From the Telegraph

The French government yesterday described the 35-hour working week as a financial disaster that was costing the state billions of pounds and promised to reform the system despite fierce union opposition.
In an interview in yesterday’s Le Figaro, the finance minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, said that the 35-hour week had lumbered the state with £10 billion a year in additional social charges and that it had demoralised millions of workers.

This 35 hour maximum working week always was a fairly stupid idea. Promoted by Jacques Delors’ daughter ( sorry, forgotten her name ) the whole idea is based on a false theory, that of the Lump Theory of Labour. The idea is that there is only so much work to go around, so if everyone worked shorter hours then more people would have jobs.
It’s false. Plainly so. It’s a basic idea in economics that the desires and wants of individuals are unlimited, while the resources we have to meet those desires are limited. Thus all the attention paid to the allocation of scarce resources within the subject. Labour is another one of those resources, a factor of production. Ergo, we do not have a fixed amount of work to distribute.
There are reasons why there can be unemployment of course, such things as high minimum wages ( which France suffers from ) . In fact, anything that makes the marginal cost of employing someone higher than the marginal revenues to be gained by doing so will condemn that person to unemployment. So if you do have high levels of structural unemployment, one should be dismantling those barriers and rules that keep marginal costs high : like union power, excessive employment / social security taxes, strict rules on firing people, minimum wages and the like.
As the Angry Economist points out, you may ignore Economics but Economics won’t ignore you.
As the French seem to be finding out.