NOT LIKE IT'S THE FIRST TIME THEY'VE NEEDED THE AMERICAN TO SAVE THEM:

The 'American' rebooting France (Roger Cohen, October 17, 2007, IHT)

Not only is Christine Lagarde, France's finance minister, ready to forsake her native tongue, she is, she says, "happier doing this in English" - and with that, right off the bat, she declares in ringing Anglo-Saxon: "We are trying to change the psyche of the French people in relation to work."

A hopeless task, some might say. Deep in the Gallic soul resides the notion that work is exploitation, a ruse concocted by American robber barons, best regulated and minimized and offset by hours of idleness. The demise of the Soviet Union left France leading the counter-capitalist school.

But Lagarde, 51, tall and striking, is not known as "the American" for nothing. Think of her as the face of a new France ditching its Cold-War hangover. The sobriquet reflects her linguistic skills, her background as a high-flying executive for the Baker & McKenzie law firm, and her Chicago-cultivated candor.

In an interview, Lagarde says that more than two decades at a U.S. corporation taught her: "The more hours you worked, the more hours you billed, the more profit you could generate for yourself and your firm. That was the mantra."

The equivalent mantra in the French bureaucracy might be: The fewer hours you work, the more vacation you take, the more time you have to grumble about the state of the universe, and the smarter you feel, especially compared to workaholic dingbats across the Atlantic with no time for boules.