THE university was cross because it was paying a lecturer who had not taught a single class all year. Absurd, retorted the lecturer, Luc Ferry, a philosopher and former education minister. He could not teach because he was on secondment to the Council for the Analysis of Society, a 32-member quango reporting to the prime minister. Besides, he added, “security reasons” made it hard for him to teach: a few years ago he could not get into a lecture hall because trade unionists were waiting outside with baseball bats. This month, as the row escalated, the prime minister's office said it would reimburse the university. The philosopher will stay on the council.

Mr Ferry dismissed the fuss as “totally grotesque”, and denied that he had a “fake job”. His council has a smallish budget, most of its members are unpaid and it produces reports. It is not to be confused with the nine-member Council for Employment, Income and Social Cohesion, nor the 51-member Employment Policy Council, and certainly not the 36-strong Council for Economic Analysis, which in turn has nothing to do with the 36-strong High Council for the Social Economy. One virtue of the Ferry affair is that it has exposed the messy tangle of quangos and commissions in France, many of which do little.

According to a little-publicised appendix to the 2011 budget, France has no fewer than 697 such commissions. Unlike statutory quangos, such as the anti-discrimination authority or the competition commission, these bodies mostly give advice. Some are self-explanatory, such as the Commission for Compensation for Damage by Wild Animals. Others, such as the Committee of Statistical Confidentiality, or the Strategic Committee for Intensive Calculation, are less so. France has commissions for noise, for the air, for water, for cold, for the polar regions, for rubbish and more. There are at least 13 commissions for inventing new French words or phrases. Charged with translating “breaking news” last year, one came up with the snappy information de dernière minute.

Some commissions do genuinely valuable work. The Pensions Advisory Council produces first-rate studies on the future financing of public pensions, which successive governments have used to promote reform. Others are less obviously useful. In 2009, the most recent year audited, the 31-member Cultural Council for the Union for the Mediterranean met twice. The National Committee for the French Initiative on Coral Reefs convened once. And the Council for Employment, Income and Social Cohesion, with an operating budget of €351,000 ($505,000), did not meet at all.

“It is all totally opaque,” argues Richard Mallié, an anti-quango deputy from the ruling UMP party. The commissions do not break down their budgets, and provide no information on hours spent or salaries paid. Although the government has abolished some of the most pointless, new ones keep cropping up. “Whenever there is a difficulty,” says Mr Mallié, “we just create committees.” In the 1960s Charles de Gaulle deplored the French tendency to set up a committee to work out what to think about anything. Half a century on, what would he have made of putting a philosopher in charge of one?