{"id":105379,"date":"2026-10-18T03:00:23","date_gmt":"2026-10-18T07:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=105379"},"modified":"2026-10-17T19:32:16","modified_gmt":"2026-10-17T23:32:16","slug":"fifty-years-of-french-decline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/fifty-years-of-french-decline\/","title":{"rendered":"Fifty years of French decline"},"content":{"rendered":"

On X, auto-translated from the original French, Guillaume Herblot<\/a> laments the dynamic, innovative France of fifty years ago in contrast to the sclerotic bureaucratic swamp it is today:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In France, we invented the Concorde.<\/p>\n

In 1969, it took off and reached Mach 2, a symbol of Gaullist grandeur, designed to challenge the Americans.<\/p>\n

In 1972, the TGV 001 broke the world speed record on turbine power (318 km\/h).<\/p>\n

In 1981, the electric TGV connected Paris to Lyon at 260 km\/h. In 2007, it shattered the world rail speed record: 574.8 km\/h.<\/p>\n

In the 1970s, the Messmer Plan launched the largest civilian nuclear program in history: 58 reactors, providing up to 70-80% of our electricity, an energy independence that the whole world envied.<\/p>\n

Dassault, Sud-Aviation, EDF, Framatome, SNCF: our engineers were the best. We were ten to twenty years ahead of almost everyone else.<\/p>\n

Then 1981, Mitterrand. Massive nationalizations (banks, steel, chemicals, electronics, aeronautics). The 39-hour workweek. Auroux Laws. Exploding social charges. All-powerful unions. Punitive taxation. Rigidified labor laws.<\/p>\n

In less than fifty years, socialism transformed a country of conquering engineers into a country of strikes, offshoring, and relative stagnation.<\/p>\n

Industry went from about 28% of GDP to 11%.<\/p>\n

The Concorde was abandoned. Our nuclear program was nearly dismantled for decades due to deadly political choices.<\/p>\n

This isn’t fate; it’s the price of an ideology that preferred to redistribute and regulate rather than build and innovate.<\/p>\n

A word to the wise.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the topic of France and the French, it is rather surprising to find that as recently as the French Revolution, “French” was almost exclusively the language of the court, the mercantile middle classes in urban areas, and the church. Most “Frenchmen” spoke local dialects that had little in common with formal French<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

A double guillotine
Mus\u00e9e de la R\u00e9volution fran\u00e7aise<\/em> via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

Just a few decades earlier [than 1900] the country was still a maze of local languages, while rural areas of 18th Century France were in many ways a foreign country.<\/p>\n

“Most subjects of Louis XVI spoke their own language or dialect”<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the 1740s, the astronomer Jacques Cassini (son of the more famous astronomer Giovanni Cassini<\/a>, for whom the saturnal probe<\/a> is named), sent an expedition out to fully map the country for the first time. When one of its geometers climbed Mont Gerbier de Jonc, “he could take in at a glance several small regions whose inhabitants barely knew of each other’s existence”, author Graham Robb writes in The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War<\/em>. (My primary source for most of what follows).<\/p>\n