Brits put their backs into idling

The book has caught the imagination of the French, who are in the middle of a national debate about work. The old, left-wing government brought in a 35-hour week that practically forbade overwork by law. But the new right-wing government is trying to dismantle what it calls a “holiday camp” culture and is promoting the values of industry, hard toil and discipline.

Bonjour Paresse also comes at the same time as a real flowering of anti-work movements across Europe. In Blighty, we have seen the publication of Madeleine Bunting’s Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives, and Carl Honoré’s In Praise of Slow.

To be published soon are my own book and Pat Kane’s The Play Ethic, an attack on the work ethic and a plea for practical change. At the Idler, we have compiled readers’ accounts of workplace horrors into a book called Crap Jobs.

In Spain, the latest hit is Bartleby and Co, a modern take on Herman Melville’s story where a lowly clerk called Bartleby refuses to do any work, with the elegant line “I prefer not to”.

Italy has seen the success of the Slow Food movement, and at a recent conference on idling there, it was claimed that idlers are smarter than toilers as they can do the same amount of work in half the time.

This is not a particularly new phenomenon. France and Britain share a long tradition of what we might call anti-work writing. But there are important differences between the French attitudes to idling and those of the Brits.

The French one is essentially negative and nihilistic, abstract and intellectual, where the British is more bloody-minded, less literary and more practical. The Gallic shruggers see resistance as futile, while the Brits hold out hope for a better world.

In France for example, while Marx and Engels were earnestly planning a proletarian revolution, Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, wrote a satirical pamphlet in 1883 entitled Le Droit à la Paresse, The Right To Be Lazy. Like Bonjour Paresse, it was conceived as a satire on the mania for work that had gripped nations, governments and political parties, right and left.

Written in splendid visionary style, the pamphlet called on the workers to stop working: “Whoever gives his labour for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves.”

Going back to the early 17th century we find the French philosopher René Descartes, who was one of the laziest thinkers ever. He was constitutionally incapable of getting out of bed in the morning. At the Jesuit school he attended, the priests tried to make him toe the line by throwing buckets of cold water over him as he slept, but he would still not get out of bed.

His snoozing and bed time led to the formulation of his great idea: “I think therefore I am.” A lovely thought, but hardly practical.

During the late 19th century there were some great French slackers. Baudelaire was the daddy of them all, and inspired by him there was the “flâneur” movement where dandies floated around Paris with tortoises on leads as a protest against rushing around. Poets such as Verlaine made an art of sitting around in cafes drinking absinthe. Later, France produced the existentialist philosophers. The title of Being and Nothingness reveals that Sartre was not a striver.

Camus’s L’Etranger is about the inability to act. Camus and Sartre, it seems, were more interested in smoking, creating abstract ideas and looking cool than effecting any real social change. Hanging out in cafes was their thing. It was to France that Henry Miller retreated to embrace the work-free bohemian life. And in Tony Hancock’s film The Rebel, the hero abandons his dead-end clerk’s job to move to Paris and become an abstract artist.

Maier’s book has something of a Gallic indifference to it, a resigned fatalism. “It is pointless trying to change the system,” she writes. “Opposing it only makes it stronger.” This is where the continental idea of idleness parts company from our own.

First, the British idler has a more formidable work culture to contend with. The pro-work government and big companies are powerful. We have no 35-hour week, nor a cafe culture. We work the longest hours in Europe. According to Bunting, 40% of British managers work more than 50 hours a week.

There is something deeply masochistic in the British nature when it comes to work. We suffer a lot of guilt when it comes to slacking. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the British anti-work tradition has tended to be more practical in nature than the French.

Thomas More, in his Utopia, suggested that six hours of work each day was enough. In the 17th century, Izaak Walton, in The Compleat Angler, promoted fishing as a protest against the emerging culture of hard work and “money-getting men”. In 1930 Maynard Keynes, the economist, said three hours a day ought to be sufficient and Bertrand Russell, writing in 1932, was in favour of four.

The 19th century is peppered by riots and revolts against the regimented work system and its machines. The Luddites, for example, protested against the factories by breaking the machines rather than trading quips in the coffee bars. Convicted Luddites were hanged or deported, which gives an idea of how brutally the authorities can come down on the slackers. We also had Chartist riots, Plug riots, Rebecca riots, and constant striking by workers such as coal miners and cotton spinners. The Chartist Feargus O’Connor was one of a number of 19thcentury idealists who set up utopian communities.

And our poets and writers didn’t just sit around in big companies slacking off; they made efforts to dream up alternatives. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Cobbett, and later DH Lawrence and Aldous Huxley all made efforts — failed, admittedly — to found communities based on sharing and having fun rather than competing and working.

Even Oscar Wilde had a well-developed anarchist philosophy, which he outlined in his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism. He believed that “every man must be free to choose his own work”.

The anti-industrialist and anti-wage-slavery writer GK Chesterton had proposals for social change. His idea was “distributism”, which would return land to the people, allowing each family an acre of land so it could keep pigs and cows and be independent from the wage system and the factories.

In my own book I have included a chapter on skiving. I agree with Maier that skiving is an important way for the worker to regain dignity. But it is only the first step on the road to freedom, not the final one. For the true idler, skiving is a bit of a cop-out: it does not represent a true revolt against work and jobs. It is a hypocrisy; you are anti-work while working. Also, you are taking money from the culture that you abhor: a sort of prostitution.

Maybe the French can deal with this — they have those wonderful abstract imaginations — but we Brits actually want to do something about our dreams of idleness. The next step after skiving is to quit the job, or at least reduce your hours significantly, by going part-time for instance. Then you will have more time to do what you want to do.

It’s scary, though, doing nothing. Wilde said it is the hardest thing in the world, and he did time in prison. But it is infinitely preferable to suffering in silence and stealing paperclips to make yourself feel better.

The conclusion to be drawn from all this is that a quiet revolution is starting. All across Europe we have become fed up with crap jobs, crap food and all the tawdry produce of industrialisation. Bonjour Paresse may be a bit wimpy — Gallic shruggery rather than bloody-minded British activity — but at least it shows that we are fed up with being slaves. Now it’s up to us to do something about it, if we can be bothered.