François Hollande is best known for his escapade on the back seat of a motorcycle from one amante to another in January 2014. Romance is in the French blood. More accurately, it is a part of French amour propre; they would rather be seen loving than making small talk with great Indians. Some years ago, our President invited Nicolas Sarkozy, then President of France, to be his guest on Republic Day. At the party the President threw in his honour that evening, Sarkozy had no time for the guests; all the time, he talked on the phone - presumably to Carla Bruni, his next-wife-to-be.
But that is not all that French presidents do; they also deal with serious state business in between. Hollande does reforms by the dozen. In 2013, he promised two hundred reforms, entitled ' Le choc de simplification': that is right, the shock of simplification. Let me review the more striking ones.
The first one is that all regulations relating to relations between the administration and the public are to be put into a single code, so that people would not have to go looking for them; in a compact little booklet available to every citizen, she would find everything she needed to know. If she did not, she would find the telephone numbers and email addresses of the bureaucrat she should contact. If she wrote twice to the administration and got no reply, she could assume that she had approval for whatever she had asked for. If she wrote electronically, she had a right to an electronic reply. If a small company wanted to bid for a government contract, it would no longer have to fill up long forms. Its company identification number would suffice. Shops would be allowed to open on Sundays.
France has had a system of consultative commissions - each government department appointed a group of bureaucrats and "experts" who could be consulted whenever necessary. The consultations could also be an excuse for endless meetings and procrastination. Hollande has abolished 168 commissions. Meetings no longer require physical presence; they can be held electronically. Circulars can no longer be issued by bureaucrats; only ministers can issue them.
The government has created a web address that people can use to get information about taxes and pay them. This address is up and working, and is a revelation ( http://www. impots.gouv.fr/portal/static/). Amongst other things, it enables people to declare their incomes and revenues and find out what tax they have paid and have to pay, and creates a space where everything related to them and the government is readily available: 91 per cent of users have declared themselves satisfied.
The French government is concerned about the high dropout rate of students. To reduce it, it has put more resources into training of teachers, facilitated teamwork amongst students and given more recognition to good teachers.
It abolished the lowest bracket of income tax of 5.5 per cent, and in effect, raised the threshold. (Incidentally, tax brackets vary enormously with the size of household: the tax-free threshold for a family of husband, wife and three children is more than four times the one on a single man or woman.) It has given businesses a tax credit of 4 per cent in 2013 and 6 per cent in 2014 of the wage costs of employees in research, development, innovation, training, market research, energy transition, ecological adaptation and replenishment of working capital.
Apart from taxes, France levies heavy social security contributions. They have been abolished on those who earn only the minimum wage, and employers who pay only the minimum wage: essentially, they have got a tax credit of 1.8 per cent. This step also frees 200,000 small businesses of red tape. It is a rather dubious concession, for it would encourage employers to pay no more than the minimum wage.
French businesses pay an apprenticeship tax, which goes to finance training in employment; some are also obliged to spend on training. The rules governing these obligations have been simplified. Now, workers get a job credit, which they can use to get training when they enter the job market or are unemployed.
France has a great railway system, with fast, safe, on-time trains. Till recently, the trains were owned and run by SNCF, while their scheduling and management were done by RFF. Now, the two companies have been merged. Paris has an extensive metro. Most of it was built in the late 19th century, when Paris was much smaller; its outer suburbs are less well served. The government has for long had a plan of building lines connecting them, but problems of land acquisition and ecological objections have stalled it. Now the government proposes to start building Line 15 which goes round Paris, and to try and hurry up the public inquiry on new lines that would cross the city.
The trend all over Europe is towards abolishing the distinction between practical and impractical education - in other words, universities and training schools - and to let students mix combinations of courses. Finland has gone furthest in this direction. France has also started. It proposes to set up more professional training schools, and locate more of them in the provinces.
The government is still to make up its mind on the report of two members of parliament, Claeys and Leonetti, who proposed that terminally ill patients who ask for it should be put into a permanent state of no-feeling - about the same thing as euthanasia.
Most of the French population lives in cities, and the cities are sick: they are divided into ghettos, there is high unemployment, and the unemployed are more prone to indulge in crime and drugs. The government saw the need to reform cities, but did not know how. So it appointed an expert committee to design an institut de la ville durable, which will generate knowledge about how to build cities for the future.
It thinks it knows better what to do with rural areas - improve medical and other public services, and connect the administration of cities with surrounding villages. It will make a plan to develop national teleworking. To improve the rural reach of the civil service, it will open government offices in a thousand rural post offices. It wants to develop villages as hosts of four types of tourism - œnotourism centred on local wines, mountain tourism, slow tourism (that is, tourists spending time wandering through ruling areas) and local art. It will encourage members of parliament to start rural projects, and assure them of help from regional prefects. It will give 1,000 medical scholarships on the condition that when they graduate, the doctors will settle down in rural areas. It will make sure that 871 rural petrol stations will not close down. It wants 40 per cent of the food eaten in rural areas to come from villages by 2017.
The government has become aware that it is even more French - ethnically and culturally - than France. So it will prohibit discrimination in recruitment, take non-bureaucrats into civil service recruitment committees, and open new channels of recruitment into the civil service.
Finally, France will give independence to New Caledonia, its beautiful colony in the Pacific.
