A Grinding Halt

The French are trying to strangle themselves. They seem to do this from time to time and they're back for more right now.

The French transportation unions are striking and today to flex their muscles. Buses, trains, flights – even local transportation is affected. The biggest cities will feel the most pain – meaning Paris will be dying with some types of trains running as low as 50 percent of normal in the middle of the week.

Flights volumes at Orly and DeGaulle airports are being reduced to 50% and 70% respectively. Airlines are prioritizing which flights go and which don't (transcontinentals get top billing). There's talk of renewing the strikes on a day by day basis with possible rolling strikes so everyone can share the pain.

But that's just the inconvenient part. The crazy part is that we're on day 16 of dockworker strikes which have caused ships to line-up at the Port of Marseilles for days at a time. Goods, including oil are not making it into the country. Corsica is literally expected to run out of gasoline any minute – if it hasn't already. All of their stuff comes in by boat.

Why? Because in order to protect France's AAA credit rating – which is a foundation of France being able to access capital cheaply as well as a tenet of its commitments to maintain EU and global stability – France has to undergo pension reforms.

A few days ago, a law was passed to raise the minimum retirement age from 60 to 62. A bill just passed the lower house of the French Parliament to raise the minimum age for a full-pension retirement from 65 to 67. All indicators say the legislation will make it through the Senate too.

There are protests and strikes in different parts of France – mostly the big cities like Paris, Lyon, Marseilles, and Bordeaux. Here in Cannes, people are either not highly political or very quiet about their thoughts. I've seen libraries more politically charged than Cannes was yesterday in the wet weather.

Tuesday is a national transportation strike and apparently, the buses which run up and down my street are fewer.

However, much to President Sarkozy's credit, he's holding firm. In my humble, outsider opinion, waiting two years longer for government full-pension retirement (which our country doesn't even have) is better than watching your country financially sink and pull Europe and the world down with it. I'd rather leave something for my children and grandchildren. That's just me.

To the American mind, getting a government full-pension seems like a luxury. Having seen other parts of the world – the very idea that people would strike over these financial reform measures would be unfathomable in Singapore where the country's well-being, financial health and survival are paramount. I have no doubt that everyone would be on the new program in a heartbeat and applaud their government for steering the ship of state so well.

But Europe has lived in a welfare state for a very long time now and messing with people's pensions doesn't go well here. In some fairness, our country will face pains like this when we finally take Social Security reform by the horns. The choices will be harder than raising the retirement age two years and calling it solved.

That said, this is the second country we've/I've been in now where protests against austerity measures have started to cut off the supply of goods. At the end of our time in Patmos, transportation strikes were beginning to affect food supplies to grocery stores and restaurants. Patmos, like Corsica depends on boats for its very life. Islands are the first places to feel the pain. The people in Athens and Paris don't think about what happens to a family in Patmos or Corsica.

Naturally, this brings us to Napoleon. Yes, I just used Napoleon's birthplace to make a major segue combined with a left turn. All this talk of strikes, protests, French unions rising up against government to protect their benefits somehow got me thinking about one of they key dispositions of the French people – they want to be taken care of.

I firmly believe that despite France's truly functioning democracy, its value is less on democracy than liberty. In its heart of hearts – in a part of France's soul it would only admit to if you wrestled France to the ground and threatened to remove all the art until it answered your question honestly – it loves a benevolent patriarch.

The French loved the idea of overthrowing a checked-out, uncaring, out-of-touch Bourbon king who had them in poverty while the corruption of his state went rampant. Heads rolled – literally – and there was liberty. But after a quick and scary dance with Robespierre, France's First Republic lasted all of five minutes before Napoleon Bonaparte went from revolutionary general to Emperor. And as my four-year-old niece said on the phone yesterday, "You know what? You know what?" – people liked him.

Not only did he bring glory to France and create a massive French empire throughout the continent and overseas, but he did something far more sweeping – he created property rights and civil liberties in codified form.

For the first time ever, even peasants owned their homes. Everyone was afforded due process of law (unless you pissed off Napoleon) and there was security in tangible and intangible ways. Napoleon – megalomaniac that he was – advanced the quality of life for the French people, and also for many of the people whose countries he invaded.

France struggled its way through 80 years of regular and severe political upheaval from Napoleon's First Empire to a Restoration Monarchy, Second Republic, and Second Empire before it made its way to the Third Republic where it finally had a successful democracy. And it had two presidents in its entire existence. Why? Because they like a good patriarch.

Fast forward to the Fifth Republic (the one we're on now) and they still have six year presidential terms where the norm is multiple terms. DeGaulle, Pompidou, Mitterrand and Chirac are fixtures in France's psyche. Good luck finding a town in France that doesn't have a dedication to DeGaulle and Pompidou – and Clemenceau for that matter (shout out to the Third Republic).

All this to say that the French look to their leaders to take care of them. They want their presidents to navigate the passages of uncertainty and keep them safe and comfortable. They want their personal freedoms, but they don't really want to make all the big choices and decisions.

Sarkozy is under fire in a lot of the media here. He's becoming unpopular because he's not making people feel so taken care of. I think he's doing exactly what it takes to keep France in a position of strength and that the heat will pass when people can see their country's place in the world was successfully safeguarded.

If they don't cut off supplies and kill themselves first.

Here, on the dunes nearby the old chapel of Our Lady of Safe Travel
Napoleon returned from the island of Elba, and set up his first camp on the night of March 2nd, 1815 before thrusting toward Paris by the perilous passage through the Alps.

Sent from my iPad