French bureaucracy cannot be defeated

When Emmanuel Macron launched his campaign to win the French presidency eight years ago, he promised to cut the number of civil servants in France by 50,000 and impose fundamental reforms on the bloated state. So how’s that going?

In 2017 when Macron was elected there were 5.6 million fonctionnaires. By 2021 there were 5.7 million. Last year there were 60,000 more.

So new promises to streamline France’s gargantuan bureaucracy must be taken with several kilograms of fleur de sel. The announcement this week by Gabriel Attal, Macron’s fourth prime minister (they’re as disposable as handkerchiefs), to ‘débureaucratiser la France’ is a classic example of the belief by politicians (and not just here) that saying something is the same thing as doing something.

Realistically, Attal’s so-called debureaucratisation seems more likely to presage an even larger number of officials, administrating an ever-expanding miasma of regulations on individuals and businesses.