PARIS — After taking office this summer, French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin promised that "economic patriotism" would drive his effort to revive a battered government and slumping economy.
Because the smooth, silver-haired De Villepin tends to be verbose even by the lofty standards of French political discourse, foreign corporate executives may not have paid him much attention.
Then last month, Hewlett-Packard Co. announced plans to cut 1,240 jobs in France by 2008 as part of a worldwide restructuring. And the new government responded with a double-barreled blast of economic patriotism a la De Villepin.
The mayor of Grenoble, site of the company's research facility in France, led a delegation to Hewlett-Packard headquarters in Palo Alto to lobby against the job cuts. De Villepin warned that the company should "respect its obligations" and might have to reimburse the state for any "specific public aid from which it might have benefited."
President Jacques Chirac, in a news conference, criticized Hewlett-Packard as well as leaders of the European Union for not intervening.
"A big international business established in Europe with a not-negligible part of its market here, earning a lot of money, [makes] decisions with strong social consequences, and the European Union does not see itself as involved, concerned or have something to say," complained Chirac, who appointed De Villepin and appears to be grooming him for a presidential run in 2007.
The implications go beyond Hewlett-Packard, which has 4,800 employees in France. The government's aggressive campaign to protect French workers and companies contributes to questions about the inherent contradictions of the "French model": a robust private sector full of multinational corporate giants coexisting with a vast welfare state and a political class that often sounds hostile to economic globalization or, as Chirac calls it, "Anglo-Saxon liberalism."
When does legitimate defense of French interests cross the line into populist protectionism? And does the government's interventionist bent hurt or help foreign investment and national prosperity?
By most measures, France is in crisis. The unemployment rate has been stuck at around 10% during Chirac's 10 years in office, and annual growth has been sluggish. The French spend less time on the job than most Europeans because of a 35-hour workweek, high youth joblessness and increasingly early retirement ages.
