why france stays socialist
one of the things i keep coming back to is: how does a country with this much education, this much intellectual prestige, this many engineers and philosophers, stay structurally socialist?
mises proved socialism impossible to compute in theory in 1920. hayek explained why in 1945 — the knowledge a market coordinates is dispersed across millions of heads, no central planner can aggregate it. the 20th century then ran the experiment in flesh. east germany against west, north korea against south, mao's china against hong kong and taiwan, cuba against florida, venezuela against chile. same people, same language, same resources. every time the more open side became prosperous, every time the planned side built a wall to keep its own citizens in. the verdict has been delivered, theoretically and empirically. no serious economist disagrees anymore.
and yet france doesn't move. public spending sits around 57% of GDP, the highest among developed economies. our last three presidential cycles offered macron, mélenchon as the credible alternative, and the rassemblement national as the supposed counter-system — all three running on increasing the state. there is no actual liberal option in french politics. the overton window has shifted so far that what would be center-left in the US looks like radical libertarianism here.
this is the puzzle. not why poor uneducated people vote socialist — that's the obvious reading and it's mostly wrong. it's why educated france, the engineers, the énarques, the agrégés, the people who read books and travel and know the data, also vote socialist. or worse: invent newer, more sophisticated socialisms with better vocabulary.
the explanation i keep landing on has very little to do with economics. it has to do with what education does in this specific country.
french education is rousseau all the way down. the implicit anthropology of the school system is that the child is naturally good and that society corrupts. the moral lesson runs from primary school to grandes écoles: the individual is innocent, the institution is suspect, hierarchy is violence in disguise. read the curriculum honestly. it goes from rousseau to foucault to bourdieu without ever encountering a positive theory of creation. you learn dialectic. you learn critique. you learn deconstruction. you do not learn what it takes to build something that didn't exist yesterday.
so what does "educated" mean in france? it means trained in the critical posture. it means equipped with a vocabulary for dismantling, not constructing. the more you climb the intellectual ladder, the better you become at finding what's wrong with what others have built. that is a real skill — but it's a skill that pulls toward the state and away from the entrepreneur, every time.
america produces a counter-myth. silicon valley, the founder, the garage, the immigrant who built something out of nothing. france has no equivalent figure in its cultural pantheon. our heroes are the resistance fighter, the philosopher, the high civil servant, the surgeon, the writer. the entrepreneur is at best tolerated, at worst suspect. ask a french teenager what they want to be — almost nobody answers "founder." the cultural attractor doesn't point there.
then there is the structural math. roughly one in four working french adults is paid by the state. fonctionnaires, hospital staff, teachers, sncf, edf, defense, local government — that's 20%+ of the electorate with a direct economic interest in the state staying large. add the retired, who depend on the state for their pension, and you get a comfortable majority for whom "less state" reads as "i get hurt." that's not stupidity. it's rational self-interest. you don't vote against your own paycheck because a 1945 austrian said you should.
and on top of the math there is the moral monopoly. this is the part that breaks every conversation. in france, anyone who questions the welfare state gets positioned, automatically, as someone who wants the poor to die. it isn't an argument. it's a category. the left has captured the moral high ground so completely that the right itself argues from inside the leftist frame — "we'll spend differently," not "we'll spend less." the rn promising to lower retirement age while mélenchon proposes 60 and macron tried 64. there is no actual right in french politics, only competing variants of the social-democratic welfare state. because the moment you step outside that frame, you stop being a respectable interlocutor and become a moral pariah.
once you see this, you see why being educated doesn't help. education inside a moral monopoly makes you more articulate, not more skeptical. the rousseau frame is the air. you can criticize specific policies, you can complain about taxes, you can be cynical about politicians. but you can't question the premise that the state is the source of the social bond, because the premise is what makes you a respectable french person.
the state, in france, isn't a service provider. it's identity. it goes back further than the revolution — louis xiv, colbert, the centralized monarchy, then napoleon, then the republican project, then de gaulle. the state has carried the national story for four centuries. to question its scope is to question the country itself. that's why every french government, of every color, ends up growing the state. it's not a policy choice, it's a structural fact of what we mean by "france."
the doom loop closes itself from there. high taxes drive entrepreneurs and capital out. the economy weakens. public revenues fall. the political class responds by promising more state — because that's the only solution the cultural frame allows. taxes rise to fund the new promises. more entrepreneurs leave. the gap with dynamic economies widens. at every election the only solutions on offer are variants of the same prescription. macron is the doctor, mélenchon is the doctor, le pen is the doctor. they prescribe different brand names of the same drug.
why doesn't it change? because changing means admitting the cultural framework was wrong. that means admitting rousseau got the anthropology wrong, that the moral monopoly is a trick, that the state is not the source of solidarity, that the educated french intellectual tradition got the deepest question backwards. that admission is anthropologically expensive. it requires giving up the moral identity that gives meaning to entire careers, entire lives, entire family stories. very few people are willing to pay that price.
the deeper point: ressentiment, as nietzsche understood, is not a position. it's an emotion that finds positions. you can argue against a position. you cannot argue against an emotion. and french political culture has institutionalized ressentiment as a noble feeling — the indignation of the just against the unjust, the people against the rich, the worker against the boss. it's the air. it's morally upgraded. it earns you respect at dinner parties. abandoning it costs social standing in a way that nobody talks about openly.
people sometimes ask me why i don't believe france will reform. it's because reform requires either an external shock so violent that the cultural frame breaks, or a slow generational shift in what status feels like. i don't see either on a horizon i care about. the math gets worse year after year, the entrepreneurs leave year after year, the share of state in the economy creeps up year after year. and at every election the same configuration: a slightly different distribution of the same redistributive theater.
the wider observation, the one that goes beyond france. the world has tried this experiment many times. the verdict has been delivered in theory and in flesh. it doesn't matter. people don't vote with their economics textbooks. they vote with their moral self-image. and the french moral self-image was constructed, century after century, to make socialism feel like the natural endpoint of being a decent person. that's why being educated here makes it worse, not better. the more sophisticated you are, the more elegantly you can defend the trap.
i don't think we're leaving this loop. the people who care about creation, about building, about taking risks with their own capital and their own time, will keep voting with their feet — london, lisbon, dubai, california, miami. the country will keep electing the same configuration. and the gap will keep widening until something gives. probably not soon. probably not gently. probably not in the way anyone hopes.