French cry out for change. But not now

The French want change. They need change. Well, maybe just a bit of change. Or maybe none at all.

Patrick Lage, a spokesman for this small city in Normandy, says the conversation about reform as next month’s presidential election nears reminds him of road repair difficulties in Evreux a few years ago.

When a new mayor announced an overhaul of the road system, people agreed that it had to be done. But as construction crews began to dig up each street, residents tried to stop them.

Non, the work created too much noise. Non, the crew was going about it all wrong. Non, it should be done later, maybe after the holidays. (The word “non” is very popular in France.)

“France needs reform,” Lage says of a system hampered by overregulation and an inflexible economy. “Everyone agrees. But when you tell a Frenchman that the coming reform is intended for him, well, he is conservative, and he doesn’t want it anymore.”

In a country the size of France, no one place can reflect all its character, history and concerns. But as the story of road repair in Evreux illustrates, this city of 51,000 has many of France’s characteristics, including its problems and obvious charms.

Tucked into a valley halfway between Paris and the beaches of Deauville, Evreux’s bustling downtown is anchored by a stunning cathedral and the Iton River. Ernest Hemingway used to come from Paris for the fishing, and now shoppers crowd the wooden benches on its banks for alfresco lunches.

But here, as in the nation as a whole, unemployment is high, almost 9%, while the average income remains low, at $18,250 a year. The local economy has endured several waves of plant closings.

And despite efforts to attract new businesses with tax breaks, Evreux sputters along as auto parts companies and electronics firms move jobs to New Delhi or find cheaper labor in the Czech Republic.

In La Madeleine, a housing project on the edge of town, these problems of globalization are not intangible: One-third of the young people are out of work. Two years ago, frustrated youths, many with their roots in North and West Africa, went on a 10-night rampage, burning cars and a shopping center.

“It was one thing for this to go on in Paris,” Lage says, recalling the shock at the level of violence. “But in the provinces, in Evreux?”

Weighing the candidates

With the first round of voting less than a month away, Evreux residents are talking about such problems, and considering the variations on change offered by each of the leading presidential candidates: the ruling party’s Nicolas Sarkozy, Socialist Segolene Royal and centrist Francois Bayrou.

But many people seem a little fed up with all of the choices, even as they acknowledge that they may well reflect the ambivalence of the French electorate.

A supporter of Sarkozy wishes the conservative candidate were made of sterner stuff, like Margaret Thatcher.

Another tempted by Bayrou sees him as a pale version of Tony Blair.

Others, fascinated by Royal, who would be France’s first female president, say she looks the most like a change but offers a plan of government spending that speaks to the past.

Guy Poupardin, who owns a small construction company in Evreux, says he has mostly made up his mind to vote for Sarkozy, the interior minister, because he considers him most likely to shake up the system, reform the labor market and jump-start the economy.

“I have a job, my wife has a job, my daughter has a job,” Poupardin says, “but you always know somebody who doesn’t. You see people on the streets out of work and wonder, why can’t they find work and why can’t I find trained people to work for me?”

Poupardin is 55, tall and blue-eyed. He sits behind his desk in his aluminum-sided office on the edge of town wearing jeans, a crisp cotton shirt and a deep tan from years of outdoor work.

He moved to Evreux from Paris 30 years ago for such a job. There were plenty then -- the big foundry on the east side of town was hiring and a popular Communist Party mayor arranged subsidized housing for the workers.

Soon after Poupardin married a local woman, he put the home he had built in Evreux up for collateral so he could start a business repairing and building windows. He’s been on his own for 20 years and has a dozen employees, and life is good. He spends a week every summer on his boat sailing the Atlantic.

But a bloated bureaucracy and rigid employment laws -- mandating, for example, that his employees receive five-week vacations -- make it almost impossible for him to imagine starting over today.

“When I started out, there was this much paperwork,” he says, holding his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. He quickly stretches his fingers as far apart as possible and says, “Now there’s this much.”

Tradition of largess

Poupardin hopes Sarkozy would have the courage to instigate as much change as Thatcher did in the 1980s when she transformed Britain. But since reading a few weeks ago that Sarkozy would engineer a government bailout to rescue airplane manufacturer Airbus, Poupardin has his doubts.

“No one is giving me money at the end of the month,” Poupardin says. “Why should the government put more into Airbus?”

But France has a long history of government intervention. Certain benefits such as free healthcare and university education as well as extensive aid to the unemployed are seen as part of the “French heritage.”

Danielle Jeanne, mayor of Aulnay-sur-Iton, a village just west of Evreux, says changing those expectations might be the most important -- and difficult -- job for the next president of France. It’s certainly a tough job in her village of 544 people.

A mother of three came to Jeanne’s office recently asking for $800 so her 12-year-old daughter could go skiing with her school and her 14-year-old daughter could go on a “discovery” trip to England over the winter break.

The mother was disappointed when the village would come through with only $250, Jeanne says. “These cultural experiences are important to the French, and this woman and her husband work hard and don’t have enormous wages. But there’s limit to what government can give.”

Jeanne recognizes that she has benefited from the generous French system. She retired from teaching at 58 and her husband from the air force at 52. They live on government pensions. But she’s not sure how much longer the country can afford to be so munificent, and she is looking to centrist candidate Bayrou to negotiate a change in what has become a fixed way of doing things in France.

Still, she is realistic: When Bayrou refers to Blair or former President Clinton as role models for working across party lines, Jeanne says, she thinks: “Well, Tony Blair came after Margaret Thatcher. She did the hard work. The problem in France is that nobody’s done the hard work yet to get people to change their expectations.”

Stephane and Anne-Claire Ranger are sensitive to such criticisms. Stephane, 43, runs a direct-marketing company, without government aid, he proudly points out. Anne-Claire, 41, is a social worker, a fonctionnaire -- considered a privileged class of civil servant.

Stephane’s father was a hairdresser, and Anne-Claire says she also came from “the working class.” Together, they are comfortably middle-class, living with their three children in a home they built in the St. Michel area on a hill high above Evreux’s cathedral spires.

But this distance from the poorer areas, such as those around the now-abandoned foundry or La Madeleine, doesn’t insulate the Rangers from anxiety about the future.

Watching every euro

The value of their home has doubled, but their salaries have not. They spend “carefully” -- they haven’t even bought curtains for the home lived in for almost a decade. They must work harder every year to sustain a station in life they labored long and hard for.

“The white collars have to be dynamic, opportunistic and work harder to keep their jobs now,” Stephane says.

The Rangers want the next president to dispose of the controversial 35-hour workweek.

“It’s great to only work 35 hours a week,” Anne-Claire says. “But what good is it if you don’t have the money to buy flowers to grow in your garden or to go to the movies with your family or go to a restaurant?”

The Rangers have ruled out Royal, a Socialist, as too embedded in the old ways and are edging toward Bayrou. But Stephane is worried that the gentleman farmer’s plan to put together a coalition of the best of the left and right isn’t viable.

The Rangers are eager for change, but they’re not sure their fellow Frenchmen can adapt.

“People are really very conservative here,” Stephane says. “They’re afraid of tomorrow so they stay with what they have.”

Achrene Sicakyuz of The Times’ Paris Bureau contributed to this report.