After you have lived in France for awhile, you realize there are many rules/laws in France. For example the price of a baguette is regulated. Because of lack of food around the time of the revolution, at some point there became a law that a baguette must be affordable for everyone. So in the bakeries in Paris there are two of the basic types of baguette....one for 1.05 E and another higher quality baguette for 1.15-1.35. The more expensive one is the baguette tradition and takes more work because the dough is held longer before baking.
It is difficult to fire people...in fact in many stores it seems there are a lot of people hanging around not working (although this never seems to apply to restaurants it seems they are always very busy).
There is a law that every restaurant in France must serve tap water. This seems obvious but in other countries such as Belgium you must buy water.
Parks sometimes seem like they are just for admiring and not for playing in. The grass in all the parks sleeps (thus is off limits) during the winter until April 19th. This was very difficult for the kids after school as you couldn't even walk on the grass and there was limited dirt space. There are also many park police walking around enforcing these rules....sometimes we joked at how much more money France would have if they didn't spend so much on these people.
One doctor told me the conflict of the government with smoking. It seems the government wants to gather the taxes more than prevent smoking. They did make a law to ban smoking indoors but you don't see much publicity or government effort to encourage people not to smoke.
Fashion boutiques must list prices for clothes shown in their windows....I found this was a nice way to check out the store.
There are lots of taxes here. One time we saw a pay stub with 15-20 taxes listed. But the benefits include healthcare (a visit to a doctor in Chamonix only cost 25E) and university education is free.
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