Our Man In Paris: What's happened to 'le weekend'?

After six years in France, we have finally come face to face with one of the great French exceptions and oddities: Saturday morning school. Six and a half years ago, we plunged our son - then nearly seven - into a French school, even though he could hardly speak a word of French. Our cruelty has paid off. Charles has done well; he is bilingual; he has French friends; he has been exposed (to his great enrichment) to the inner workings of the French juvenile, and adult, mind in a way that would have been impossible in an international school.

Last week, we did something even more cruel. We moved him from one Parisian Catholic school to another at one day's notice. After six years in the same institution, he and we had decided that it was time for a new challenge. For months the school we approached insisted that it would probably have no vacancies. Last week, on the day before the new school year began, they offered Charles a place. Overall, he seems pleased with his new school but he finds two things upsetting. He is banned from wearing any of his extensive collection of baskets (trainers) and the new school - unlike the last one - has classes on Saturday mornings.

"No more late, relaxed Friday nights," he moans. "No more grasses matinées [literally fat mornings, or long lie-ins] on Saturdays..."

I also have a selfish moan of my own. Saturday morning school will enormously complicate family weekends in my beloved house and garden in Normandy. Why does a nation obsessed with "le weekend", a nation of second home owners, the nation of the 35-hour week, preserve the cultural oddity of Saturday morning schools (usually matched with half days or free days on Wednesdays)?

The institution has been gradually dying. It also shows remarkable signs of life. A great debate on Saturday school rumbles endlessly among parents, teaching unions, politicians and child psychologists. It bounces, in a very French way, between abstract theories, sound arguments, and self-interest masquerading as the public interest.

Many French school districts have abolished Saturday school. Hundreds of primary schools, and one million children, switched last month to a new four-day system, with both Wednesdays and Saturdays free but shorter summer holidays. Some private (ie mostly Catholic) schools have abolished Saturday classes at the insistence of parents; others cling to them.

Two years ago, the mayor of Paris, Betrand Delanoë, tried to scrap all Saturday classes at state schools in the capital. He was defeated by the teaching unions, mostly because free Saturdays would have meant longer terms and shorter school holidays.

It turned out that many of the teachers who campaigned against the plan work in maternelles (kindergartens), which had already, unofficially, abolished Saturday classes as well as keeping their long holidays and Wednesdays off. Obstinate tots who turned up for school on Saturdays were discouraged from trying it on again by ruses such as being left in their raincoats all morning. (This is what the more militant French teaching unions call "defending the principle of public education".)

There are some arguments for Saturday morning school. Psychiatrists say that children study best in the mornings. Working on Saturday, and keeping Wednesday afternoons free, gives them an extra morning's learning. Where Saturday school has been abolished, surveys suggest that the people who most regret the change are the children themselves. "On Saturday morning I now end up going to the supermarket with mum," one complained. "Before I was with my friends."

A French diplomat with children at Charles's new school is convinced that it maintains Saturday classes as an unspoken means of selecting parents. "The school's attitude is that your child should come before your weekend. If you are the kind of parent who puts the weekend first, you are not the kind of parent they want."

I, of course (cursing horribly under my breath), willingly put my son's education before my lawn and potatoes.

Never a gendarme when you need one

One of the many French taboos is criticism of the police. You can say that individual police officers are brutal or incompetent but you cannot suggest that there is something bizarre about the French police as an institution (or rather two institutions, the Police Nationale and the Gendarmerie.)

France has 50 per cent more police officers than Britain. There are 211,000 flics and pandores (police and gendarmes) compared to 140,000 cops in the UK, policing roughly the same population. The French crime clear-up rate is one of the worst in Europe. Enforcement of road traffic laws was, until recently, sketchy at best.

What is going on? A book just published in France offers an explanation. It suggests that the Police Nationale is largely populated by the incompetent and the work-shy. "One third of the officers do the work, with the occasional help of another third. The rest are barely capable of intelligent walk-on parts," the book says.

The author is not a dangerous, anarchist radical but a retired divisional police commissioner in Marseilles, Gérard Justin. No French publishing house would handle his book, Par Inadvertence - temoignage de 30 ans de police (By Mistake - testimony on 30 years in the police). M. Justin published it himself.

He gives the example of the 65-strong Marseilles urban motorcycle squad, which he says, "never listens to its radios but spends all its time cruising wherever it feels like, burning up the kilometres and taking the air... so long as the weather is good".

The next time you see a squadron of French police motorbikes rushing officiously through the traffic, blowing whistles and sounding their sirens, you will know where they are going. Nowhere in particular.