Re: Up the creek without paddle...
@Don Jefe
Wow, did I touch a nerve?
You manage to infer an awful lot from a couple of sentences. The the point I was making, but that you chose to ignore, was that the French economy is not working in splendid isolation (or indeed working much at all), the French people aren't expecting to sacrifice standard of living to avoid an inconvenient phone call from work. So far at least, they're not doing more with sufficiently less to be able to prop up the fat, comfortable and bloated state and associated political class that they are lumbered with.
In my last job I didn't *expect* to receive a call from work during the middle of the evening, but as the company had customers in the US and far east I had to accept that it was a possibility and be prepared to deal with it. That said, I have never wanted to devote my life to work, I have other, better, fish to fry.
Hollande has an economy that's struggling. He needs to do *something* about it, and has to date, done not much at all except enact legislation that will make it that little bit harder to attract inward investment.