Playing the long con, infiltrating the police.

[Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang]

It's hard to find specific numbers in English, and my French is not quite good enough to be able to browse through sources.

France is ultimately a welfare state with relatively high social spending, although the bulk of it seems to be taken up by pensions and healthcare and another significant portion being unemployment benefits.

All the various schemes seem to have major efficiency problems. It seems to be a strange catch 22 where governments are elected on the specific promise to finally reform the system (like Macron, Hollande, Sarkozy, they all promised institutional reform), but as soon as they go about implementing their electoral promises their support collapses and they are unable to actually do anything.

Everyone agrees that the pension system is over bloated, over complicated, too fragmented. But nobody wants to change anything.

Everyone agrees that racism is a real and pervasive social problem in France, but everyone pretends that there's no institutional racism in France.

Everyone agrees that welfare system seemingly cannot reach the most vulnerable areas, but everyone pretends those areas don't exist.

Everyone pretends the police is an untouchable holy institution, while everyone pretends that the corruption, excessive use of force and suicides aren't happening.

It's quite idiosyncratic.

Idiosyncrasy is pretty much a defining trait of France indeed. My point of view is not that of a French person per say, but a more neutral one from a neighboring's country French speaking minority, heavily exposed to French cultural influence, news and politics (I even went to a French school).

Since the late XVIIIth Century, France has known nothing but political instability and an extremely centralized power, that before becoming the 2nd largest colonial Empire, effectively built itself by colonizing its own very diverse mainland provinces. Historically this meant that for the longest time, the higher authorities and police forces were almost a foreign occupying force, the latter actually being a branch of the military, sent from Paris, and effectively were/are in some of the more independently minded parts of the country.

Over all this time, France has know many, many Revolutions, with more than a dozen Constitutions, usually assorted with a Regime change, with political violence, riots and turmoil a recurring feature and/or prelude of the process. While this led to the need for, and the creation of a powerful army and police force, defining factors always made it suspect in the eye of the politics (historically it has been the calling for categories such as monarchists, the old Aristocracy, Catholics, populists or patriots). Add-in their experience of historical or aspiring Great Leaders from military backgrounds (Napoleon, Boulanger, Pétain, de Gaulle), professional politicians have for a long time been wary, and more than willing to defund military and police forces.

Over the past few decades, massive protests, and/or the prospect of riots if not a general strike have usually been enough to make governments curb or cancel reforms, if not fall themselves (unless the protestors are of the innocuous kind). The fear of riots and turmoils has led politicians to severely restrict rules of engagement for the ordinary police, making a situation requiring self-defense a lose-lose conundrum for many (if not hazardous anyway due to dismal shooting practice allocations and some delinquents being much more heavily armed with AK-47 if not RPGs), inciting them to focus their work on mostly law abiding citizens, resulting in areas where the rejection of authority is such that firemen and even ambulances are attacked.
On the other hand, politics are adept of the saying "Strong against the weak, lenient against the strong", so riot police and the like are usually well equipped and well fed, particularly when their personal safety is on the line : the Yellow Vest movement saw them really scared at the beginning, with a lot of forces mobilized around governmental palaces and evacuation plans made. Of course this does not better the public's perception and the life of ordinary police.

My 2 cents on the mess of French police.

The rest has a lot to do with two competing sanctified values of modern France : Equality, and Social Progress.

-Equality has pretty much eclipsed the 2 other mottoes of the French Republic (that being Liberty and Fraternity), combined with the Centralism that characterizes it, it is pretty much a dogma that there are only French people, racial statistics are even illegal. Another consequence is that the baseline minimum wages, and "Revenu de solidarité active", is set at uniform values, regardless of whether you live in Paris, the remote countryside, the border of Brasil or in the Indian Ocean.

-the sanctity of Social Progress makes it very hard to rework the Pension system, especially since those with the most to lose are some with the highest nuisance power : civil servants, which amount to 20% of the workforce, not counting the quasi-public transportation companies.