Comment by sunshine-o
4 days ago
France basically always had very good PR portraying the country as "romantic" and a champion of freedom but reality has almost always been very different.
It was very unfree in the 16th century, what led to the French revolution, which was a nightmare, then military dictatorship. The 20th century was not much better and never forget France collaborated very quickly with the third Reich. Then De Gaulle has some sort of soft military dictatorship with a secret police and a total control of the media.
Today their police is very aggressive, their justice system highly politicized. And as always a dominating bureaucracy.
The state is getting more and more aggressive as drugs and violence are rampant.
It is by far the country in Europe I had the worst interactions with the police.
There are a lot of beautiful things to see there but today I try to avoid it for business and leisure.
When it comes to freedom, France definitely has it backwards. Now that it is in deep trouble economically, the bureaucracy is claiming for even more soft communism in a very totalitarian way. One needs to understand that the system made some people quite rich, way more than they would have been able on merit alone, thanks to the politics of bureaucracy.
Funnily enough the "far-right" is brandished as a fascist boogeyman when it would be a challenge to actually become more totalitarian.
For those reasons the "state of rights" is losing its legitimacy and criminality is on the rise unsurprisingly. When what you can expect to get out of the system becomes too disconnect from merit, it doesn't make sense to participate as a good actor.
So we now get rising commissars that tries to police speech and behavior any way they can. The police is basically a state militia that spends more time annoying mostly law-abiding citizens for minor offenses that just tow the line, in order to extract as much money out of them as possible. Meanwhile real criminals are out of control and receive laughable sentences from the corrupted justice system when they get caught. Following far-left ideals, criminals are victims that can be given more chances. One elected parliament member got caught buying drugs and basically nothing happened to him. Hard to not see some collusion.