Is Emmanuel Macron’s France in the vanguard of a new economic revolution?

As he delivered his televised address to the French public on Monday night, following a month of street protests and intensifying mob violence, Emmanuel Macron sat behind a gilt-framed antique desk, flanked by a pair of golden lampshades. Behind him loomed one of the imposing golden doors of the Elysee Palace's Salon Dore. Yes, "dore" means golden.

President of the rich? Whatever gave people that idea? Yet appearances can deceive. Despite the Marie Antoinette-style furnishings of the Elysee and the complaints of the gilets jaunes protestors, the statistics suggest the French Fifth Republic is actually a more egalitarian nation than its major peer economies.

According to the World Inequality Database, the share of total pre-tax income flowing to the pockets of the top 1 per cent of people in France is around 11 per cent. That compares with 13 per cent in Germany, 14 per cent here in the UK and 20 per cent in the US.

Post-tax income inequality, as measured by the Gini index, is also lower in France (29 per cent) than the UK (35 per cent) and the US (39 per cent) and roughly the same as in Germany.

The wealth share of the top 1 per cent in France is also well below that of the US. Comparisons with the UK and Germany when it comes to the distribution of wealth are more difficult due to a lack of comparable data but they are likely to be broadly similar.

What about economic performance? The French unemployment rate (9 per cent) is higher than the US (4 per cent), the UK (4 per cent) and Germany (3.3 per cent). Yet average real wages seem to have grown much more in France than in the UK and the US since the financial crisis a decade ago. Here in Britain they are still lower than they were in 2008.

The policies Macron announced on Monday - an increase in the minimum wage, a reduction in the overtime tax, an encouragement for employers to pay workers a Christmas bonus, scrapping an increase in the tax on pensioners - were mainly about putting money in ordinary people's pockets.

According to France's public accounts minister, this package will cost around €10bn (£9bn), or around half of one per cent of GDP. That's not negligible, especially considering the government was hoping to see its budget deficit decline from 2.8 per cent of GDP next year to 2.2 per cent in 2020 and the eurozone's rules define a 3 per cent deficit ceiling.

While Macron's package has been interpreted in some quarters as a "turn to the left", his refusal to reinstate the wealth tax on those with total assets of more than €1.3m, which he scrapped last year, shows there are limits to how far he is prepared to redistribute. He may, ultimately, need to capitulate on that too, just as he has on the new diesel tax, which sparked the recent protests.

The president suggested the unrest has stemmed from "40 years of malaise". That could be interpreted as an attempt to spread the blame after 19 months in office characterised by unforced errors, but there is something in this diagnosis.

While there are those like Marine Le Pen who ascribe the sense of dissatisfaction in France primarily to immigration, a glance at the demands of the (admittedly diverse) gilets jaunes suggests a dominant economic element.

In the wake of the destruction left by the Second World War, France basked in the "trente glorieuses" - thirty years of rapid economic growth and rising living standards for most.

Since the 1980s the rate of both overall GDP per capita growth and productivity growth in France has slowed. It seems to have shifted down again in the wake of the financial crisis a decade ago.

What's ominous for Macron is that this seems to be part of a global trend of slowing economic growth, suggesting it will not easily be turned around by policies in one country.

Defeatism is usually poor counsel and so it remains today. There surely remains potential not just for France, but for all nations, to increase national productivity growth through investments in infrastructure, research and skills. Living standards can be improved not just through redistribution but through a new generation of low-carbon technologies, through institutions that foster a greater sense of economic security, and through governance innovations that enable people and communities to take more control of their lives.

Yet the transition out of malaise is unlikely to be smooth. And if the economic pie is not growing as fast as it was, arguments and tensions about its division are likely to become more intense. Perhaps in this respect, as it was in 1789, France is in the revolutionary vanguard of nations once again.

French to displace English as the world's first language? Probablement pas, President Macron

Est-ce que c’est possible? The French President Emmanuel Macron wants to make French the “first language of Africa” and “perhaps the world”.

“The radiance, the attractiveness of French does not just belong to France,” he proclaimed to students in Burkina Faso last week.

Macron may have shattered the mould of the formal French political system when he established an entirely new political party and sensationally stormed the Élysée Palace earlier this year, but when it comes to French language promotion, the familiar old elite Gallic script endures.

The French establishment alternates between chauvinism and paranoid defensiveness when it comes to its mother tongue. After Britain joined the common market in the 1970s English dethroned French as the primary means of communication within the bloc, putting noses in Paris out of joint. An attempt to designate French as the European Union’s benchmark legal language a decade ago failed. But some in France are now sensing that Brexit opens an opportunity for another crack at a Francophone restoration in the EU.

Within France, the language is policed by an official Académie of the great and good, which periodically updates a blacklist of distasteful Anglo-Saxonisms such as “le weekend”. The domestic law has even been deployed in the cause of defending the language. In 2006 a French subsidiary of General Electric was fined €500,000 for issuing one of its software manuals in English.

Yet, unfortunately for Macron and any of his compatriots who are dreaming of a Francophone future, such bureaucratic and legal levers are unlikely to be effective.

Two economic concepts explain the spread of language: network effects and path dependency. Network effects describe how the network becomes more useful the more people join it. If an increasing number of people speak a tongue it becomes increasing worthwhile for others to speak it too if they want to communicate efficiently. Path dependency describes how initial conditions can have a profound influence on outcomes over a long period. 

Today’s pre-eminence of the English language in international commerce and culture stems from the fact that Britain created a globe-spanning empire in the 19th century, which then effectively gave way to an Anglophone cultural hegemony in the early 20th century with the economic predominance of the US. These initial historical conditions, combined with network effects over the decades, are the reason English dominates international communication today.

It could have been different. There’s nothing uniquely or universally accessible about English. For all its glories, the tongue of Shakespeare is by no means the easiest language to learn. What if France had emerged as the dominant seafaring European power in the 1800s? What if French immigrants had settled in the colonies of what became the United States, rather than English ones? A small change in those initial conditions might have resulted in us all speaking French today. We might have been set on a different path.

But why can’t things change? Why shouldn’t France “disrupt” English and become the lingua franca of the 21st century? The French investment bank Natixis forecast a few years ago that the numbers of the world population speaking French could overtake English, Mandarin, and Spanish and become the language with the most speakers by 2050. This was essentially based on projections of rapid growth in the population of Africa (where French is commonly spoken due to the legacy of French 19th century colonialism).

Yet path dependency and network effects are more powerful forces than demography. It’s true an African born in the coming decades might grow up speaking French. But there will remain extremely powerful incentives for that same young African to also learn English if they have aspirations to travel, study abroad, or work in firms that are linked to the global economy.

After all, even today there are more native Mandarin speakers (982 million) than native English speakers (375 million), but English’s domination (with 1.5 billion total speakers worldwide) is as strong as ever, even with the economic rise of China.

The Chinese Communist dictator Mao notoriously argued that power grows out of a barrel of a gun. When it comes to the power of a global language, military domination certainly had a role in the early days, in establishing those initial conditions, those colonies and empires. But today a language’s power is mainly drawn from the peaceful network. One thing it certainly doesn’t flow from is the diktats of French bureaucrats and politicians.

This article was originally published in The Independent on 03/12/2017