Lived in France for several years.
Not only an age 60 retirement, but between the 35 hour work week, a "saint's day" every other week, some civil holiday every alternate week and a rail/taxi/muni/police/carman's strike every third week, plus six weeks of vacation, you end up working a 3 day week year 'round!
Oh yeah, and that 2 hour lunch (paid by law by your company).
You must have lived in a different place called France from the one I live in.
Retirement at 60 is only possible if you've worked for 42 years straight. The "new" reduction to 60 from 62 does not reverse most of the changes made by the previous government; to qualify, you have to have had almost no breaks of any kind. And in any case, this is not the full rate; you have to wait until 65 for that (a bit like US Social Security). To go at 60, you have to have saved quite a bit, FIRE-style, and until very recently there was no 401(k)-style tax deduction for that; your personal retirement contributions were paid out of taxed income, and even getting the returns tax-free (Roth-style) means accepting some conditions.
It's a Saint's days almost every day of the year, courtesy of the Catholic calendar. However, a total of 0 (zero) Saint's days are recognised as public holidays in France. (Several French holidays are indeed Christian religious festivals; these were abolished after the 1789 revolution and quietly snuck back in during the period from 1815 through 1871 when the French brought the monarchy back. They don't like to talk about this period very much; for example, it is skated over very quickly in school history lessons. Anyway, when 1871 came around, they were apparently so tired from losing a war to the Prussians that they never re-secularized the holiday calendar.)
France actually has no more holidays than the US, once you take into account that Whit Monday is not really a holiday (it's a very long and complicated story, involving politicians).
And there is no employer-paid lunch break. If you work a 35-hour week, you typically work from 9:00-12:00 or 12:30 and then 2pm to 5:30pm or 6pm. Lunchtime is your own. Many workers go home, but others sit at their desk like people all over the world. (The most common consequence of the 35-hour week was for people to work 8-hour days or even slightly more, then either go home on Friday afternoon, or take an occasional extra day off. Mothers will often typically go home on a Wednesday afternoon, since most kids have no school then - elementary schools are typically shut all day Wednesday. (This *is* a secular thing; in pre-revolutionary France, schools used to be closed on Thursday for catechism practice, so the revolutionaries kept that idea, but moved that to another day and made it about recreation. French kids need this break; they work their butts off in school.)
Gender discrimination and discrimination based on reproductive status. Lovely.
As far as I know, this applies to men and women equally. Certainly, the 5-year retirement age bonus which has applied to government employees for some time is not based on gender. I know a man who went to work for the then-nationalised phone company at age 18 and retired 30 years later, with 5 years bonus for 3 kids.
As for the other part, it's simply designed to compensate for time spent not working due to bringing up children. This would not be regarded as discriminatory anywhere in Europe.
Don't forget, most Europeans have been brought up - since Bismarck - to expect that the state will be fairly substantially involved in their retirement income. In France and many other countries, the state administers or guarantees a number of pension schemes which have a substantial degree of proportionality to your income. (Notable exceptions are the UK and the Netherlands, where the state retirement pension is a fixed, and unspectacular, amount; however, both of those countries have fairly sophisticated private pension provision, including generous tax deductibility, which is handy due to their - by US standards - eye-watering marginal income tax rates.)
