12/06/2004|||110235471738590296||||||

GALLIC TENDENCIES

A friend, scanning recent posts here, says she detects an anti-French bias. I hope that's not the case. (I don't really want to see Team America blow up the Eiffel Tower - honest). I may not like Jacques Chirac, but I'm actually a bit of a Francophile. If I had the money and the time there's no place I'd rather live than the Gers. Reading the conservative press in the States, it's easy to get the impression that France is a hell-hole. Here's an alternative view from that left-wing rag, The Economist:

"For each hour worked, the French are 5% more productive than the Americans. Their economy has outperformed Germany's over the past six years. The French live long, healthy lives and, to the annoyance of Anglo-Saxon theorists, seem happy to boot."

Of course, as the same article points out, the question is whether the state-dominated economy can carry on as it has done in the past. Seems unlikely.

It's also worth bearing in mind that there is such as thing as a pro-American French intellectual. Jean-Francois Revel is one example. Another, the Byronic Bernard-Henri Levy, made an appearance in the New York Times yesterday. He's not too happy with John Miller's transatlantic polemic, "Our Oldest Enemy".

|||Clive|||http://clivedavis.blogspot.com/2004/12/gallic-tendencies-friend-scanning.html|||12/06/2004 05:36:00 pm|||||||||

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