What's a President to do?

France is still rioting. Next Wednesday the unions and student leaders have called for a nation-wide strike; it's a good thing that I'm coming back from Paris on Monday; if I'd planned to return on Weds, I'm sure these plans would be nixed. Anyway, the labor unions and the students are saying they won't negotiate until the CPE is gone. De Villepin (Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin to his close friends), who headed this whole CPE thing, is desperately seeking support, and has so far refused to scrap the plan. Sarkozy (or Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sárközy de Nagy-Bócsa to his intimates) is biding his time and waiting for de Villepin to collapse so he can sweep in and save the French right and [of course] become president in the process. Chirac, has remained fairly quiet letting his feuding underlings grow their own wings. But many people are asking - where is Jacques? Is he still alive? After his "vascular incident" last year he has dropped from public view and some people (me at least) are wondering if he didn't die and the government is just holding the image of him up until they can figure out the next best course of action (we are talking about a huge bureaucracy; it wouldn't happen over night). You all saw "Dave" right? If they can do it at the White House, they can do it at the Elysée Palace.

Anyway, that was all proven false yesterday in Brussels where Jacques Chirac is back in stunning fashion. When the French head of the EU Business lobby, Ernest-Antoine Seillière, gave a speech in English because it is "the language of business." Chirac threw a tantrum and stormed out with his Finance and Foreign Ministers. The news reports that I have seen do not delve into subject any more than to report that Jacqu-o left and that Seilliere and the French government are at odds for, among other things, the official governmental policy of "what is French is French and we don't give a s--t what is good for the economy as long as Suez, Sanofi, Thales, Alstom, etc, remain part of the FRENCH economy." Of course when it's a French company* doing the buying there's no problem.

I am getting off track here; what started as a criticism of Chirac has [once again] degraded into a criticism of the French economy in general...why does this always happen? Anyway, as I was saying, I don't know any of the inside story as to why Chirac stormed out, but does it matter? The man speaks English...well. Crying about something won't change the fact that English is much more used in the world and in the world of business than French. Yep, your all-expense paid trips to famous French chateaux may convert a few EU Politicians to speak a little French, but are you kidding. The Indians and the Chinese and the Saudis and the Russians are not going to learn French when they can already get by with their limited English.

This whole problem is France's fault though. The French language demands an enormous amount of study and focus to speak and write. With something like 80,000 different conjugations per verb it's a lot of work. On top of this, the French are very stuffed up about the practice of the language. A French person that makes a speaking error is below dirt. A peasant at best. Foreigners get a little bit of slack, but they are insanely rigid about the language...There is no English Academy (of course the site wouldn't be in English) to define the "real" words in the language - we let society determine this, not a bunch of stuffed shirted sitting in some huge library in Paris. If everyone is speaking English it's because it is an easy language to speak poorly, but we don't really care how you speak it - as long as we can get the jist of what you're saying. I read somewhere that people can effectively do business with 500 English words. That's not a lot considering that there are around one-half million recognized English words. French has around 100,000 (less if you consider L'Academie's numbers), but sometimes I think you need all of them; plus certain French people like to shove their vocabulary down your throat - it's a mark of honor if you can use a word that the other person doesn't know.

The meeting was also discussing certain nationalistic attitudes taken by certain EU countries to ensure that certain companies remain part of these certain countries. I think Chirac was trying to make a point about the whole thing, but if anything this makes him look dumber.

*Yeah, I know that the Alcatel-Lucent talks are about a "merger of equals," but does such a thing exist? In a merger of equals, Alcatel would account for about 65% of the combined company...