The current President of France, Jacques Chirac, has been around for quite some time. He knows exactly how difficult it is to govern France, since he has also been the Mayor of Paris as well as the Prime Minister of France. Chirac has been through the beginning and end of many regulations. One restriction that was made by Frances was the 35-hour work week, by Lionel Jospin. They thought this would lower their unemployment status. It, however, did the opposite. Low wage workers were not making enough money to support themselves and their families. In The fraud of the 35-hour workweek in France Arens and Thull described how this was happening, "the minimum wage would have to be 11.4 percent for the real value of low wage workers' weekly income to remain at previous level." The government said that they would gradually raise the minimum wage in the distant future, since it was not getting raised when the new regulations were to start.
No Mans Land, Flanders Field, France, 1919 (LOC)
English: Lionel Jospin and his wife, Sylviane Agac...
English: Lionel Jospin and Lucien Bouchard at Univ...This great plan slowed Frances economy. When the ecomony goes down it starts to effect everyone in the country, especially the retailers. Nicolas Sarkozy, the current Finance minister, has now sidelined the 35-hour work week that Jospin had introduced.
There are many different government regulations that affect the retail world. In The tightening of government regulations decreased store openings and have also made retailers more inclined to set up mergers and investments overseas. "The French government limits the number of store openings in the hyper and supermarket categories," as stated in Reaching France's retail food system. They want to make it harder to open stores, so they keep the local business running, instead of big international corporations.