A few facts in an opinion piece in Le Monde, by Jean-François Couvrat. It's in French, but here are the highlights:

• the unemployment of 22% for the youth really means that 8% of the youth are unemployed, lower than the EU average (where have we heard that before)

• Eurostat indicates that the main indicator to assess the flexibility of a labor market and the mobility of workers is the proportion of workers who have been in their job for less than 3 months. That proportion is 6.7% in France, higher than in the UK and than the 4.9% EU average...

• French companies never stop creating jobs. In 1993, the worst recession year in a long time, they hired 3.6 million people; the number was 4.8 million in 2003, a year with weak growth, and 5.4 million in 2000, a boom year.

And a few facts from the much quoted Blanchard study (pdf):

The labor market is characterized by large flows--high rates of separations from firms, and high rates of hires by firms. In France for example, 1.5% of all jobs are destroyed each month and roughly as many are created-- interestingly, this is about the same percentage as in the United States. As there are many reasons other than job destruction why a worker may separate from a firm, the flows of workers are typically much higher. In France, they are of the order of 4% per month (Pierre Cahuc and André Zylberberg 2004).

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes