France is the most popular country in the world. France is a country of incredible diversity. It has mountains with eternal snows, subtropical regions, Paris and pastoral villages, ultra-modern bullet trains and lowland rivers slowly carrying their waters.
Of course, the attractiveness of France is not only in nature. Glorified by the greatest writers, the country's richest history has left a lot of monuments and sights in France. After all, it is so tempting to walk along the street along which the Musketeers walked, to look at the castle in which the future Count of Monte Cristo spent many years, or to stand in the square where the Templars were executed. But in the history of France and its modernity, you can find a lot of interesting things, even if you move away from the paths beaten by historians and guides.
1. King of the Franks, and later the Emperor of the West, Charlemagne, who ruled at the end of the 8th - beginning of the 9th centuries, was not only a worthy ruler. The territory he ruled was twice the size of modern France, but Charles was fond of not only military campaigns and the augmentation of lands. He was a very educated (for his time) and inquisitive person. In the war with the Avars, who lived approximately on the territory of modern Austria, a huge ornate horn was captured among the rich booty. They explained to Karl that this is not a horn, but a tooth, and such teeth-tusks grow in elephants in distant Asia. Just then the embassy was leaving for Baghdad to Harun al-Rashid. Among the tasks assigned to the embassy was the delivery of an elephant. Al-Rashid gave his Frankish colleague a large white elephant named Abul-Abba. In less than 5 years, the elephant was delivered (including by sea on a special ship) to Karl. The Emperor was delighted and placed the elephant in King's Park, where he kept other outlandish animals. Not wanting to part with his pet, Karl began to take him on campaigns, which killed the noble animal. In one of the campaigns, while crossing the Rhine, Abul-Abba died for no apparent reason. The elephant most likely died from infection or food poisoning.
2. The French are generally pretty cool about their own work. On Friday afternoons, life freezes even in private companies. Foreign contractors joke that the French will comply with any of your requests if you do not contact her from May 1 to August 31, after 7 am on Friday, on weekends and between 12 and 2 pm on weekdays. But even against the general background, employees of budgetary institutions and state enterprises stand out. There are about 6 million of them, and it is they (together with the students preparing to take their places) who organize the famous French riots. State employees have a colossal set of rights with a minimum of responsibilities. There is a joke that for a career in the public sector you need to perform your duties as poorly as possible - in order to get rid of such an employee, the administration is forced to send him for promotion. In general, as the failed French Zelensky Kolyush (a comedian who ran for president of France in 1980) joked: "My mother was a civil servant, my father never worked either."
3. A very significant source of income for the French state budget in the 16th - 17th centuries was the sale of posts. Moreover, no attempts to restrict this trade worked - the temptation was too great to get money into the treasury out of the blue, and even take a bribe from a hungry candidate. If in 1515, with a precisely known number of government posts of 5,000, 4041 of them were sold, then a century and a half later it was only known that 46,047 posts were sold, and no one knew their total number.
4. Theoretically, only the king or the feudal lord to whom he granted such a right could build a castle in medieval France. It is quite logical - the fewer autocratic owners of castles in the country, the easier it is to restrain them or negotiate with them. In practice, vassals built castles quite arbitrarily, sometimes even their suzerain (a royal vassal of a higher level) was only informed. The overlords were forced to put up with these: a vassal building a castle for himself is a serious fighting detachment. And when the king learns about illegal construction, and the kings do not last forever. Therefore, in France, which at the best of times put hundreds of knights into operation, now there are only 5,000 preserved castles. Approximately the same amount is given today by archaeologists or is mentioned in documents. Kings sometimes punished their subjects ...
5. School education in France, according to both the parents of the students and the teachers, is approaching a disaster. Free public schools in major cities are slowly becoming a combination of juvenile delinquest and migrant camps. Classes are not uncommon in which only a few students speak French. Education in a private school costs at least 1,000 euros per year, and it is considered a great success to get a child into such a school. Catholic schools are widespread in France. Several decades ago only very religious families sent their children there. Now, despite the very strict customs, Catholic schools are bursting with an abundance of students. In Paris alone, Catholic schools refused admission to 25,000 students in a year. At the same time, Catholic schools are prohibited from expanding, and the state in public schools is constantly being cut.
6. Alexandre Dumas wrote in one of his novels that financiers are never loved and always rejoice at their executions - they collect taxes. On the whole, of course, the great writer was right, tax officials are not liked at all times. And how can you love them, if the numbers illustrate well the growing pressure of the tax press. After the introduction of regular taxes by 1360 (before that taxes were collected only for the war), the budget of the French kingdom was (in equivalent) 46.4 tons of silver, of which only 18.6 tons were collected from citizens - the rest came from royal lands. At the height of the Hundred Years War, more than 50 tons of silver were already collected from the territory of France, which had been shrinking to the extreme. With the restoration of territorial integrity, fees rose to 72 tons. Under Henry II at the beginning of the 16th century, 190 tons of silver a year were squeezed out of the French. Cardinal Mazarin, ridiculed by the same Alexander Dumas, had an amount equivalent to 1,000 tons of silver. The state expenditures reached their peak before the Great French Revolution - then they amounted to 1,800 tons of silver. At the same time, the population of France, both in 1350 and in 1715, was about 20 million people. The indicated amounts are only expenses of the state, that is to say, the royal treasury. Local feudal lords could easily shake the peasants under their control under a plausible pretext like war or a wedding. For reference: the current budget of France is roughly equivalent to the cost of 2,500 tons of silver with a population of 67 million people.
7. The French had their own Internet chats long, as paradoxical as it may sound, before the advent of the Internet. The modem was connected to a telephone line, providing a speed of 1200 bps for receiving and 25 bps for transmitting. Enterprising Frenchmen, and specifically the monopoly company France Telecom, together with an inexpensive modem, also leased a monitor to consumers, although, of course, the possibility of using a TV in this capacity was known. The system was named Minitel. She earned it in 1980. The inventor of the Internet, Tim Burners-Lee, was still writing software for printers at this time. About 2,000 services were available through Minitel, but the overwhelming majority of users used it as a sexual chat.
8. The French king Philip the Handsome went down in history, first of all, as the gravedigger of the Knights Templar, who died from the curse of the head of the order, Jacques de Molay. But he has one more defeat on his account. He was bloodless and therefore not as widely known as the execution of the Templars. It's about the Champagne fair system. Counts of Champagne by the XII century made the fairs held on their lands continuous. Moreover, they began to issue special papers on immunity to merchants heading to their fairs. Gigantic trading floors, warehouses, hotels were built. The merchants paid the count only a fee. All other expenses were related only to real services. The protection was carried out by the people of the count. Moreover, the Counts of Champagne consistently forced all neighbors, and even the King of France, to protect merchants going to Champagne on the roads. The trial at the fairs was carried out by elected merchants themselves. These conditions made Champagne a world trade center. But at the end of the XIII century, the last Count of Champagne died without leaving any offspring. Philip the Handsome, once married to the Count's daughter, quickly got his hands on the fairs. First, on a far-fetched occasion, he arrested all the property of the Flemish merchants, then he began to introduce taxes, duties, bans on certain goods and apply other incentives to trade. As a result, in 15 - 20 years, the income from the fair decreased fivefold, and trade moved to other centers.
9. The French invented such a wonderful thing as “Camping municipal”. This name is literally translated as “municipal camping”, but the translation does not give a clear idea of the essence of the phenomenon. Such establishments, for a meager fee, or even free, provide tourists with a place for a tent, a shower, a washbasin, a toilet, a place for washing dishes and electricity. The services, of course, are minuscule, but the expenses are appropriate - an overnight stay costs a few euros. What is more important, all “Camping municipal” are supported by local residents, so there is always a lot of information about what events are taking place in the area, which uncle you can buy cheap cheese from, and which aunt can have lunch. Camping sites of this kind are now found throughout Europe, but their homeland is France.
10. One could read about the optical telegraph now only in the novel of the already mentioned Alexander Dumas "The Count of Monte Cristo", but for its time this invention of the French brothers Chappe was a real revolution. And the revolution, only the Great French Revolution, helped the brothers introduce the invention. In monarchist France, their petition would have been shelved, and the revolutionary Convention quickly decided to build a telegraph. No one argued with the decisions of the Convention in the 1790s, but they were carried out as quickly as possible. Already in 1794, the Paris-Lille line began to work, and by the beginning of the 19th century, the towers of French invention covered half of Europe. As for Dumas and the episode with the distortion of the transmitted information in his novel, life, as often happens, turned out to be much more interesting than the book. In the 1830s, a gang of enterprising merchants faked messages on the Bordeaux-Paris line for two years! The telegraph employees, as Dumas described, did not understand the meaning of the transmitted signals. But there were junction stations at which messages were decrypted. In the interval between them, anything could be transmitted, as long as the correct message arrived at the nodal station. The scam was opened by accident. The creator of the optical telegraph, Claude Chappe, committed suicide, unable to withstand the accusations of plagiarism, but his brother Ignatius, who was in charge of the technical department, worked until his death as the director of the telegraph.
11. Since 2000, the French have legally worked no more than 35 hours a week. In theory, the “Aubrey Law” was adopted in order to create additional jobs. In practice, it can be applied in a very limited number of enterprises, where a large number of workers perform the same type of work. At the rest of the enterprises, the owners had to either raise wages, paying for each additional hour that became overtime, or in some other way compensate employees for overtime: increase vacation, provide food, etc. Aubrey's law did not affect the unemployment rate in any way, but its power was canceled now they are unlikely to be able to - the trade unions will not allow.
12. French has long been the only language of international communication. It was spoken by people from different countries, diplomatic negotiations were conducted, in a number of countries, such as England or Russia, French was the only language that the upper class knew. At the same time, in France itself, barely 1% of the population, concentrated in Paris and the surrounding area, understood it and spoke it. The rest of the population spoke at best in "patois" - a language similar to French, except for some sounds. In any case, the patois speaker did not understand the Parisian, and vice versa. The outskirts generally spoke their own national languages. The great Jean-Baptiste Moliere and his troupe once decided to ride through the French countryside - in Paris, which received Moliere's plays with great favor, the performances of the actors became boring. The idea ended in a complete fiasco - the provincials simply did not understand what the capital's stars were saying. Evil tongues say that since then the French have adored booths or stupid sketches like The Benny Hill Show - everything is clear there without words. The linguistic unification of France began during the Great French Revolution, when the government began to mix soldiers in regiments, abandoning the territorial principle of formation. As a result, after a dozen years, Napoleon Bonaparte received an army that spoke the same language.
13. In modern French culture, quotas play an important role - a kind of protectionism, the promotion of French culture. It takes different forms, but in general it allows French cultural masters, who do not even create masterpieces, to have a solid piece of bread and butter. Quotas take different forms. In music, it is established that 40% of publicly played compositions must be French. Radio stations and TV channels are forced to broadcast French music and pay French performers accordingly. In cinematography, a special government agency, the CNC, receives a percentage of the sale of any movie ticket. The money raised by CNC pays out to French filmmakers for the production of French cinema. In addition, filmmakers are paid a special allowance if they work out the deadline set for that year. Usually this is about 500 hours, that is, about two and a half months, if we take 8-hour working days with weekends. For the rest of the year, the state will pay the same as the person earned during the filming.
14. In 1484, a tax cut occurred in France, hardly equal in the entire history of mankind. The states-general - the then parliament - were able to take advantage of the contradictions in the highest circles that appeared after the death of Louis XI, who was succeeded by the young Charles VIII. Fighting for closeness to the young king, the nobles allowed the total amount of taxes levied in the kingdom to be reduced from 4 million livres to 1.5 million. And France did not collapse, did not fall under the blows of external enemies, and did not disintegrate because of the crisis in government. Moreover, despite endless wars and internal armed conflicts, the state experienced the so-called. "A beautiful century" - the population of the country steadily increased, the productivity of agriculture and industry grew, all the French gradually became richer.
15. Modern France has a fairly effective health care system. All citizens pay 16% of their income to health care. This is usually enough to get treatment for free in uncomplicated cases.The state compensates both the payment for the services of doctors and medical personnel, and the cost of medicines. In case of serious illnesses, the state pays 75% of the cost of treatment, and the patient pays the rest. However, this is where the voluntary insurance system comes into play. Insurance is inexpensive, and all French people have it. It compensates for the remaining quarter of the cost of medical services and medicines. Of course, it does not do without its drawbacks. The most important of them for the state is the huge amount of expensive drugs prescribed by doctors without any need. For patients, it is critical to wait in line for an appointment with a narrow specialist - it can last for months. But overall, the health care system is performing well.
