What are the invisible rules that make French daily life run?
French daily life is regulated in a way that foreigners misread as moodiness. The café is an office, a living room and a parliament; the boulangerie is a supply chain with a legal minimum for flour and a legal maximum for price on one loaf; the strike is a scheduled, lawful part of the calendar rather than a breakdown. This pillar reads the routines as systems — what they cost, who they serve, what they enforce — because the invisible rules are the country, and the visible ones are just their shadow.
In this pillar
The café as a parliament
The French café is a cheap rented room where politics, literature and business have been conducted for two centuries.
The boulangerie as a supply chain
The baguette has a legal price ceiling and the boulangerie a legal duty to exist; bread is infrastructure, not just food.
The strike as a scheduled event
A French strike is a lawful, pre-announced part of the calendar; it is the negotiation continued by other means.
The August holiday as a national shutdown
For one month the country closes; the five-week leave is a 1936 law that reorganised the entire calendar around it.