La Reforme de la Retraite
The government just announced that the first round of next year’s presidential election will take place on Sunday, April 18, and the second round between the two front-runners after the first round will be held two weeks later on May 2. Memories of the successive canicules of the summer of 2026 will have faded after a cold, wet winter, and the other issue about which every Frenchman has a strong opinion will surge into the forefront once again – l’âge de la retraite – especially since the second round is scheduled to take place the day after the Fête du Travail du 1er mai – France’s Labor Day – when unions will be marching in the streets and speeches will be made once again, not only demanding the repeal of the 2023 law increasing the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64 (which was suspended by the current government in early 2026 to keep the Socialists from voting to overturn the government), but to reduce the retirement age to 60 years. Ever quick to exploit a popular issue, that is Marine Le Pen’s position.
It is interesting to recall the history of the retirement age in France:
In 1909, the Socialist Prime Minister Jean Jaurès first proposed retirement at age 60, when the life expectancy in France was a little less than 50 years.
In 1928, an early version of a pension law at age 60 was passed in France. Life expectancy was then 55 years.
In 1945, the first pension law was passed in France with a retirement age of 65. Life expectancy as 54 years.
In 1981, the Socialist President François Mitterrand lowered the retirement age from 65 to 60. Life expectancy was 74 years.
In 2010, the Gaullist President Nicolas Sarkozy nudged the minimum retirement age up to 62 years. Life expectancy was around 80 years.
In 2023, the centrist President Emmanuel Macron nudged the minimum retirement age up another notch to 64 years, only to have the pension reform law suspended in February 2026 until after the 2027 presidential election.
The life expectancy in France today is around 82 years.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is based in Paris, just issued a report recommending measures that France should take to get its economy back on track. Figuring prominently among its recommendations was to increase the minimum retirement age, pointing out that the average retirement age in the 38 OECD members states is 64.7 years today and will increase to 66.4 years in the future. The OECD recommends that France align its retirement age with the OECD average and index it to increases in life expectancy – a great idea that would avoid the interminable and inconclusive debates over increasing the minimum retirement age. In fact, the center-right government of Friedrich Merz just announced that it will propose just such an indexation in Germany in the fall, which would result in a retirement age of 67 by 2031.
Add to ever increasing life expectancy the fact that today’s birthrate in France of 1.55 children per woman is expected to drop to 1.45 children (the replacement level is 2.1), so fewer people will be entering the workforce as the baby-boomers and later generations retire and live longer lives collecting pensions. In 1950, each French retiree was supported by nearly six people of working age whose social security withholdings were applied to pay that year’s pensions. By 2050, there will be just over two workers for every retiree.
Simple math and Cartesian logic dictate that for the system to work French workers have to work longer.
Wags have said that, if forced to choose, the French would prefer to retire earlier than to live longer. But those who argue for an early retirement age understand the math. They simply expect the state to make up the pension shortfall with funds from other sources – i.e., from higher taxes on the rich and corporations. Not a great argument for restoring France’s competitivity.
Stay tuned for declarations from presidential hopefuls about the best way to untie this Gordian knot.
But early retirement is just one of many attractions of France, as journalist Samuel Fitoussi pointed out in his column in Le Figaro on June 29 (translation by Google Translate):
Pourquoi, chers amis américains, vous devriez tout plaquer pour émigrer en France
(Why, dear American friends, you should drop everything and emigrate to France)
It is fashionable in your circles to mock Europeans. We are supposedly weary, debt-ridden, deindustrialized, incapable of innovation, and resigned to becoming a museum of our past glory. You should come live in France instead. Everything you hear about us is merely populist disinformation spread by the far-right fringe. Life here is sweet.
Detractors will tell you that in France, you will suffer from heatwaves. It is true that we lack air conditioning—forgive us for saving the planet. We sweat together, fraternally, in a spirit of republican and inclusive perspiration, and we bathe in the clear, pure waters of the Canal Saint-Martin [a canal in Paris]. And unlike your ultra-liberal country, which leaves its citizens to fend for themselves, the State mobilizes 100,000 civil servants every summer to create infographics on the best ways to beat the heat (closing shutters, drinking water, and much more—let’s not give away all our industrial secrets).
Detractors will tell you that in France, you will be poorer than in the United States because wages are half as high. First of all, that is a gross exaggeration: you are forgetting about deferred wages [work now, get paid later]. Secondly, while the wealth you generate in the US sits idly in a savings plan (invested in the S&P index—a mere 10% annual growth), in France, it subsidizes social housing in Seine-Saint-Denis [the low-income département north of Paris] and funds a thriving network of associations: Afro-feminist collectives deconstructing gender stereotypes in preschools, university chairs on systemic racism, and yoga classes for non-binary people in Algeria. Some things transcend base material considerations.
Detractors will tell you that trains in France are always late. That is false. More than half of trains run on time, and nearly a third are air-conditioned. As for strikes, the issue is vastly overstated: there are a full 150 days a year with no strikes at all.
Detractors might claim that France—and Europe—are militarily weak. On that front, we have no lessons to learn from anyone. You boast of your might, your aircraft carriers, and your "surgical strikes." But have you ever managed to trigger world wars? Twice? On your own soil? Not even close. You are capable only of small-scale, distant operations—devoid of grandeur, tragedy, poetry, or epic scope.
It is true that France lacks the massive data centers needed to power AI models. Instead, we have the CAF [Caisse d’associations familiales or Family Benefit Fund that provides financial assistance to French residents, including, for example, helping pay the rent]—social welfare offices—that help sustain human beings. A more dignified approach. As for our AI models, they are frugal, eco-friendly, and low-carbon. They are also free of gender bias and developed responsibly. Furthermore, if you are a researcher at OpenAI or Anthropic, know that in a French lab, you could finally put your brain to work for the common good—filling out the gender equality index, the CSRD directive [the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, requiring large companies to report data on environmental, social and governance factors to be able to better assess the impact of the company and its activity on the environment], and form SPX-09-Q/4 (detailing the carbon footprint of your model training) every quarter. As for your pay, it would no longer be opaque or a source of inequality; instead, it would be public and pegged to a salary scale approved by both social partners and Ursula von der Leyen. In the face of ruthless ultra-liberalism, there stands European humanism, placing the human being at the heart of its network of solidarity.
And then there is everything the naysayers won’t tell you. In France, we have real football matches, free from intrusive interruptions that break the flow (like "cooling breaks" even when it’s only 17 degrees [62 degrees Fahrenheit]). In France, we have cheeses other than neon-orange cheddar. We have café terraces where you can linger for three hours over an espresso without a waiter pressuring you to free up the table for the sake of crass commercialism. We have tall [the original word was “grande”, which can mean either “great” or “tall”] actresses: Doria Tillier [an actress I’ve never heard of] is 1.80 meters tall [5 feet 10 inches].
So come visit us! To immigrate, there is no need for the xenophobic red tape your country demands (work visas, proof of income, a clean criminal record, etc.). Just say you have a serious, highly contagious disease, and we’ll take you in under the AME scheme [State Medical Aid, a social assistance scheme designed primarily to cover the medical expenses of foreign nationals residing illegally in France].
La poésie de la langue de Molière
Another reason to emigrate to France is to bask in the beauty of the French language.
A survey of members of the Poetry Society of America found French to be the language most pleasing to the ear. For the poets polled, the most beautiful-sounding words were amour (love), fleur (flower), mélange (mixture), épaulette (shoulder ornament), désolé (sorry), and papillon (butterfly), all noted for their flowing vowels, soft consonants, and melodic rhythm. (The survey voted the most beautiful-sounding English words to be “diaphonous”, “ethereal” and “mellifluous”.)
The survey is about the phonetic beauty of words, not about their meaning.
“Je suis désolé, mon amour, que le papillon s’est posé sur mon épaulette et pas sur ta fleur – un étrange mélange.”
