The Spoiled, Hypocritical French Electorate

The French electorate has made it's choice for the status quo ante, albeit a theoretical one, in which housing, education and much else and housing are abundantly provided for because they've been declared rights.  Even as French government spending is  more than half of GDP (no footnotes, but I'm pretty sure it's right, look)  the French people have decided that blame for the problems they face can be laid at the feet of the private sector as a whole.
The French may have had an even more peculiar relationship with wealth than countries.  On the one hand, they are prodigious capitalists.  They have more companies in the Fortune Global 500 than any other European country (edging out Germany).  Yet they are consistently among the most sceptical of liberal economies:
http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2011/1/26/worldupdates/2011-01-26T163422Z_01_NOOTR_RTRMDNC_0_-544174-1&sec=Worldupdates

They're spoiled in that, as with all modern democracies, they are susceptible to the "free lunch" thinking proffered by politicians. In France it is more entrenched and unquestioned, more deeply ingrained in their culture with fewer countervailing forces, as evidenced by the proportion of the economy that's state run, the entrenched skepticism of liberalism, and the known propensity to strike.  They're hypocritical because the condemn the basis of much of the prosperity they enjoy.
France has always somehow made the most of these circumstances; though standards of livings have likely increased less than they otherwise might have, so far they've avoided the trip from first world to third suffered by the Argentines.
France may have seen this movie before.  The last time a Socialist was elected, Mitterrand embarked no a pretty radical program of regulation, taxation and nationalization. (Perhaps tellingly, this occurred as the US under Regan and the UK with Thatcher began to recover from their inflationary statist misadventures of the 60s and 70s).  Markets and reality soon intervened, and Mitterrand ended up charting a more moderate course for the duration of his presidency.
Global French giants should continue to be more or less successful, and France has enough momentum and accumulated wealth that it still looks like a monumental collapse should probably be averted.  They may, regardless of the wrongheaded choices of the electorate, maintain or, perhaps slowly decrease their living standards.  The prospects for smaller businesses on which future prosperity would presumably rest, however, are in grater doubt:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-10/entrepreneurs-in-france-flee-from-hollande-s-rejection-of-wealth.html