The Art of Not Working: France’s Most Elegant Paradox
Faire le pont is not laziness. It is a civilisational position. And now the bill has arrived.
A friend texted from Paris last week.
“Pick a day,” she wrote. “We’ll have lunch outside. It seems many of my clients are away.”
It’s May. Of course, they’re away.
This year, the French calendar delivered something close to perfection. Five public holidays in 25 days. Both the 1st and the 8th fall on Fridays. Ascension landed on a Thursday. The travel division of Carrefour (Carrefour, the supermarket chain) publishes a guide each spring advising customers exactly which days to book off to build the longest possible bridge. This year, played correctly, you could string together 17 consecutive days without touching a single annual leave day!
The French call it faire le pont. Making the bridge. And they have raised it to something approaching a national art form.
From the outside, you might read this as extravagance. Indulgence. A wealthy country that has never quite committed to the project of work. I understand that reading. I just don’t think it’s right.
Because France has made an argument, it has done so for centuries. And May is where that argument becomes visible.
This piece is part of the MyFrenchLife™ French Culture Deep-Dive Collection, exclusively for Annual Subscribers and Mighty Supporters. The France worth knowing about takes a little longer to tell.
What follows is the full story: the man who wrote a pamphlet in prison that France is still arguing about 145 years later, the productivity number nobody mentions, the flower that accidentally became a symbol of labour, and the prime minister who tried to take May away and lost everything. It’s worth the read.