Le snooze? We lose

Who knew that when the French say, “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi?” they actually might be asking if you’d like to take a snooze? At least that’s the conclusion one might draw from a survey on social habits released this week that shows the French on average sleep about nine hours a night, more than people in any of the other 29 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Then again, another conclusion might be that the French define “sleep” more broadly than, say, Koreans, who are at the other end of the spectrum with about seven hours a night. Or than Americans who, as we know, like to get their eight hours.

The French spend more than two of their waking hours each day eating, about twice as long as Americans do. Yet, despite all that brie and Bearnaise sauce and mousse au chocolat, they’re far less likely to be obese -- 10.5% of the adult French population compared with 34.3% of American adults, according to the OECD’s 2009 Society at a Glance report. Eating and sleeping fall under the broad category of “personal care,” a pastime in which the French lead the world, of course. There’s a reason French terms like “manicure” and “haute couture” have made their way into English. Add leisure time to that and, well, there doesn’t seem to be a lot left for work. The French on average labor 37 hours a week in paid jobs compared with 41 hours for Americans, which comes out to hundreds more hours per year for the French to do je ne sais quoi.

The numbers almost make you feel sorry for French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose flashy personal care earned him the nickname President Bling Bling when he came into office two years ago promising to make France more productive. He did manage to extend the 35-hour workweek, pass some tax and pension reforms and impose some strike restrictions to make France more competitive. It’s not clear whether walking a French picket line would count as paid work or personal care, but either way the study would suggest Sarkozy still has a ways to go if he wants to change the country’s work culture.

On the other hand, the numbers also suggest he might want to reconsider, because all that French eating, sleeping and grooming seems to be paying off in a longer life span -- second only to Japan and well above the United States. We may be snarky about those well-rested, thin people across the Atlantic, but then, truthfully, in our next lives, wouldn’t it be nice to be French?