Forget who'll win in France. Change is a loser.

PARIS: IN the months leading up to Sunday's presidential voting in France, there was a lot of talk about breaking with the past. Don't bet it will happen.

The French are notoriously resistant to change, and any new president would be hard-pressed to deliver any dramatic departure from the way people here live and work and get along with each other (or don't).

It was the French, after all, who first observed, "the more things change, the more they remain the same."

"I have the impression that things will move, yes. But will France resemble Britain? No," said Michel Winock, a French historian, referring obliquely to Margaret Thatcher's 1980s showdown with British unions and the eventual economic boom her policies helped bring. "We have traditions, attitudes, an attachment to social welfare and, even if change is desirable, we won't accept change overnight."

How can that be? The candidates, Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal, each promised to remake France, deploring the joblessness, the bloated bureaucracy, the lack of entrepreneurial spirit. Sarkozy has proposed something approaching the Thatcher revolution, while Royal even suggested scrapping the Fifth Republic. But all that talk ignored two realities:

First,

life in France is, on the whole, plenty comfortable. The French flirt with the idea of change, but few in the mainstream want to risk losing France's "exceptionalism" — that warm bed of traditions and entitlements that lets so many enjoy the benefits of living here.

And the benefits are great. Listen to the conversation with the waiter at the table next to you in a Parisian restaurant at lunchtime and more often than not it will involve a nuanced discussion of what is best to eat and just which wine to drink. Later, the diners will often pay with meal vouchers from their employer.

Cumbersome and costly as the system may be, it's not exactly broken. So why risk trouble?

Second, there is something about the French that resists a change, even in times of trouble. Historians famously trace it to the Enlightenment, when France developed a republican model based on the collective will. By contrast, republican models in Britain and America stressed the primacy of economics and individualism — what the French still, with a shudder, call liberalism.

"French society remains attached to the idea of the collective," said Jean-Claude Mailly, national secretary of the Force Ouvrière union federation. "A whole series of things are managed collectively." And that, by its nature, makes things move more slowly than Americans are accustomed to.

Unions and business federations, as sectors of society, are expected to be consulted before legislation is put on the French agenda, for example — a more deliberate, if more open, practice than interest-group lobbying as practiced in the United States.

Of course, France has problems, but a look at some of the most pressing ones shows plenty of room for people to feel smug.

Yes, the economy is sluggish: growth is slow and unemployment is high — about 2.1 percent and 8.5 percent, respectively. But France continues to draw large amounts of foreign direct investment, and in 2005, economic output per hour worked was higher than in the United States. The World Health Organization rates the French health care system among the best in the world.

Yes, young people are rebelling: second-generation immigrants took to the streets in 2005 to protest joblessness and discrimination, and college students did something similar last year to protest a law that would have made it easier to fire them from their first jobs.

But as bad as the urban unrest was, it never reached the level of violence seen in periods of unrest in American cities. The more equitable social welfare system here, which is often blamed for some of France's economic problems, is one reason.

Yes, life is expensive: a web of protectionist regulations has kept a lid on the ability to save money at discount stores and restaurant chains. But that has also kept neighborhood bistros and bakers and cheese shops and charcuteries in business far longer than in most other developed economies, creating a rich fabric of daily life that everyone loves. It is one reason France draws more tourists than any other country each year.

All of this gives the French good reason to stick with their basic philosophy on dealing with troubled institutions: rather than chop them down and build something new, the French prefer to prune.

Take the 35-hour workweek. Both candidates agreed that the law imposing it causes problems for businesses and needs to be amended, but neither proposed scrapping it. "It is very difficult to reverse social benefits like this," Winock said.

Still,