     Meanwhile, the new minister of economic development, Emmanuel Macron, indicated in an interview he gave Le Point, a free-market leaning newsweekly, the day before he was officially named, that France needed to revisit the thirty-five hour work week.  The thirty-six year old Macron, a Socialist and a former banker with Rothschild, will be the target of all his less market-friendly colleagues' ire, with his predecessor, Arnaud de Montbourg, leading the charge.

     Valls signaled a few weeks ago that the rentrée would be difficult: perhaps even more difficult than anyone might imagine.