French tied down by ‘Kafkaesque’ bureaucracy

New movement aims to sweep away rules that stifle many aspects of life and cause widespread despair

FORGET purchasing power, crime or immigration: France’s number one concern is red tape, according to a philosopher who has gathered tales of woe in a tour about the Kafkaesque complexity of Gallic bureaucracy.

Gaspard Koenig spent three months sounding the French out on their daily concerns and has compiled their complaints in a book out this month entitled Simplifions-nous la vie! (Let’s make our life simple!). He also created an online platform to gather testimonies.

Informal meetings with French people from all walks of life often ended up resembling Alcoholics Anonymous sessions, he said, with citizens railing against the labyrinthine rules stifling their personal and professional lives.

“There was always a small hesitation, then people would jump in to moan about the norms on fencing or coypu [rodent] traps. Red tape is the elephant in the room,” said Mr Koenig, 38, who runs a liberal think tank, GenerationLibre.

“I met a farmer who had 50 unopened letters from the French Republic on the seat of his car, who said: ‘I give up.’”

Other “absurd and tragic” tales included a winegrower unable to house grape-pickers in his domain because he risked a €15,000 fine for not having three showers. As a result, he had to pay a company to bus the pickers in.

Another woman who ran a farmhouse inn was forced to take legal training due to the complexity of running her business, as the cross between a farm and hospitality didn’t “fall into one simple category”. “The poor woman just wanted to serve a few meals. This should be about a few basic rules of hygiene and easily understandable taxes,” he said.

Gripes are hardly new. Indeed, they were even in a register of grievances during the French Revolution and every leader promises to tackle the issue. However, it was during his travels that Mr Koenig realised “just what a source of distress it was to our country”.

“These are not just anecdotal tales but something deeper about the way the state is structured. France remains highly Jacobin – very centralised, interventionist and dirigiste,” he said.

“It belies a lack of trust in the individual, whose every move is micromanaged. That creates a huge sense of mistrust and has seen France descend slowly into a sweet anarchy where nobody respects the rules as they are no longer intelligible.” Frustration over this complexity contributed to the 2018 Yellow Vest revolt, he said.

Some of the prime victims, he found, were women. While the men complained, it was often the women he met “who ended up doing the paperwork”.

Other casualties were small businesses. Red tape is thought to shave three per cent off the French economy.

When he clinched the presidency in 2017, Emmanuel Macron, a self-professed liberal promised to free up French society, simplify the labour law and to make the French less risk-averse.

However, Mr Koenig said he turned into a jumped-up, interventionist “inspector of public finances”.

He said: Macron-style liberalism is top-down technocracy that creates laws that are friendly to big business but doesn’t trust individuals or decentralise power.”

Mr Koenig is launching a political movement this month called Simple, which aims to push for simplifying French bureaucracy and his liberal ideas.

He suggests reducing all French law to one volume of 5,000 general principles rather than a law for every occasion. “To cast into question the fiction of perfect equality in favour of equity would be a huge culture shock for France,” he said.

‘I met a farmer who had 50 unopened letters from the government on the seat of his car, who said: “I give up”’