KEY POINTS:
At the gleaming counters of Fauchon in the Place de la Madeleine, Parisian ladies jab a manicured nail in the direction of the foie gras to add a succulent wedge to their New Year order.
At Le Chien Qui Fume restaurant in les Halles, oysters rushed from Brittany
nestle in a bed of crushed ice and fronds of seaweed.
The autoroute to the Alps is chocka with families heading for the ski slopes. Those not going away these holidays may well be planning their break for the next holiday period, just seven weeks away. When you only work 35 hours a week and have six to eight weeks of leave, or you're a civil servant who has retired at 55, you have a lot of leisure time on your hands.
This is France in late 2006: well-heeled, high-spending, luxuriating in the good life. But how will it look at the turn of the decade?
Ask any economist, and you are likely to get a snort of derision for asking anything so daft. The figures, you would be told, speak for themselves. France is running a record trade deficit of around $5 billion each month, and one in 12 of the French workforce has no job. Within a quarter century, the economy could be bankrupted by a pensions crisis.
Today, its welfare system costs a record $2 billion every month more than it receives in contributions. Any trip to the doctor results in a prescription for at least three or four drugs - "anything less and you get accused by the patient of not doing enough," says a physician.
But even the slightest attempts at health-service reform, such as the introduction of generic drugs rather than brands or scaling back subsidies for treatment at spa resorts, meet with howls of dismay. National competitiveness in key sectors is melting like icecream in the sun, driven by low investment, the high exchange rate of the euro and sky-high employment charges.
Hardly a week goes by without news of a company that is shifting its textile base to China, its car-parts production to Eastern Europe, its call service to Morocco. "Made in France" is becoming such a rarity that Finance Minister Thierry Breton has proposed a new label, "Designed in France," which at least would reflect French input in a product. Breton also bewails France's "significant lack of economic culture," a code for entrepreneurial drive and desire to succeed.
Lots of young French people would agree with him. Stifled by red tape or the corporate hierarchy, discouraged by a stultifying university system and denied the job protection accorded to their elders, more than a thousand youngsters migrate to Britain each month. The UK's transport system is a joke, the accommodation in London insanely over-priced and British cheese, to French palates, looks like recycled plastic. But the young find jobs a-plenty, room to earn good money, promotion and work experience or gain a diploma that is varied, flexible and universally recognised.
The French Embassy in London says 270,000 French nationals now live in Britain, and some estimates put the figure as high as 350,000. How many of them will eventually return home? That is a question that worries many opinion-makers, if the rash of books this year on French self-doubt and self-criticism are any guide.
But with presidential and legislative elections now months away, there is not a single politician around who will say that France must scrap the 35-hour week, chop or redistribute its farming subsidies and end the apartheid by which young people are hired on revolving temporary contracts whereas their older counterparts can enjoy cosy job security.
No politician will declare that people will have to retire at 67 or later and do more to fund their retirement or suggest a raft of measures that would prune the social security safety net in order to prevent its eventual destruction.
So what will happen? France's traditional flaw is that it resolves its problems through clash and crisis rather than forethought and consensus, and this time is unlikely to be any different.
So, for next year at least, the status quo will remain. At some point, though, the gravy train will hit the buffers - and the sight will not be pleasant.
