solidarité

If you want to understand French politics (a wild challenge not an attainable goal), you have to grasp the concept of the word solidarité first. Whenever grey men engaged in the affairs of society enunciate their ideas in front of a TV camera, solidarity takes inevitably center stage. No matter whether you disagree with your opponent or whether you want to shut down the country with a grève général, if you solidaritize it, the French public will swallow what you say.

Having grown up in the east of Germany, I am not completely foreign to the concept of solidarity. We used to support rice farmers in Vietnam and children in Mozambique (but never Polish dock workers), anonymously, distant and abstract.

These days, solidarity is even more abstract, and equally imposed from above. I got an email today from our institute's administration that this coming Monday is the "Day of Solidarity", a holiday created to make up for the loss of Pentecost - on the same day. Solidarity with whom, why and how exactly, nothing was elaborated.

What the letter elaborated was that the "Day of Solidarity" covered only seven hours. Full time is eight hours. We have to compensate - and I'm not making this up - for "the difference between the theoretical daily work time and the theoretical duration of the holiday". Quite naturally, we get an hour off on Friday to make up for the one hour we can't take off on Monday because it's already a holiday.

If you don't understand this even the third time your read it, I'd say there's a fair chance that you're sane, and that you'd be shaking your head till your neck was stiff if you were living in France. And maybe it's not solidarity that's the foundation of the French system, but utter and complete lack of logic, abstruse obfuscation, and impenetrable nonsense, a metaphysical kind of dark matter that powers the country with the most bizarre of effects. Just watch the news.