meritocracy system as the politicians.
Then came the liberal professions, at the top of the category were doctors, lawyers and architects followed by the accounting professions and financial advisers. These classes were for the most part economically privileged.
Scientists and engineers as non-independents were less wealthy than the liberal professions fell into its sub-division. After came a sub-division composed of a broad group of academics ranging from university professors to schoolteachers. These were followed by small business people, often one or two man firms in a wide variety of business activities from travel agents to small building firms, closely followed by the commerçants, that is to say shopkeepers, high street services, restaurateurs and cafe owners.
At the end of the scale came the workers, divided into skilled workers including non-professional hospital personnel, office workers and qualified factory workers. Finally came those with rudimentary skills such as public transport workers, bus and truck drivers and shop workers followed by those who had little or no skills. At the very end of this category were those with the most basic educational qualifications, they worked as cleaners, as unskilled building labourers and drivers.
The status of any class of salaried employee was considerably improved if they were in government employment, which in France brought an extraordinary number of advantages to all those who achieved that enviable position. Government employees were composed of a vast privileged mass described as fonctionnaires who had special pension rights, negotiated salary deals, special health insurance rights and improved holidays, the list was long. They included members of all classes with a broad range of classifications from high-level civil servants down to pen pushers and garbage disposal workers, in addition there were also those who were fonctionnaires assimiles, who did not have the full status of functionaries, but who enjoyed many of their privileges. In total the number of government employees was over four million. The fonctionnaires defended their acquired privileges tooth and nail, there ultimate arm being the threat of bringing the whole country to a standstill.
The system of fonctionnaires was also a shelter reserved for the many Gallo workers with low educational qualifications, who would have been otherwise unemployable.
France had not been exempt from the transformation that modern technology had brought to industry with the gradual decline of employment in the traditional manufacturing sectors of the European economy. Automatisation and computerisation had replaced manual labour with the disappearance of millions of jobs in industry, in parallel machines reduced labour needs in a wide range of other sectors including building, construction and industrial cleaning, not forgetting the automation of mass transport as bus, tram, underground and railway services were robotised, with disappearance of hundreds of thousands of jobs in the name of cost savings and modernisation.
It was not only the more menial jobs that became more precarious as employment patterns changed, there were fewer jobs for all, however it was the lowly skilled and the poor who were effected first and foremost, those who formed the underprivileged class, who had no hope of ever owning a home or acquiring pension rights.
The progressive cost of healthcare and longer life expectancy coincided with the fall in the number of jobs. Governments strove to invent new forms of employment and jobs, both in government service and in the private service sector, to ensure an equitable distribution of wealth that in spite of the transformation had continued to grow.
The great mass of lowly skilled and unskilled labour, was provided by the non-Gallos, who through the pass system were employed as temporary foreigner workers on a short-term contractual basis, which was however renewable. The foreign workers were lodged in the Special Residence Zones, reserved districts in major towns and cities; requiring day passes to travel to and from their work places.
To take advantage of the low price of the vast pool of labour, factories were set up nearby both sides of the frontier between France and Algharb by Gallo-European businesses as well as those from other countries of the Federation. However, family units were strictly forbidden for the foreign workers.
Politically the French had always had a strong socialistic tendency, though a majority of votes were cast for the right. Both the right and left in French politics were fragmented into a wide spectrum of tendencies from Trotskyites to Greens, floating centrist variations, to moderate and conservative parties on the right and the nationalist parties of the far right.
However, whatever party the French voted for, it was the same technocratic elite that returned. As in the Fourth Republic governments came and went but the same old political hacks returned with different ministerial portfolios. The cynicism of the political classes reached an extraordinary degree contradicting what was visible to the general public from foreign settlement to unemployment and corruption and the loss of autonomy to Brussels.
The socialistic vision of French politics was worn out to the point where it was no longer believed by their followers, it was the same for the vestige of the communist electorate based on their nineteenth century Marxist concepts. The world had changed whilst they debated dead ideas.
Socialism in all its traditional forms had been invented with the industrialisation of Europe demanding the collectivisation of the economy and production. It had persisted in its ideas until the late twentieth century; the vociferous and supposed humanist extreme left wing had forgotten that they had been raised in totalitarianism with its adherents marching over the unmarked tombs of their victims. Then the new economic theory took over explained how the interaction of all the economic actors provided wealth to the masses.
When problem of distributing the riches of the nation, by the creation of jobs, no longer responded to political stimulation, for the simple reason that fewer and fewer jobs were needed in industry, as a consequence the stress within French society had slowly built up until it reached breaking point.
The state had been unable to halt the progress of science and technology, dictated and powered by the needs of capitalism, virtually eliminating the need for manual labour in industry. Cost reductions were the prime motivation as production lines and packing lines were automated and goods were distributed by automated logistics systems, disposing of all manual labour and unskilled handlers.
The unemployed were the unskilled; the computer illiterate, they had the choice of working in precarious lowly paid service sectors or accepting the sop of benefits. The non-Gallos represented the vast majority of the unskilled.
The Federation and globalisation of the economy had changed everything, not that globalisation was global, it could have been defined as embracing those it affected, the labour markets, consumers and capital, the rest were abandoned to their fate. The developed economies consumed, they also provided the capital, they no longer needed mass foreign labour for production, they controlled communication, media and transport, and in short globalisation was a thing of the rich.
The utopian vision of the socialistic philosophy: the state, nationalisation, contestation was dead, unable to reply to the needs of the working classes, either providing employment or an ideology adapted to a world that had changed. Socialism was replaced by a doctrine of empty promises by populist politicians who struggled with forces beyond their control or comprehension, promises based on the sole idea of election and waving the mirage of nationalistic glory and acting out their brief moment before the masses that sat hypnotised before their TS screens, duped into believing in the power of democracy.
Ethnic Affairs
The Ministry of Ethnic Affairs and its Department of Ethnic Regroupement was responsible for the application of the Boublil laws relating to the revision of naturalisation and the Non-Gallo question.
Revision of naturalisation was one of the principal articles in the legislation that defined the rules that determined those who were by culture and ancestry Gallo-Europeans and those who were not. The Nation of France was not racist the minister proudly proclaimed pointing to J
ews and blacks, who were classified as cultural Gallo-Europeans. He explained that the auto-determination of non-Gallo-Europeans had been accorded, under the enlightened guidance of le Martel, at their own demand.
The law defined those being Gallo-European on the simple premise of :
their place of birth and that of their parents and grandparents
their nationality and that of their parents and grandparents
their language and the maternal language of their parents
their religion and that of their parents and grandparents
No physical sign or distinction was taken into account, but the system efficiently separated those non-Europeans who had arrived in France since the middle of the last century. In practise it was a points system though the officials could by applying any single criteria, as defined in the law, cancel an individual’s nationality or naturalisation. Those who failed to meet the requirements were deported to a country of his or her choice within a period of two months in which they could lodge an appeal. A Tribunal of Exception listened to appeals, which did not interrupt the two-month period. The appeals were treated in an expeditious manner, few being accepted. The deportation orders were supervised