The French enjoy making fun of American cowboy culture. Here we are, this big nation of cowboys and cowgals swaggering around and when the bad guys ride in, we face off at noon in the middle of the street. If you are French this is pretty funny. But why?

Well, because if you are French you belong to a mob culture. Standing alone against anything is just not French. French social movement is done in huddles. If you can't gather a big enough huddle around yourself, well, then you join someone else's big huddle and see where it takes you.

Since 1789 all French political power has come from the streets. Contemporary France legislates her benefactions on the barricades. And since this is how everyone goes about arriving at a better life, nobody much likes the discommodings but nobody much complains.

France's public sector trade unions said yesterday that a potentially crippling nationwide strike was "unavoidable" in January unless the centre-right government increased its offer of a 1% pay rise for 2005.

"It's a joke, half the forecast rate of inflation and yet another insult to state sector workers," said Bernard Lhubert of the CGT union after the breakdown yesterday of talks with the civil service minister, Renaud Dutreil.

The threat is a serious concern in France, where the state employs more than 5 million people, or more than 25% of the workforce, compared with about 14% in Britain.

Public sector discontent on pay augurs ill for a long-awaited and wide-ranging reform of the state apparatus promised by the prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin - a move many governments have announced over the last few decades, but none has delivered.

Despite criticism of the taxes levied to pay for it, the French have long been unwilling to re-examine the disproportionate weight of the state, and becoming a job-for-life fonctionnaire , with its associated privileges, remains a widely held Gallic ambition.

Another reason the French find us funny. The big American dream is to work hard and eventually be your own boss. The big French dream is to belong to the gray huddle of the state for life.

Mr Dutreil said yesterday he had no further room for manoeuvre and the talks were in effect closed. "The unions are asking me to make good three years of zero increases under the previous Socialist government, as well as minimal hikes over the past two years," he said. "It's unrealistic, more than any government could do. It would cost €10bn (£7bn) and we can't afford it."

France has progressed to the point where wealth redistribution is no longer sufficient to produce the sugar plums demanded of her. Can M. Raffarin pull funding from his fundament? M. Dutreil says no. He apparently has had a good look up M. Raffarin's fundament and attests no sugar plums are in evidence. If disappointment on the barricades becomes ugly, the French huddle may just have a look-see up there themselves.

My prescription, Fourty five million bootlegged copies of Brazil as French Christmas stocking stuffers.