Wow, what a quote. I'll break some journalistic rules and start with both a quote and a joke:
A US-American, a Frenchman and a German are sitting on a bridge. You want to make them jump down. What do you say to them to achieve that?
To the American: "There's a 1000$ down there"
To the Frenchman: "It's forbidden to jump off this bridge"
To the German: "Jump"
Where's the connection between the joke and the quote? Easy: this is an article about rules and German and French people.
Everyone knows the German are a law- and rule-abiding people. Well, at least everyone says so. And I have more than once done something like stopping at a red pedestrian light even there's no car around in the middle of Brazil, for example. I had a little chat with the secretary for internships here and she immediately started telling me about her trips to Germany and of course some anecdotes about German law-abidingness.
My observation: it's all true (I leap right back into the over-generalisation without any data backing me up again). But there's a twist, and here's my theory: Germans are more rule-abiding, but they also have more sensible rules.
France is by no means short of rules. You get them everywhere and by the hundreds and loads of them are ridiculous (in my humble opinion). So no wonder French people don't stick to rules: they couldn't budge a meter without breaking one. So hey, why not break a couple more while you're at it.
I think a typical French procedure is something like this: there's millions of rules, you stick to those you can care to do so, then someone 'in charge' will come complaining, you start a discussion and bargain out some understanding. When I organised a birthday party for someone from the student's home I had to sign a piece of paper that there wouldn't be any alcohol at all, I wouldn't invite more than 15 people, there'd be no noise and the room would be handed over spick and span by 23.00 tops. Quite impossible to both do a birthday party and stick to those rules, but I was assured by some people who do parties more often that you just have to have a quick word with the security guy and it would be OK... (and I didn't invite more then 15 people, they just came).
Rules are everywhere. There's traffic lights and crossings I wouldn't even notice without the lights. You're supposed to stop at zebra crossings if someone wants to cross, but there's one every 25m. My student card has some space just for general rules (in Karlsruhe the space is rented out for advertising). You automatically ignore them because there just not enough time to read them all. I am not allowed to attach an electric hotplate in my room, but a microwave oven is fine. A fridge is not. If you want cars to drive 40km/h because the road is dangerous there's a sign limiting to 10km/h.
So far my unqualified observations. There's lots of stuff I'd like to know, e.g. if the law system is something like that (see the quote), and if they started off with lots of laws and started ignoring them or if the many rules were introduced to compensate for the ignoring.
The title is (ironically) a quote by Charles de Montesquieu, a Frenchman (you've probably heard of him, he's the one who came up with the division of the administrative powers executive/legislative/judicative). Quite a loose translation, the German translation is "Wenn es nicht notwendig ist, ein Gesetz zu machen, dann ist es notwendig, kein Gesetz zu machen." His favourite author, Tacitus, also had his opinion on this subject: "The most rotten countries have the most laws." And here's the catch: this country is far too nice to be called rotten. At least French people don't blindly jump of bridges.
