Economic realities and modern France have rarely seen eye to eye: and so it has long been with the question of the national retirement age.
Ever since Mr Macron became president in 2017 there has been a debate about when people should qualify for a state pension.
It has been 62, but is now scheduled to rise to 64 by increments of three months at a time by 2030.
President Macron announced this two years ago, but the process is barely under way: various concessions to the trade unions and other workers’ groups about people doing particularly strenuous work have helped facilitate the change.
Even a pensionable age of 64 would still be two to three years lower than in many European countries, where economic reality kicked in some time ago.
Indeed, in Denmark pensionable age has recently risen to 70, which if it were promised in France would probably result in the country being reduced to rubble.
In Britain it is 66, and it will rise to 68 within 20 years.
The British, living longer than they used to and having despaired of the state keeping them in the style to which they are accustomed, have long since resigned themselves to increasing retirement ages.
In Britain, too, there may be a rising state pension age, but there is no longer a compulsory retirement age: and many Britons choose to work into their 70s or beyond because their health allows it.
Longstanding opposition
This is not unknown in France, of course: but there has been a level of militancy against raising the retirement age from long before the Macron era that is simply unknown in most other European countries.
The Conseil d’orientation des retraites (COR), which advises the government on the pensions system, is known to have told France’s rulers that by 2045 the retirement age must rise to 66, or the country will face ruin: as in Britain and other advanced countries, people are living longer, and the expense to the state is becoming crippling.
Pensions were not meant to cripple economies: when Mr Asquith devised the British old-age pension in 1909 it kicked in at the age of 70, when the average life expectancy for men was 48 and women was 52.
Similar calculations were made by other states as they went down the road to welfarism.
For some reason, however, a proportion of the French public sufficient to cause serious trouble is violently (metaphorically for the moment, but quite plausibly literally in time) opposed to any further rise in the age.
Indeed, they have only settled for 64 with the greatest reluctance.
Laurent Berger, of the CFDT union, called the proposal to go up to 66 ‘an outright provocation’ and warned all who cared to listen that it would be ‘fiercely resisted’.
Olivier Faure of the Parti Socialiste was similarly belligerent, claiming the COR’s figures were ‘cooked up’ and the idea of further increasing the age represented an ‘attack on ordinary people’ and ‘an injustice’.
Marxist traditions
The idea of France possibly living far beyond its means, and how over-generous pension arrangements might be paid for, seems not to have occurred to such people.
The problem is presented as a class issue, as if it is part of some Marxist dialectic, with the French left in its various incarnations representing the idea of an economically realistic pensionable age as meaning that retirement will be something that only rich people can afford.
And that is part of the problem with this, and various other political debates in France: it is as though the collective worldview has not moved on since Charles de Gaulle fell out with the hard left at the dawn of the Fourth Republic.
It is as if the world is and has been for 70 or 80 years unchanging, and discourse can still be conducted on those anachronistic terms.
In recent weeks the French economic growth figures have been revised downwards; as matters become worse, those determined to live in a welfarist dream world are digging their heels in.
And there is also an impending problem that the French are hardly alone in not properly recognising: the march of Artificial Intelligence and the way it will chew up jobs done by human beings, who pay taxes and, for the moment, do not require unemployment benefit.
The challenges for societies such as France and Britain where welfarism is deeply entrenched will be massive.
As things stand, a quarter of French public spending goes on pensions.
The government has been warned that, unless things change, the system will be 115billion euros a year in deficit by 2035.
Yet some in the political class not only refuse to give an essential lead on this vital issue, but demand the complete reverse.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who admittedly is an increasingly marginal figure in French politics but still has a remarkable immunity to understatement, called the idea of a higher retirement age a ‘declaration of war’ on the French people.
He wants pensionable age reduced back to 62; and so do the Rassemblement National, who are by no means a marginal force in French politics, but could conceivably end up providing the country’s next president.
France’s politics are so unstable that anything, however absurd, could happen. François Bayrou, the prime minister, promised to review the rise to 64 and then ruled it out.
He has appeared to be living on borrowed time more or less from the moment he took office, preserved thus far by the constitutional impossibility of Mr Macron calling a new general election before this month.
Many in the political class speculate that Mr Bayrou could be censured in the autumn, and that an election may then be called.
Much support for reducing the pension age is entirely cynical, and pays no regard to economic reality. That might not, however, prevent it from happening.
