04 February 2014
What does entrepreneur mean to the French?
by Richard Pooley
Former US President George W Bush was reputed to have told Tony Blair: “The trouble with the French is that they don’t have a word for ‘entrepreneur’.” Oh, how we mocked him. But it turns out that George W was more of a linguist than we thought.
On 20th January, France’s Economy Minister, Emmanuel Macron, was interviewed on the combined television and radio stations BFMTV and RMC. He was on Bourdin Direct, France’s answer to the BBC’s Today programme. He had come on to explain President Hollande’s latest plan to reduce France’s overall unemployment rate of 10.6%. In particular, how was the plan going to help young French people get work? One in four of those aged between 15 and 24 years old is not in education, employment or training.
Despite being a minister in France’s Socialist government since August 2014, the 38-year-old Macron revealed last year (also on BFMTV) that he had only been a member of the Socialist Party from 2006 to 2009. This came as little surprise to those on the Left in France. After all, Macron had once been an investment banker at Rothschild’s. So, nothing he said in the interview was likely to persuade them that he was on the side of the poor and unemployed. Even so, he must have been puzzled by the reaction to just one of his sentences: “The life of an entrepreneur is very often harder than that of a salaried employee”. His next two sentences, which attempted to explain why, were ignored in the subsequent furore. “One must never forget that. He can lose everything and he has less security.”
What was so surprising to British expatriates like me and my wife was not the predictable ire of trade union leaders defending their salaried members. It was the realisation that all commentators, across the political spectrum, had a different definition of entrepreneur from the one we had. The report on the interview in right-wing Le Figaro assumed Macron was talking about company bosses – chefs d’entreprises. Left-wing Libération, under the headline “No, Mr Macron, the life of an entrepreneur is not harder than that of a salaried employee”, brought in tables from L’Insee, France’s Office of Statistics, and the Banque de France to prove that “tradespeople, craftsmen, shopkeepers and company bosses” had an easier life than employees. They earned a good amount and they were less indebted. Now, it is true that the artisans – the carpenter, plumber and electrician – who we have employed to do work on our house run their own businesses. But they are sole traders. They are not really entrepreneurs by my or Macron’s definition, especially as they don’t want their businesses to grow so much that they have to employ anyone. Why? Because if you employ anyone in France, you have to pay around 50% of their salary in national insurance. And you can’t sack them if they are no good at their job. The shopkeepers in our village work longer hours than their British counterparts but only one that we know of employs assistants. Far better to bring in a member of the family if extra help is needed.
I am an auto-entrepreneur. So is my wife. We translate this as self-employed and most of our French friends agree. Certainly, we have not created a new business. I am semi-retired (a concept few French, including our French accountant, can comprehend) and carry on doing some of the things I did when running a company in the UK.
Macron himself tried last week to clarify what he had meant. Bizarrely, Le Figaro reported it as a “mea culpa”. But he was not apologising, merely explaining: “We should stop thinking that there are company bosses on one side and salaried employees on the other. When one talks of ‘les patrons’, they are people who manage companies, who sometimes are salaried employees too, who did not create [the companies]. And on the other hand, there are the entrepreneurs and it these people I wanted to talk about. The entrepreneurs, these are the men and women who take risks.”
Is Macron in a tiny minority then? Yes, when it comes to the definition of the word entrepreneur. But maybe not in what he and one or two politicians in the right-wing Republican Party think must be done if France is to recover from its economic malaise: major reform of its labour laws, including abandoning that shibboleth of the Left – the 35-hour working week.
We listened not only to the 25-minute interview of Macron on Bourdin Direct but also to the hour of phone-ins and broadcast tweets which followed. Jean-Jacques Bourdin conducts this process as well as the interview itself. He always seems to try and ensure a wide range of views are heard on his programme, despite himself being a self-professed supporter of the centre-right politician François Bayrou. But nearly everyone who rang in or tweeted on 20th January endorsed what Macron was saying. The only other interviewee who I have heard generate the same kind of enthusiasm and excitement was the 26-year-old National Front Party deputy, Marion Maréchal Le-Pen, niece of the party’s leader Marine Le-Pen.
It will be impossible for Macron and other reformers to succeed if the French really are as anti-entrepreneurial as their leaders and the media think they are. But maybe many French people have begun to feel that their word – entrepreneur – means not someone who bosses and exploits people but someone who creates companies for people to work in.
There are rumours that Macron will not survive next month’s cabinet reshuffle. Some are also predicting that he will stand in the presidential election next April. What as? A socialist? A republican? An independent iconoclast? I doubt he would win. But he may persuade many French people, especially the young ones, to have a more positive attitude towards the job creators in their society – the entrepreneurs.
