"Fourchette" is French for "fork." According to Simon Heffer, columnist of the Times (UK), there's an enormous one in the road that the French have traveled the last six decades. A choice has to be made and the consequences, particularly the economic ones, are equal part profound and unavoidable:

It rarely happens to a country that a clear opportunity is presented to it to save itself from ruin. ...The decision France has to take tomorrow, when it chooses between Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal for its new president, is whether it finally has the courage to move out of the 1940s, or is determined to stay there to the point of utter economic destruction. Ask any Frenchman or woman, and they will tell you of the three great economic difficulties facing their country: and they are all, of course, related to each other. The first is chomage, or unemployment. The second is the absence of croissance, or growth. And the third is the weakness of pouvoir d'achat, or purchasing power. What money people earn doesn't seem to go very far in France.

One of Sarkozy's proposals is to scrap the infamous 35-hour work week, the effect of which has been dampening and hampering to the French economy and worker productivity:

Unlike in Britain, small businesses are not engines of growth, because bureaucracy and high taxes make it very hard for them to grow. ... The other factor that makes it so hard for energetic and enterprising French people to prosper is that they are usually prevented by law from working more than 35 hours a week. This law, brought in under the socialist government of Lionel Jospin, is now widely condemned, even by some supporters of Miss Royal, for the effect it has had on suppressing growth, living standards, wealth creation and productivity. That Mr Sarkozy has said that he will not only scrap it, but will make the earnings for work done in excess of the 35 hours free of taxes both for the employee and the employer, is indicative of the hand grenade he intends to throw into the dormant French economy. But will they let him?

With a 10% lead in the polls for Sarkozy, it seems the answer is "oui." We who promote the economic liberalism and the free-enterprise system certainly hope so.