(That’s the official rate. The percentage of the population who are drawing some kind of dole, barred from working by law, or no longer counted as “temporarily out of work” is of course much higher.)

It’s a funny thing about such simple applications of arithmetic, though. Consider the foundry employee who decided not to waste an hour cooking a roast at 350 degrees, instead deciding that 15 minutes at 1,400 degrees would surely accomplish the same thing. (If a 35-hour workweek will help the economy, why not go for 20, or even 15?)

Initial reports by the Socialist government’s own Labor Ministry were glowing: The mandated shorter week created 350,000 new jobs between 1998 and 2002, the Socialists proclaimed.

But since Lionel Jospin and the branch of the Socialist Party who actually call themsleves Socialists were booted from office, more objective analysts have been reviewing the numbers, and they’re not pretty.

French unemployment is soaring, and wages have stagnated. It turns out employers simply froze pay to make up for lost productivity.

A parliamentary committee last year determined the shorter workweek was actually costing France more than $13 billion per year. The shorter workweek is “destroying jobs because companies wonder whether it’s worth taking people on for just 35 hours per week,” explains Marc Touati, chief economist at the Paris-based Natexis Banques Populaires.

Hardest hit, sadly enough, have been the very folks the socialists always claim to be looking out for: poor women and single parents.

“The women that suffered were the lowest paid, who needed all the overtime they could get to make ends meet,” explains Monique Halpern, president of the leftist women’s organization CLEF. “I think this is one reason Lionel Jospin lost the elections.”

Work less, and see your standard of living fall? Sacre bleu! Who’d have thunk it?

Clara Gaynard, head of the French International Investment agency, says the shorter workweek also hurt foreign investment in France -- especially from the United States, France’s largest source of foreign capital. (“Yeu are a bunch of gauche and ignorant gangsteres in ill-fitting polyester lizzeure suits. We spit on your high-handed moron president with his cowboy boots and his Chiz Doodles and all this shaving of the women’s underarms. Pliz mail your checks to 2 avenue Velasquez, 75008 Paris-France.")

“The perception was that the French didn’t want to work any more,” Mrs. Gaynard distresses. (A 2003 survey of 25 industrialized countries by the Organization for Economic Coperation and Development found only the Norwegians and the Dutch worked fewer hours per week than the French, who put in 1,431 hours per year to the average American’s 1,792. The Dutch rate was probably pulled down by their unionized army, which takes weekends off.)

French economic growth will slow to 2 percent this year, from an already pathetic 2.3 percent in 2004, the OECD predicted last fall. That compares to a 3.3 percent projected rate in the U.S., where the official unemployment rate remains about half that of France and Germany ... despite our own ongoing dalliance with state socialism (mandatory government youth camps, outlawing jobs that pay “too little,” etc.)

So the French are giving it up. Despite opposition by 56 percent of salaried employees -- and by the Socialists, who are themselves currently out of work, of course -- a bill that effectively restores the previous 39-hour work week was expected to win final legislative approval in Paris this week.

All better now?

Well, no. In fact, the people who designed the Maginot Line still don’t seem to “get it.”

The real question is: Why should the central government be dictating how many hours anyone can work? Why not allow folks to choose and negotiate their own trade-offs between income and free time?

Why, if it turned out you could make the same amount of money working part-time as a doctor or architect as you could digging ditches for 60 hours a week, who knows -- some kids might even opt to hit the books and get a decent education ... in spite of those socialized government schools.