The specific goal of the student movement has been to force the government of Prime Minister Dominque de Villepin and President Jacques Chirac to withdraw a new labor law, the so-called "First Job Contract" (CPE). The goal of this bill was to make it more attractive for businesses to hire young workers, defined as people under twenty-six years old.
(As this article went to press on Tuesday, the French government announced suddenly that the CPE law is indeed being withdrawn. What happens next is anybody's guess.)
The main catch was that young people would face a trial period of two years in any job, during which they could be fired without due cause. This extended to medium and corporate enterprises an earlier law that limited the two-year trial period to small business with fewer than 20 employees.
A first puzzle is why such a massive, spontaneous, nationwide student mobilization was possible on the basis of such an apparently thin complaint?
France, (alas!) has become a "small" country. Until the end of WWII, France was still imaginable as a "large" country, as a great, if declining power. Today, the French are acutely aware that France is "about the size of Texas."
Moreover, France as a whole, now mentally smaller than ever, has always taken its cues from whatever goes on in Paris, whether culturally or politically. In France, "the provinces" are perceived as pale reflections of the only thing that really counts-Paris.
The revolutionary "events of May 1968," for example, began at the University of Nanterre, located in a poor northeastern suburb of Paris, over visitation rights of the sexes in each other's dorm rooms. The current crisis over the CPE likewise began in Paris and radiated out into to the provinces.
Until today, May 1968 had been the last episode in a glorious (notorious, according to many people) French tradition of periodic uprisings of The People. It began in 1789. Then came 1848 ("Les Miserables"), the Paris Commune of 1871, the general strikes during the 1936-37 Popular Front years, and finally May 1968. (Of considerable significance, last winter's wilding-plus-vandalism "riots" of minority young people in tough suburban neighborhoods (few students among them) constitute something new in French history.)
A second question: Why have the national trade union organizations, the parliamentary opposition Socialist and Communist parties and a good number of average people, been marching with the students?
A short answer, good for an entire swath of "progressive" French people, is the Groucho Marx principle of politics: "Whatever you're proposing, I'm against it." There is in French political culture a perennial spirit of protest and rejection, often enough self-righteous. It is a kind of solidarity of the aggrieved that coalesces around a kernel of truth. In this case the issue is the increasing precariousness of job security and social guarantees for young people as a whole, linked as it is to cutbacks in the cradle-to-grave welfare state "European Social Model."
What is really at issue here?
First, why are university and lycee students rejecting the CPE? After all, the CPE was designed to encourage business to hire more young people by reducing the huge disincentives to do so. Students reply, not implausibly given the history of French labor relations, that the two-year trial period will be used capriciously to keep often unskilled, minority and non-unionized workers turning for many years or permanently on temporary jobs. They also argue that the under-26 generation is being singled out unfairly, even unconstitutionally, by a kind of falsely well-intentioned affirmative action treatment that amounts to a new form of discrimination-"youthism" as opposed to "ageism."
Is all of this true or false? Creating a younger-than-26 category for special treatment is indeed contrary to the French republican version of equality before the law. The concept of affirmative action-the French term is "positive discrimination"-is recent and not widely accepted. And putting CPE young people through the two-year probationary period in big as well as small business would be a new hurdle for individuals, even if the goal of creating more jobs for all were to be reached in the medium term.
One student told a journalist that the issue was "not demanding more, but only to keep what we have." But, frankly, what do French students have now? They have a two decades old 20 percent unemployment rate, 40 percent among minority young people, declining social guarantees and the risk of living their whole lives less prosperously than their parents' generation.
The student struggle for the status quo is wrong-headed radicalism, a short-sighted, oblivious conservatism, a misreading of self-interest. The solidarity of the labor unions in this affair represents little more than piling on the government and burnishing credentials, not to mention a continuation of the tacit trade union conspiracy of the employed against the unemployed. The me-too marching of the Socialist party et al, and the nostalgic admiration of the students by "progressive" citizens is by and large a combination of empathy, hypocrisy and the French tradition of protest-voting with the feet instead of the ballot.
It seems blindingly obvious that French students, presumably the best and brightest of the young, should be agitating for the kinds of changes that will genuinely expand, not just protect the job market; they should be fighting for those government policies that will radically lower decades of unemployment at levels that only the "Social Model" could comfort. But they are not. Why not?
There are two true bedrock issues. Most French students (and the French in general) have little confidence in capitalism or capitalists, even when they are capitalists themselves. What the French call "the Anglo-Saxon, ultra-liberal model," signifies to them "jungle capitalism," le capitalisme sauvage. The old Soviet-style socialism no longer mystifies French political culture, but neither is realistic economic literacy a widely-distributed good.
Underneath this dread of a word, however, is the fact that the French people, old as well as young, are simply afraid for their future. Stanley Hoffmann, the dean of French specialists, points out that for a century the French have been haunted by two fears: the rise of Germany and their own decline-in some ways the same thing. To this has been added the love-hate relationship with America and a very French malaise concerning globalization, Europeanization, immigration and outsourcing.
Some considerable reduction of social and labor market guarantees seems unavoidable, simply because the old levels are no longer financially sustainable. The goal of older people is to last as long as possible with as much as possible. Young people want to avoid becoming "the Kleenex generation," quickly used and discarded. And the economically literate among them hate the injustice of being handed the bill for the largesse accorded their parents and grandparents.
But there is another, less often-noticed factor. Where are the French capitalists when they're needed? The French business elite deserves big blame for the French dilemma.
For decades much of the French private sector has behaved with a bunker mentality. Rather than explaining and ensuring that capitalism is a career open to talent, French business has been lived as a kind of crony capitalism within which the clubbable, elite school copain is the model rather than, for example, Bill Gates, Jerry Yang and, yes, even Martha Stewart and Donald Trump.
Given this economic and pedagogical bankruptcy of French business, French governments have been left to go it alone into the breech. Most governments have played it safe, but a few have behaved with temerity and been smashed for it. Dominique de Villepin, le pauvre, is the latest case in point. He and President Chirac now resemble Don Quixote and Sancho Panza more than they do Napoleon and de Gaulle.
Villepin should have grabbed French business leaders by the lapels (as Lyndon Johnson would have done), jawboning them to say publicly that they would police themselves against capricious behavior, and then promise that the government would guarantee it.
It goes without saying that all that can be rescued of the Social Model's positive aspects should be. But at the same time the French should be educated to see (at last) that a market-based economy oriented to economic growth is, even with all its defects and injustices, the best way to create good jobs with good benefits.
France and the French, in sum, must change very much in order to remain even half as much the same. Whether this will happen in a spirit of optimism or in a blue funk of pessimism is the issue.
Tiersky can be reached at
rstiersky@amherst.edu