For healthcare, retirement, various helps for unemployed people and other social benefits, companies are paying roughly the equivalent of your net income directly to the state. The so called "charges".
Then according to your revenues you will pay between 0 and 50% of your net income in tax (it's maxed out to 50%). For your average software engineer with a master degree, probably around 30%.
So that's a total of 65%. Hardly ever less than 50%, and hardly ever more than 75%.
Now the real obfuscation comes from the so-called "charges". They are payed by companies so some people consider them part of company tax. I don't, because "charges" are tied to an employee... fire him/her and you won't have to pay them.
The double obfuscation on "charges" is that only a part of them is showed on the payroll... so most people tend to see them as lower than they actually are.
And then the VTA is 19.6%... So yes, French people pay an incredible amount of tax. And wages are not even high to begin with (much lower than in the United States, at least NYC where I used to be working).
Then again, nearly free education and nearly free healthcare is nice too... the "Grande Ecole" I went to, top tier, was 800 euros a year. Books and all materials included in the price. Definitely affordable.
You can read the Forbes Tax Misery Index (http://www.forbes.com/global/2008/0407/060_2.html) or the Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom (http://www.heritage.org/index/Country/France) to learn more.
Despite those billions, most public services have been running huge deficits for decades. The trains are fast and the electricity is mostly nuclear, though. And you'll have the pleasure to live in a country where everyone has equal health care. And it's really, really... well, equal.
Unless you happen to live in les banlieu. France's disenfranchised underclass is a ticking timebomb that the CRS will only be able to contain for so long. The Americans had their Jim Crow laws, but that's nothing in comparison to what goes on in France.
Actually, the banlieues (suburbs) are the most subsidized areas of the country. The infrastructure there (schools, libraries, sport clubs, etc.) has a mysterious tendency to spontaneously consume itself, but usually it's promptly rebuilt thanks to the generous taxpayer.
The thing is, those cities were planned and designed from the ground-up by progressive, visionary social engineers as part of a social experiment (in collectivism, it goes without saying) funded with money from the Marshall plan. And the result of this experiment seems to be that, no, people really don't like living in cities that look like Brasilia.
But that's just one part of the problem. The big picture is gloomier and it reveals a massive failure of the French socialist-minded government in economic and social policies. The most rigid labour laws in the world prevent employers from hiring anyone but the most productive and qualified workers. Everyone else (too old, too young, not qualified enough, etc.) is excluded from the job market and lives on welfare.
The social policies are probably even worse than the economic policies. They say racism is evil and we should all live together and love each other and so on, yet they don't seem to really believe in what they preach since they have this nasty habit of forcing people to integrate; which, of course, only results in more racism, hatred and violence.
Oh, I forgot about justice. It's very humane. After all, criminals are themselves victims of society and should be treated as such, aren't they?
You're right about the word time-bomb, but it's far from being as simple as a clash between two classes. The government has generated hundreds of antagonist interest groups. The CRS is extremely efficient at dealing with random bursts of violence (it's one of the most efficient European police force when it comes to dealing with urban violence). But of course it can't prevent or control a civil war.