Recently, I did something that I believe most Americans in France never get to do. I ventured into the belly of the French bureaucratic beast and found myself in the offices of the Inspection du travail in Nîmes, or what we call in the US, the Employment and Labor Office. I will not go into all the boring and sordid details of why I was there, just let me say that employed as a director of a French cultural centre who hires people, I needed some more precise information and advice, a kind of second opinion, after consulting with a lawyer. Needless-to-say, I will not name names to protect the guilty.
France, as you might have heard, is the country par excellence for bureaucracy due to its particular history (can you say Louis XIV, Napoleon, and Charles de Gaulle) and because of the establishment of socialist government and policies under the presidency of François Mitterand in the early 1980s. As an American, and especially a New Englander, I have a certain antipathy to a centralized system of government rules and regulations without real local autonomy or control. However, I have found the French system does contain much reason and justness given human nature seen from outside an American progressive and optimistic point of view. The French view, which I would argue is medieval and Catholic, is much more pessimistic about human behavior and nature and does not believe in human perfectibility. It seems they have a greater sense of the animal in us rather than all that « being made in the image of god » stuff because, due to their hundreds of years of religious warfare from the Albigensian Crusade to the wars against Protestants to the French Revolution and the Dreyfus scandal and finally the deportation of Jews during WWII, they seem to have gotten over religion to a greater degree than Americans. It is also probably why they have a much more permissive sense of sexuality and a fuller sense of sensuality. Yet, I find these attitudes of the French changing more towards an American sense of « Yes, we can change, and change is good » as their economic present and future becomes worse and worse. Here religion can come in with irrationalism to fill a void created by the logic and reality of economics.
But back to the Inspection du travail, what does it look like? First of all, it had moved from the imposing yet charming 19th century government centre of Nîmes to the new, rapidly developing outskirts, which is a French version of American sprawl but not mall. Here you have big box-like structures of warehouse style stores just like US Walmart stores. Plus, there were new, large, gaudy restaurants—like the Tendance Rouge (or Red Inclination), a Chinese fusion restaurant specializing in cheap Wok fried food and nightly and family entertainment—built to pack them in, with parking; French bistrot, forget it. This is not the picture postcard France that attracts the most tourists of any country in the world; 75 million annually, the US is second with 50 million. With the Conforamas and HyperUs there are sprinkled in new government office buildings; the exurb yet within city limit space to give all those French contemporary architects a palatte to work on no restrictions, so they can create their boxes and contemporary horrors, usually depressed even before they are finished being built, a place away from archaic, charming France, commonly known in as La France profonde (deep France).
The building I had to go to had the blandness of dirty, white concrete, with a flat roof, and much glass and steel, but with no real view except the highway and other late examples of bad bauhaus. The inside design seemed to take no concern of where humans were to be. On entering, the receptionist was placed in an odd corner and angle that immediately gave off a Kafkaesque feel.
I made my way up to the floor where the employment consultants had their offices, knowing there would be the inevitable bureaucratic wait. Sure enough, there was an oddly angled room off the corridor with a ticket box to take a number, just as if I was getting in line for some meat or fish at a supermarket in the States. Of course, for such a huge building, the interior space had been ingeniously reduced for the public, so that the waiting room, filled with women, babies, limping young men, and piles of folded information flyers on small tables, seemed to have no air to breathe or feel the least bit comfortable in; no lounging in the waiting area.
The other clients were silent but polite, and even the babies were quiet with no crying or fussing, and after a half an hour I began to imagine they were drugged. Every so often a person would appear, ask who is next, and disappear with the next person or group waiting. The inspectors, mostly women, were casually dressed looking like they were about to vacuum a house rather than try to explain the byzantine rules of French labor law.
After an hour wait, not too bad for this kind of thing, a gray, thin man asked who was next. I gave him my ticket, which he did not even look at, and I followed him into a kind of half office with an empty desk, a couple of chairs, and nothing on beige walls in front of a wall of glass covered by venetian blinds looking out to nowhere. I was expecting to be in some kind of cubicle, but this was more pleasant, although open entirely on my backside to the corridor.
I explained why I was there and that I was an American. I think with this cue, he proceeded to speak deliberately and clearly as if I was a 5 year old. This was fine with me, because I had some rather complex questions, which he logically and systematically explained. Only a few times in the hour I spent getting information did his face show any surprise. I kept thinking to myself that this guy has probably heard it all in one form or another. Still he was not jaded, condescending, unpolite, or obtuse. In fact he was clear, rational, helpful, and pleasant. Again given the design and reputation of this bureaucratic structure, I kept on wanting to know, « Where’s the Kafka? » Just in the architecture? On this trip, this day, there was to be little of it except in the exurb aspiration of contemporary sprawl.
And so, to a good restaurant, Le Riche in Alès—with that blog to come later.
© 2010 J. Livernois
