The European Parliament voted yesterday to end Britain's exemption from the maximum 48-hour working week. A bit of Euro-fudge with the member states should water this down, but across the Channel they are wondering why Britain bothers.

Since the early 1980s, les Anglais have been lecturing Europe on the virtues of long hours as the path to prosperity. While the grasshopper French were awarding themselves a 35-hour week in the 1990s, the British fought for the right to sweat away 24/7 in the name of competing with the emerging ants of Asia.

Now the boot is on the other foot. Just as there is no French word for opt-out, there is none for schadenfreude - but there is a lot of it around. No one is saying “we told you so” too openly, yet it is impossible to escape the smugness over the failure of the virtuous modèle Anglo-Saxon.

France is suffering from the slump too. Lay-offs are multiplying and money is tight, but the pain is nothing like as bad as in Britain and the United States. America's slide began with the dollar a couple of years ago, but the belittling of Britain has come as a shock.

British prosperity, flaunted by pound-rich house buyers and Eurostar weekenders, was until lately the envy of stuck-in-the-mud France even if people sneered that it came with Dickensian work practices. Only last year, Nicolas Sarkozy won an election on the slogan “Work more to earn more”. He encouraged people to retire later and work a few more hours. That seems a long time ago.

Since even George W. Bush has temporarily abandoned capitalism, “Sarko l'Américain” has started talking like a lefty. On Monday, he dumped a long-standing promise to allow Sunday opening for all shops.

Seen from Paris, there is little to be gained from emulating les Anglo-Saxons and their brilliant financial institutions. It looks as if the Gallic model was right all along. You can have your butter and the money for the butter - French for “cake eating”. Super-Sarko has been rubbing it in, pointing sorrowfully across the Channel and saying that he would never give up a manufacturing industry in favour of financial services like Britain.

France has been profligate and wasteful. It has run up big national debt, but it has been protected by the euro (thanks to German austerity). France resisted investment-funded pensions, kept its big car industry, its generous welfare state, its 80 per cent nuclear power and expensive high-speed trains. And it has managed this while working the world's shortest week. Writing as a new-poor Brit in Paris, there may be a lesson here, or perhaps this is just another exception française.

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