Plus ca ne change pas

You've got to hand it to the French.

As the queues build at petrol stations and residents of Marseille have taken to setting fire to the mountains of rubbish to keep the rats at bay, one can only marvel at France's systemic inability to change.

While the British swallow the most savage cuts in public expenditure since the Second World War with characteristic stoicism, the French are back manning the barricades over proposals to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. That's an extra 2 years on people's working lifetimes vs an increased life expectancy of 13 years since the pension regime last changed. And the reform will still leave the French retiring 4-5 years sooner than their counterparts in other major European economies.

Yet despite the public being held to ransom, opinions polls indicate that 70% of the French population support the strikes.

So what's going on? And how hard is it for policymakers and politicians to create public consensus for change?

Firstly, striking in France is a first resort, not a last resort. French democracy came about because people took the streets, so that's what people do - regardless of how narrow, minor or marginal their cause. Becase it's so ingrained in the cultural heritage, public endorsement for public protest is high even if the actions taken appear disproportionate and unfairly disruptive by other nations' standards.

In France, striking can be a display of selfishness or solidarity, or both at once. Scratch the surface of mass protest in France and you'll rarely find a coherent collective narrative or cause - more often a loose coming together of factions, each mobilising to defend their own interests or their own riff on a wider national theme. So students are busy blocking schools and universities right now not because the argue with the maths of the pension reforms (ie it is they who will have to pick up the tab for their parents if their parents don't work longer), but because they fear for the jobs they're not yet ready for (ie the longer old people work, the fewer the jobs for the young).

Paradoxically the French also have a grand tradition of sympathy striking, often by constituencies who have nothing to do with the original cause of the protest. So metalworkers will come out in support of teachers striking to cling onto their 13th week of summer holiday. How can Government tackle focused reform when protest spreads collaterally?

You might hope that cold, hard empirical evidence from other nations might inject a note of rationalism, but then the French are impressively schizophrenic when it comes to looking beyond their borders.

The country whose pioneering vision of the universal laws of man spawned the American constitution still believes (genuinely so) in carrying the torch for human rights across the globe. When Dominique de Villepin faced off to Colin Powell at the United Nations, he did so because history was on his side. But internationalism in France is basically a one-way street - somehow other nations have little to offer that the French are willing to acknowledge, learn from or emulate. Especially if they're "Anglo Saxon", a handy pejorative that used by the French left the way "liberal" is used by the American right - to dismiss other people's ideas out of hand because you reject the ideology that supposedly underpins them.

But perhaps the greatest barrier of all to change is psychological: the French's adolescent relationship with authority. Forgive the crude characterisation, but essentially Anglo-Saxon societies emphasise self-reliance, so the role of the state (broadly speaking) is to provide a basic set of universal services and benefits for all - while taking care (sadly rather less these days) of those who are less able to help themselves. By contrast, the French expect the state to take care of them, a culture of dependency that's so endemic that polls show that more graduates would prefer to work in the public sector than the private sector.

The French elected a reforming president who came to power on a platform of disruptive change, but have fought him every time he's tried to turn rhetoric into action. Somehow the French national psyche manages to juggle two apparently contradictory impulses - a yearning for the comforting embrace of the state's ample bosom with profound rejection of government's parental authority.

And beneath all of this is a profound malaise across French society about French identity in a globalising world, about the ability of sovereign nations to manage their own destinies in the face of macro-economic forces they can't control. And beneath all that a chronic, crippling fear of change that has ordinary people fighting to hang onto every hard-won privilege even as the state's coffers run dry.

Will history be kinder to the French than they are to themselves? Only time will tell.