Rev­o­lu­tion Sticker, Nantes

“C’est la crise, madame!”, you can hear every­where when vis­it­ing France.

Yes, indeed. The eco­nomic cri­sis is now pretty much global and France is no excep­tion. Well, here it actu­ally started quite a while ago and it doesn’t take an degree in econ­omy to real­ize that French are get­ting poorer, and that life has became more dif­fi­cult in the last decade.

These days, French are obsessed with their “pou­voir d’achat” (pur­chas­ing power) and the “pre­car­ité” (inse­cu­rity) of their job. Food and other nec­es­sary items seem to be get­ting more expen­sive every­day, and mean­while, unem­ploy­ment rate is high.

The Franc dis­ap­peared for­ever on Feb­ru­ary 17, 2002 and France adopted the Euro as the new cur­rency. Shortly after, prices were raised quite dra­mat­i­cally (and are still ris­ing!). Is the Euro respon­si­ble? Econ­o­mists dis­agree: some say it is, some blame the shops (for exam­ple, the super­mar­kets) for rais­ing prices more than they should have, some say life feels more expen­sive because mean­while, salary haven’t been raised in years. But no mat­ter who you blame, life is more expen­sive — crazy expensive.

Take a lot at a few items (all the price quoted are in US$):

• In Canada, bananas sold in super­mar­kets are around 60 cents a kilo: in France, $2.60 (gen­er­ally speak­ing, all the veg­gies I have bought so far at the mar­ket in France were at least dou­ble the price com­pared to Canada)
• A movie ticket in a big the­ater is $8, ver­sus $13 in France
• The new Mac­Book Air is $1800 in Canada, $2520 in France
• The new Ipod Nano is $140 in Canada, but $200 in France.
• Gas was 65 cents when we left a week ago in Canada, it’s $1.30 in France

Basi­cally, as a Cana­dian, the only things cheaper in France are cheeses, wines and some mag­a­zines. Phew. The French feel goods in stores cost more while they have less in their pock­ets… and it does look this way.

Mean­while, mas­sive lay-offs have raised the unem­ploy­ment rate, which was already pretty high at 8.5% (Jan­u­ary 2009). An incred­i­ble 19.1% of 15 to 24 years old in France are unem­ployed as of 2009… And it’s not like French who are work­ing are rich. The min­i­mum wage is the SMIC, which is now at 1037,53 € per month. Sta­tis­tic varies, but it seems that the median salary for a house­hold is about 2,000 € a month.

There is also a hous­ing cri­sis, espe­cially in the biggest cities. Rents are extremely expen­sive, there aren’t enough social hous­ing (wait­ing list up to 14 years in Paris!) and land­lords are kings: they don’t hes­i­tate to demand a per­ma­nent job with a salary that is at least three times the rent. Stu­dents, immi­grants and poor to middle-class pro­fes­sion­als have the hard­est time to find a place to live… even though over 10% of prop­er­ties in Paris are vacant (mostly because own­ers keep them for real estate spec­u­la­tion). For­get about buy­ing a prop­erty, unless you are very very rich. In 2009, in Paris, the aver­age square meter price in the most expen­sive area of Paris (the 6^th) was 9 800 €/m2, while the cheap­est was the 19ème at 5 060 €/m2. Ouch.

As the result, some of the pop­u­la­tion is liv­ing in very bad con­di­tions, because peo­ple either don’t find a place a rent, either can’t afford the rent. Recently, there have been sev­eral scan­dals: run­down build­ings burned in Paris and stu­dents moved into squats because land­lords didn’t want them as ten­ants. In 2007 The Chil­dren of Don Quixote set up hun­dreds of red tents for home­less peo­ple along a canal in a trendy part of Paris to put the plight of the home­less into the spotlight.

French aren’t exactly thriv­ing. The gap between the afflu­ent and the rest is widen­ing (as I wrote last year vis­it­ing Paris) and no one seem to know how to solve all these issues. We are going through a cri­sis as well in North Amer­ica, but there have been down times, and there will be up times. Now, France has been in cri­sis for a long time — what will it take to rebound to this situation?

Related arti­cles:

1. 8 Things More Expen­sive in Canada than in France
2. Rebel France III
3. Rebel France IV
4. What I Miss From France… And What I Don’t!
5. Lucile And Mur­taza: From France and India to Montreal