Craig Smith on one reason the French have to hate Americans. France's 35-hour workweek

law, conceived at a time when the national unemployment rate was nearing 13 percent and French pessimism was at a peak, was supposed to usher in a utopian era of greater leisure and more jobs. But many workers complain that it has not led to enough hiring and has instead squeezed the same amount of work into fewer hours.

Well, plenty of people told them it wouldn't work.

Unemployment has dropped to 9 percent since the law went into effect, and the government, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to subsidize new jobs, claims some of that reduction is because of the shortened workweek.

Post hoc fallacy.

In the 19th century, Marxist influences helped define work as a means to achieve leisure rather than an end, as it was to many Americans. Some French were even taught that ambition could make them ill, said Theodore Zeldin, a British sociologist and keen observer of French society. Karl Marx's French son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, wrote a political tract entitled "The Right to Idleness," which argued for a three-hour workday. "It fits in with a French idea of what life is about � the enjoyment of one's senses and the company of others, sitting in the cafe watching people go by"...

Well, it does sound nice, but

A sense of immobility in the traditionally class-conscious society also saps many people here of the get-ahead ambition that drives their counterparts in the United States.

Still, I often wonder if this admittedly socialistic attitude doesn't benefit the French quality of life (particularly Parisian). Food and aesthetics.