'We Will Not Be Thrown Away!'
by ANGELIQUE CHRISAFIS
[from the April 24, 2006 issue of The Nation magazine]

Paris

Back in November, when the forests of tower blocks in the Paris suburbs were lit by rioters torching cars, Floréal Mangin woke each morning to count the blackened metal wrecks outside her bedroom window. She watched the gangs of boys in tracksuits and hoods who were setting light to all they could find. They had grown up with her, and some were in her class at school. "They were on self-destruct," she says. "They were destroying their own neighborhood, smashing their families' cars, but they had no other way of telling the world they existed."

Now Mangin, a slight 17-year-old in a sweatshirt with a cartoon on the front, is one of the organizers of a new youth rebellion in the banlieues, the suburbs beyond the moat of Paris's ring-road, where its poor and immigrant populations have been traditionally confined. And this time, they will not be ignored. Cars are burning again outside Mangin's classroom in Seine-Saint-Denis. It is places like this--where the youth unemployment of 50 percent is the highest in Western Europe--rather than the cafes of the Latin Quarter that are the motor for what is now being called the 2006 uprising.

On March 8, for the first time since 1968, students occupied the Sorbonne before being tear-gassed out three days later in a dawn raid by riot police. Since then, a whole district of Left Bank Paris has been sealed off behind metal barricades by thousands of RoboCop soldiers from the CRS--the riot police--fearful that the building will become the focus of violent revolt, as it was in '68. Two-thirds of France's universities have been occupied, on strike, blockaded or closed; hundreds of secondary schools have been taken over; and a middle-aged trade unionist, knocked unconscious during clashes between police and rioters, hangs between life and death in a coma. No one knows where this will end--not the teenage suburban lycée students, not the university students occupying their campuses, not the embattled poet-prime minister, Dominique de Villepin.

This is not like May '68, when Paris was at the center of a joyous global student revolt against capitalism, imperialism and the Vietnam War, as well as the universities' antiquated regulations. Then, as paving stones were hurled at police, the philosopher-rebels demanded the right to break free from their superiors and live their dreams, chanting, "Under the paving stones, the beach!" Now Mangin, whose father is unemployed, sees nothing under the concrete except more concrete.

She is one of the accidental teenage leaders of France's new student uprising, which began slowly on January 31 and has shaken the country. Mangin is standing with her sixth-form comrades in the engine room of the "movement," a ramshackle warren hidden up a spiral staircase behind a street of halal butchers near Paris's Gare du Nord. It is from these back rooms, littered with pamphlets, that sixth-formers (16 and older) have coordinated in painstaking detail their "actions" to paralyze hundreds of French schools. Every surface is weighted down with the paraphernalia of revolt: spray-paint cans, sheets painted with slogans, megaphones. A fog of smoke hangs in the air as teenagers, fueled by cigarettes and chocolate biscuits, man assembly lines stapling placards. Some have parents who are unemployed, others are at prestigious feeder schools for France's top universities. "This is not a bourgeois movement; this is a movement of the people. The suburbs and the center of the city come together," says an artist's son who is planning to apply to the Sorbonne.

On the surface, this is a strange revolution. It was sparked by opposition to an "easy-hire, easy-fire" contract designed to ease France's crippling youth unemployment. The contrat première embauche, or CPE, is a "first employment contract" that the prime minister believes will spur employers to hire young workers safe in the knowledge that they don't have to keep them on. It allows them to fire workers under 26 after two years and without giving a reason, bucking all the traditions of the French paternalistic state, which prides itself on jobs for life. Current employment terms are prohibitively expensive for small businesses, making them reluctant to take young people on. For young people who already found themselves with no choice but to take some form of short-term contract, the CPE was the last straw.

The young rebels are fighting not for change but for the status quo--they want the same rights and benefits their parents enjoyed. They do not put flowers in their hair but take to the streets with nooses round their necks, carrying mock gallows and coffins, chanting, "We are disposable pieces of shit!"

But the festering anger goes deeper than the CPE. It's fury at what they see as the lie of the Republican ideal of liberté, égalité, fraternité. This is a country where, because everyone is supposed to be equal, and equally French, ethnic minorities are not counted. But most young people believe that no matter how many degrees you have, your chances of a decent job are nonexistent if you have a non-French name or an address in an immigrant suburb.

In late March Mangin and her classmates voted to end the blockade of their Seine-Saint-Denis high school when two burning cars were pushed toward the front gates. They see teenage boys traveling with baseball bats to the center of Paris to join otherwise peaceful demonstrations, throwing petrol bombs at police, torching cars, being tear-gassed and hauled off in vans. "It's starting again," she says. "We can feel the burning starting again in the suburbs. It never really went away. The government has done nothing to address the hell of life in the poor suburbs--no jobs, prison, broken homes. And one name gets them back on the street and into a frenzy of fighting--Nicolas Sarkozy," the interior minister and presidential pretender who vowed to clean up the suburbs with a power hose last fall.

As always, the media are looking for a photogenic young revolutionary leader, a modern replica of '68 pinups like Daniel Cohn-Bendit, "Danny the Red." But the teenager who more than anyone is pulling the strings of the schoolyard revolt isn't interested in fame. Karl Stoeckel, 19, could not be further from the romantic, preening revolutionaries of '68. He emerges from his tiny back office in a neat sweater, beige trousers and polished shoes, apologizing for the mess left by his comrades. "The '68 leaders were completely different people," he says. "Maybe they were more romantic. But I would not want to become what they have turned into now. It's a little tragic when you see some of them. They are the greatest capitalists in the world." The leader of France's biggest union of sixth-formers, he has survived on four hours' sleep a night for weeks, going to the barricades to motivate striking schoolkids, sending daily press releases from his office tallying the number of schools that are paralyzed. The fight over numbers is at the heart of the struggle; the education ministry's figure is, inevitably, at least a third less than Stoeckel's.

Stoeckel, who was briefly arrested at a student roadblock, is trying to study in spare moments so he doesn't slip in his baccalauréat grades. He wants to study law at one of France's top faculties. Like Cohn-Bendit's, Stoeckel's parents are immigrants: His father is German, his mother Malaysian. His father, an engineer, is now unemployed. "He's over 50. There is age discrimination in France and he can't find a job. He won't really talk about it," Stoeckel says. He believes France is going through a catastrophic period, that people are being left out in the cold. "I am not a revolutionary," he says. "This is not romantic at all--it's important and it's very serious. We are doing this for the future of all the generations who are going to follow us."

Cohn-Bendit, now a member of the European Parliament in Germany, has dismissed the new movement as the "no" generation, with none of the optimism and ideas of the '68 radicals. For once the right in France agrees with him, claiming that Stoeckel's revolution symbolizes all that is wrong in the French psyche. To them, it is students again scuppering the necessary reform governments have tried to introduce for twenty years. The young, they claim, want to remain cocooned in thirty-five-hour-a-week jobs for life, with employment laws that make it almost impossible to get rid of staff.

But Julie Coudry, the photogenic, floppy-hat-wearing leader of the breakaway student confederation, disagrees. To her, the '68 revolutionaries had the luxury of fighting for their dreams because they had comfortable homes and jobs for life awaiting them. "The '68 crowd had a lot of utopia and dreams; now we are having to deal with the reality," Coudry says. "Our generation is saying we are angry that the ['68 students] didn't find a lasting solution. People say we are like Communist or Marxist revolutionaries, but we don't want to cut with economic society.... We are not just an 'anti' generation. We just want to build our own future, and we're ready and waiting to put forward our ideas."

Perhaps the biggest media star to emerge from the protests is Bruno Julliard, the square-jawed and straight-talking head of the largest student union, UNEF, who has taken his place alongside France's union leaders to deliver ultimatums to the government. When a loose coalition of students demanded on March 26 that the whole French government resign, Julliard was careful to distance himself from the call. He took to the airwaves, saying he did not want any "victors or losers" in this battle, just the withdrawal of the CPE. Accused at the start of the protests of spending more time talking to the cameras than talking at the barricades, Julliard, whose mother is a Socialist mayor, sees himself as a public spokesman for a movement that is really being driven by the protesters on the ground.

The question now is where the movement will go. French President Jacques Chirac passed the law on April 2, amending it so that young workers could be fired after one year, not two, and stating that employers must give a reason. The law will not come into effect until the changes are made. Interior Minister Sarkozy has been charged with initiating talks among the government, unions and students, but many think the protests will continue. Trade unions and student leaders estimated that on April 4, 3 million protesters took to the streets across France. One student tells me the anti-CPE movement has become the flag of a "dispossessed generation," sick of a society run by a permanent elite where so many people have no place. Universities are now calling for an amnesty for all rioters who were rounded up in the suburbs after car-burning sprees in the autumn. "They were just making their stand to change society. It is no good locking them up," says one Muslim student at Nanterre, where the '68 revolt began.

Even a Sorbonne degree is no protection from the relentless "daily racism" that many feel permeates French society. Mohammed Konate, a Sorbonne law student who was born in Ivory Coast, says the color of his skin would put him at the back of the queue for jobs. Others say CVs are thrown in the bin if they come from troubled banlieues. Yamina, a Moroccan law student at another prestigious Paris faculty, says: "A nonwhite woman? From the banlieu? In a head scarf? I don't think the odds are stacked in my favor, do you?"

In 1968 police brutality played a major role in transforming what started as spleen-venting by a few hundred privileged but radical students into a mass movement that threatened to turn French society on its head. Last autumn the riots in the suburbs were sparked by the deaths of two teenagers who were electrocuted after running from police and hiding in an electrical substation. At a March 28 demonstration, new banners appeared, demanding Justice for Cyril Ferez, a 39-year-old trade unionist lying in a coma since he was struck, according to witnesses, by riot police after a Paris protest on March 18. Pictures of him joshing with the riot police one minute and lying unconscious on the ground the next have stirred protesters.

There is a feeling that France is dancing on a volcano: that if there is a death, if someone is martyred in the protests, things could really erupt. Graffiti on the boulevards of Montparnasse, not far from the huge steel barrier the army erected to seal off the Sorbonne, says One Cop, One Bullet. Sarkozy has warned that the protests could light the kindling of unrest among violent kids from the suburbs. He has poured riot police into the center of Paris, where students have also attacked police, telling his officers to arrest as many people as possible, but warning they will be "judged on their cool." He has broken with his potential presidential rival, de Villepin, in preaching compromise and dialogue, but the young protesters have so far judged him only on the police. The multiracial groups of teenagers from the suburbs who watched plainclothes police grabbing and frisking their counterparts in hooded tracksuits at the March 28 protest clenched their fists in silent rage. The spray paint on the walls of the Latin Quarter reads Put Sarkozy to the Wall.

Outside the metal fortress that surrounds the Sorbonne, where police riot vans still line the cobbled streets, Alexandre Duclos, a 25-year-old PhD student in philosophy, is on the twelfth day of a hunger strike as we go to press. He has tried student sit-ins and street protests; now he is taking a drastic measure against "the army's occupation" of the Sorbonne. "It's not the police--they do their work, they obey orders," he says. "The question is, Who is giving them those orders? This society is extremely fragile. When have you ever seen a sight like this? A Western European army taking over a university, shutting it down and sealing it off behind a steel wall? This movement isn't just about resistance to change and employment law. This society has failed."

The French postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard has spent his life warning of the dangers of the "media simulated" reality we take for truth. But he saw last autumn's riots and the burning cars as "a sort of eternal flame, like that under the Arc de Triomphe, burning in honor of the Unknown Immigrant," an anger that won't go away. President Chirac may not have a plane waiting on the tarmac, as de Gaulle did to flee in 1968, but it remains to be seen whether his party can calm the storm.

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Chirac Rescinds Labor Law -  includes link to video. 

April 11, 2006

Chirac Will Rescind Labor Law That Caused Wide French Riots

By ELAINE SCIOLINO

PARIS, April 10 — President Jacques Chirac crumbled under pressure from students, unions, business executives and even some of his own party leaders on Monday, announcing that he would rescind a disputed youth labor law intended to make hiring more flexible.

The retreat was a humiliating political defeat for both Mr. Chirac and his political protégé, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, underscoring the paralysis of their center-right government 13 months before presidential elections.

It also laid bare the deep popular resistance to liberalizing France's rigid labor market, and makes any new economic reform politically impossible before a new government is in place, and perhaps not even then.

"Dead and buried," is how Jean-Claude Mailly, leader of the leftist union Force Ouvrière, described the fate of the labor law. "The goal has been achieved."

The cancellation of the law, which Mr. Chirac signed April 2, is aimed in large part at bringing an end to two months of major protests and strikes throughout France that have shut down universities, threatened to hurt tourism and the economy, and brought violent clashes between young people and the police.

Still, a student protest march scheduled for Tuesday will proceed as planned, and students at several French universities voted Monday to continue blocking access to classes, demanding more concessions from the government in work practices and job security.

Dominique de Villepin"Today is a defining victory, but there are still many issues outstanding," said Bruno Julliard, who heads UNEF, the main student union.

The new law was intended to give employers a simpler way of hiring workers under 26 on a trial basis without immediately exposing companies to the cumbersome and costly benefits that make hiring and firing such a daunting enterprise. Opposition to the law reflects the deep-rooted fear among the French of losing their labor and social protection in a globalized world.

In a television interview on Monday evening on the private channel TF1, Prime Minister de Villepin, who had been widely hailed as a possible center-right candidate in the May 2007 presidential elections, said he hoped to learn lessons from what he called "an extremely difficult time," contending that he had never harbored presidential aspirations.

"I have always indicated that I did not have presidential ambitions," said Mr. de Villepin, who had drafted and pushed the law.

His sober, subdued demeanor contrasted sharply with his defiant and angry stance in defense of the law in recent speeches before Parliament, in which he proclaimed that the future of the youth of France was at stake and vowed not to back down.

Both in his television interview and in a brief televised address earlier in the day, Mr. de Villepin blamed the French people's fears and anxiety for the defeat of the measure.

"The necessary conditions of confidence and calm are not there, either among young people, or companies," he said in the television address.

The abolition of the law was announced without fanfare, in a terse, one-sentence communiqué from Élysée Palace: "Under the proposal of the prime minister and after having heard the presidents of the parliamentary groups and the officials of the parliamentary majority, the president of the Republic has decided to replace Article 8 of the law on equality of opportunities by a mechanism in favor of the professional integration of young people in difficulty."

To replace the defunct youth labor law, senior lawmakers from Mr. Chirac's party presented a much weaker draft law to Parliament on Monday.

The new proposal would give employers financial incentives to encourage the hiring and training of young workers, and give job seekers more guidance and increase internships in areas where jobs are relatively plentiful, including restaurants, hotels and nursing.

There will be temporary subsidies or tax breaks for companies hiring unskilled young workers permanently. The cost of these measures, about $363 million a year, would be financed through an increase in tobacco taxes.

In its initial form, the law allowed employers to fire new employees within two years without cause. In the face of mounting pressure, Mr. Chirac watered it down so that employers could subject new employees to only a yearlong trial period, and then would have to offer a reason for any dismissal.

Students and unions, bolstered by support from the opposition Socialists and even some business leaders, had vowed to continue their street protests until the law was rescinded.

The Socialists were quick to proclaim victory on Monday. "This is an unquestionable retreat," François Hollande, the leader of the Socialist Party, told reporters. "It is a grand success for the young and an impressive victory for the unity of the unions."

Mr. Hollande, who has not ruled out running for president, said the crisis offered the party "reasons to hope."

But it is much too early to predict how the government's defeat over the jobs law will affect the presidential race.

Certainly, Mr. de Villepin is severely weakened. But as a former foreign minister who never held elected political office, he always lacked the obvious credentials to secure the nomination easily.

By contrast, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who successfully avoided having to use substantial force to calm the protests, has emerged stronger. And as the leader of the governing center-right Union for a Popular Movement Party, he has the power of the party machinery behind him.

In a poll published Sunday in the newspaper Le Parisien, 85 percent of the respondents said they saw both Mr. de Villepin and Mr. Chirac as weakened by the battle over the law, but 53 percent said it had improved Mr. Sarkozy's standing.

In an interview that is to appear Tuesday in the center-right daily Le Figaro, Mr. Sarkozy emphasized that this was not a moment for criticism of the government. "Politics is a long-term affair," he said. "No one gains from humiliation."

He went out of his way to declare his fidelity to Mr. Chirac, his longtime political rival, saying, "Never, in a long time, have I been as in sync with the president of the republic as in these last few weeks."

Instead, Mr. Sarkozy unleashed his criticism against the Socialist opposition, saying: "The left has nothing to propose, nothing to say, nothing to defend. It can only feed off the right's mistakes."

The Socialists have offered no plan of their own to modernize the labor market. Nor is there a Socialist plan to reduce youth unemployment, which is 22 percent nationally, and more than double that in some of the poor suburbs racked by rioting last fall.

Perhaps the most surprising setback for the government came when some business leaders, who were supposed to find it easier to hire young workers with the new law, began to criticize the government's handling of the dispute and warned that a prolonged crisis could damage France economically.

In a statement on Monday, Medef, France's largest business federation, expressed hope that the withdrawal of the law "marks the end of a crisis that dented the credibility of our country."

The remarks of former President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing were just as cutting. In an opinion piece in the weekly Journal du Dimanche, he accused Mr. Chirac of a lack of leadership.

"It's high time to get out of this quagmire," Mr. Giscard d'Estaing said. "The enemies of France have viewed these images with delight, and her friends with consternation."

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April 12, 2006

France Struggles to Reform Despite Pride in Revolution

By REUTERS

Filed at 5:39 a.m. ET

PARIS (Reuters) - The ideals of the French Revolution struck a chord that has echoed for more than 200 years but when it comes to reform France is struggling to find the right key.

The motto of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity was revolutionary at the time, yet radical change is what many of those who still cherish it today fear the most.

They demonize anything that smacks of ``Reaganomics'' or the pro-market policies Margaret Thatcher pushed through in Britain, saying it will weaken cherished social protections and open the floodgates to unbridled market forces.

The left, as well as some conservatives, say reforms will bring inequality and individualism at the expense of fraternity -- and be a sure vote loser.

``I have the impression that we have to follow this free- market path like in Britain and I'm not too keen on it,'' said Pierre Malige, a teacher who joined protests in Paris last week.

Marches and strikes forced the government to scrap a reform that, though modest, was the most significant attempt in years to liberalize the labor market and create sorely needed jobs.

``The Fifth Republic has had its day. Everything needs to change. We are going to have a non-violent revolution,'' said Barthelemy Billette, a student protesting outside the prestigious Sorbonne university.

But he opposed the First Job Contract (CPE), a bid to make it easier to hire and fire young people who suffer most from unemployment.

That paradox -- dissatisfaction with the status quo but resistance to change -- is the core of the problem confronting President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, analysts said.

DEFICITS AND JOBLESSNESS

The European Central Bank is constantly urging euro zone states to carry out structural economic reforms, including freeing up labor markets and boosting competition, to help long-term growth and provide the jobs polls show voters want.

In France, the need for new jobs is urgent. Late last year youths from poor suburbs torched thousands of cars in weeks of riots to protest exclusion from mainstream French society.

A core grievance was unemployment -- 22 percent among young people and double that in some urban neighborhoods.

Deficits run up by France's welfare system forced Chirac's government in 2002 to make a priority of reform of labor law and the health, pensions and social security system.

The tension between the need for change and fear of it also helps explain the appeal of the far-right National Front and the resentment that helped sink a referendum last year on the European Union constitution.

``Here's the cold shower: apparently no one knows how to move forward. Here lies the bitter realization of the impossibility of reforming France,'' said Andre Grjebine, international research director at Paris's Science Po university.

Dialogue was the solution but the process was impeded by a left-right ideological divide that made compromise difficult, and by a weak trade union movement which encouraged government to ignore them as a reform partner, he said.

POLITICAL WILL?

Commentators said the fact that Villepin rushed the CPE through parliament with little debate or dialogue with unions or students was at the root of their passionate opposition to it.

The defeat of the CPE would in itself make it less likely that politicians would attempt significant reform, said an editorial in the business daily La Tribune.

Victorious unions and students could use their new-found power to block progress and defend the status quo.

``Or ... they could learn the lesson ... that there's nothing better than the virtues of dialogue to modernize the relations between workers and businesses,'' the editorial said.

One problem was the length of time politicians stayed within France's system, sapping their energy and allowing them to be absorbed into a system they then have a stake in maintaining.

A charge leveled at Chirac is his political longevity. He became economy minister in the late 1960s and has remained in politics ever since.

But at root was the question of the desire for reform, said Robert Schneider, political editor of Le Nouvel Observateur.

``Chirac doesn't have that steadfastness. In a country which is already difficult to reform and where the welfare system is so important to so many French people, reform becomes impossible if you haven't got the political will,'' he said.


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Politicus

Chirac's Rigid Creed for French Nonreform

By JOHN VINOCUR
International Herald Tribune

PARIS

Jacques Chirac is discredited, Dominique de Villepin, too, and with them, it seems, a certain France that told the world it could avoid change and, as exceptionalist as ever, escape immobility's ridiculousness in the process.

Absurdity certainly has caught up with this routine. There's never been a more incongruous political crisis than the country's present misery about relaxing employment regulations for young people: scores of thousands of them - a poll shows 76 percent of the 15- to 24 year-old age group aspire to the privileges, early retirement and ironclad security of civil service jobs - demonstrating for social conservatism on the historical turf of new dawns and revolution.

Which leaves the left, riding weeks of protests and the Chirac/Villepin retreat, in a much-improved position to win the presidency. But the left's return to executive power after 12 years' absence would be without the deep reforms in society that Margaret Thatcher left behind for Tony Blair (and which make Britain a country that works.)

 Since Chirac fled tackling reform head on, and has been humiliated as a result of his prime minister trying to grab only the big toe of change, the Socialists can't be objectively encouraged or expected to act as its agents. Rather the opposite. The one hot Socialist presidential prospect, Ségolène Royal, attacks the word flexibility, a euphemism for reform in a country certified as scared stiff of it. She argues flexibility "means social destructiveness and makes no economic sense." Royal's prescription for a France she admits is in decline? She says: "I think that to re-establish confidence, citizens have got to see that the experiences they're living through are being identified with. The best way to achieve that is to ask them what they think. I believe in citizen expertise."

 If that very probably means that fighting for reform gets eliminated as the best way to win the presidency, it proves Chirac's sorry axiom right. In all of France's ongoing grief, Jacques Marseille, a professor of the history of economics at the Sorbonne, has become, left and right, the media's go-to guy for wisdom on the demonstrations and the country's rejection of change. Talking to the newspaper Le Monde, he suggested that what France has now become is a pole of emptiness, "the model of the absence of real democracy, or incapacity for discussion, reform and compromise." So was France impossible to reform? he was asked. "Yes," Marseille answered. "Or in any case it's exceptionally difficult."