A writer in public service, this often makes for a hilarious tale. In 1893, Georges Courteline wrote Gentlemen round leather, inspired by his experience at the Ministry of the Interior. At the Directorate of Donations and Legacies, no one finds a misplaced file, especially not Deputy Chief Théodore Van der Hogen, the archetype of a fussy and inefficient senior civil servant. Courteline describes it as “stuffed with Greek, stuffed with Latin, and absolutely incapable, with that, of putting twenty lines of French to their feet”.
In 1946, in Vercoquin and plankton, Boris Vian describes the absurd daily life of the National Unification Consortium (CNU), alter ego of the French Association for Standardization… where he works. “In order to avoid abuses, the government had delegated a brilliant polytechnician, the Central Government Delegate, whose task was to delay the completion of the Nothons as much as possible. [NDLR : des fascicules gris qui règlent l’activité et sont la raison d’être du CNU]. He achieved this easily by summoning the heads of the CNU to his office several times a week for discussions rehashed a hundred times,” writes Vian.
From bureaucratic zeal, popular culture has also retained the famous “A-38 pass” issued by the Roman administration, nicknamed “the madhouse”, to Asterix and Obelix, in The Twelve Labors of Asterix, animated film from 1976. We would have to laugh if this French penchant for paperwork did not have disastrous consequences.
L’Express investigated the effects produced by this heap of forms… for those responsible for filling them out. Policemen, nurses or rural mayors… All relate their discouragement. “The bureaucratic problem participates in the French downgrading”, even believes Jérôme Fourquet. The “shocks of simplification” multiply but there always seems to be, somewhere, a Theodore van der Hogen to thwart them with an A-38 pass. What if we finally got out?