Social Struggles in France (March-April 2006)

Richard Greeman

Why this Polarisation?

An unlimited French general strike is on the agenda, IF  the unions don’t chicken out and leave the students high and dry. . . IF increasingly brutal police action against the students doesn’t result in death and provoke a violent cycle of repression and rebellion. . . IF gangster elements under police protection, don’t go on the rampage, creating a pretext for a total government crackdown, mobilisation of the Army, etc . . .  In any case, thanks to the ineptitude and elitist isolation of the French Right (arguably the most stupid and certainly the most divided Right in Europe), the stage is set for another round of social or civil war in France, government versus people.

Why is the conservative French government – confronted with a mass social movement backed by a solid majority of public opinion -- apparently seeking a showdown?  Far from backing down after last Tuesday’s huge outpouring, the government has deliberately rejected every form of face-saving compromise and seems to be actively seeking confrontation. The striking demonstrators included the unemployed kids, their hardworking parents, and their grand-parents -- many of whom lost a big piece of their pensions in a similar confrontation two years ago. According to the polls, 92% of French people think the government’s new labor law should be withdrawn, and 62% actually support the strike movement – despite the government campaign to depict it as violent and chaotic.

The very next day, a provocative order was given permitting the police to evacuate the student-occupied schools by force. Likewise, on Thursday, the Constitutional Council, which could easily have pointed to legal flaws in the controversial CPE, chose to pass it. Tonight, President Chirac could have saved social peace and gone down in history as a friend of the people by deferring enforcement and sending the bill back to the legislature for a second reading -- as many nervous members of his party were begging him to do. Why then did Chirac -- France’s charming version of Dick ‘I am not a crook’ Nixon – pretend that he was somehow was forced to defend the sacred democratic process by promulgating the offending legislation, when everybody knows that he has the power to send back the bill -- was pushed it through without debate by a near-empty Chamber at two in the morning tacked it onto another bill as an amendment? Why did he further provoke the students and unions by offering a bogus invitation to help revise the law AFTER he just rushed to promulgate it?  His protégé de Villepin had left him out on a limb. Chirak sawed it off. What’s their game plan?

A generation ago, Maggie Thatcher and her disciple Ronald Reagan consciously declared class war on the British and American workers and inflicted an historic defeat. The Iron Lady provoked the British Miners into a prolonged and ultimately disastrous strike in the early 1980’s, while in the U.S., the newly elected President Teflon intervened in the strike of civilian air-controllers (who ironically had supported his election and were mostly demanding safety improvements) by firing them all and replacing them with military personnel. Period. The labor movement never recovered from the shock, and conditions for most U.S. and British wage-earners and employees have been in decline ever since. In contrast, the working people of France suffered no such defeat in the 80’s. They elected the Socialist François Mitterrand, and although subsequent Conservative and Socialist governments have whittled away at the social contract, the French social movement entered the 21st Century bloody but unbowed.

This state of affairs is unacceptable to the French financial elite in the age of globalised competition. Today, de Villepin thinks he can get away with to playing Dame Thatcher and inflicting an historical defeat on the French working people. De Villepin forgets that Thatcher had carefully prepared public opinion (and stocked up on coal) for many months before declaring war on British labor. He also forgets that Maggie had the solid backing of the British Conservatives, whereas the Gaullists are as usual divided, with part of the UMP running scared and his arch-rival Sarkosy stabbing him in the back. Without a consensus, the only card the government holds is violence, and I am afraid that they are prepared to play it. France has at least four types of riot police, one nastier and more brutal than the others. I thought the CRS were thugs until the Mobile Anti-Crime Brigades went into action in Montpellier, and they haven’t yet mobilised the Gendarmes (militarised National Police) or the Army. The scariest thing in Chirak’s broadcast tonight was a throwaway line linking the social movement with street violence – apparently to justify massive repression (like Bush linking Saddam with Al Qaeda). That’s why we need to look more closely at the issue of violence.

Violence and the Media                

As I said, with the exception of one rather shocking incident, the student occupations, strikes and mass demonstrations here have been basically peaceful, albeit forceful. I guess the U.S. and British corporate media like play up the ‘chaos’ angle because the so-called ‘French exception’ (slow food and labor laws that still protect workers) galls neo-cons, who are afraid our workers might catch on. Also, many editors and pundits OD’d on ‘Freedom Fries’ back when Chirac and de Villepin were poking holes in the Bush/Blair’s rationalisations for invading Irak (and giving EXXON the juicy oil-development contracts formerly held by ELF-TOTAL). The patriotic Anglo-Saxon habit of Frog-bashing is hard to break.

French TV (strongly government influenced) also plays up the ‘youth violence’ angle (sensational shots of burning cars and broken windows), while studiously avoiding the scandal of excessive use of force by police -- never shown. Another TV trick is to give near-equal time to interviewing ‘counter-demonstrators’ – usually a small bunch of law and business students mobilised by the governing UMP party. On the other hand, the daily news papers (including the conservative Midi Libre here in Montpellier) portray a different world, more like the one my friends and family live in. The dailies (which cost over a Euro and need to sell) reflect public opinion, which is 82% against the government’s new law and nearly two-thirds positively in favor the strikes and occupations. The German and other European are also favourable to the movement, or at least neutral.

Everybody in France who has kids (or grandkids) is concerned about their future. Indeed, the old, who lost their battle over retirement cuts two years back, are especially eager for revenge, and I observed that the grey heads of frustrated teachers and factory workers (including friends who were ready to retire when the law suddenly changed) dominated back part of Tuesday’s big demonstration in Montpellier. On the other hand, Elyane, my French sweetheart, was at the front, having gone downtown early. For her, the demo was ‘all kids.’ (Apparently the students started marching first, while the unions were still lining up).

Who are ‘The Scum?’

Hard to be certain what is happening in the streets, when even in little Montpellier we like the legendary blind men feeling the elephant ?   The Internet helps. Friends up in Paris have been E-mailing me some truly hair-raising first-hand reports about the very serious and nasty violence at the Esplanade of the Invalides a week ago Thursday.  Dismayed and helpless, a young demonstrator witnessed “. . . gangs of savages lynching anything that looked like a demonstrator, a Leftist, a white person. All the exits (from the Esplanade) through which we could escape were blocked by the forces of order (cops), who seemed to be enjoying the spectacle. The ‘Scum’ (La racaille) charged into the ranks (of highschoolers, college students and CNT members) several times, provoking some very violent fighting…”

He goes on to say that he had been to every demo so far and had never seen such a thing. Of course, he says, there were always incidents with small groups of (mostly Arab) kids from the slums picking on students or stealing their cell-phones, but the Invalides attack was on a different scale. Indeed, like me, he had been counting on a growing political consciousness among what he calls the ‘semi-proletarian’ youth from the projects, coming together in solidarity. Now he is terribly discouraged, what with police repression, the timidity of the union leadership and now this attack. He wonders whether these gangs of ‘Scum’ weren’t paid by the so called forces of order, now that the class war the government provoked it turning against it. I wonder too.

Obviously, the police were complicit. Did they have orders to block the exits, but not intervene until the demonstrators were thoroughly terrorised? Another witness reports that the gangs showed up at the Invalides all together and in big numbers, hundreds rather than the dozens previously encountered. Could this be spontaneous? Generally, I make fun of the kinds of conspiracies the French imagine happening in the U.S. (as if the Bush crowd were competent enough to have been secretly behind the high-jackings of September 11!). On the other hand, recent French history is full of governmental conspiracies and counter-conspiracies, with barbouzes (‘guys in fake beards’) and agents-provocateurs galore . Different political cultures.

Be this as it may, many of my Leftist friends in Paris, where this shocking incident (and most of last November’s rioting) took place, are understandably shaken up. They consider these racailles as proto-fascist militias. For me it is a stretch to amalgamate the thugishness of male-chauvinist Arab gangsters with radical Islam, and radical Islam with Nazi-ism. I understand their feelings, and the threat is real enough. How to overcome it? As a veteran of the U.S. Civil Rights and labor movements, it seems to me that until the France’s white working class overcomes what I see as its historic anti-Arab racism, the Right, however inept and divided, will continue to divide and rule. But how to reach out?

Last week, I got involved writing a leaflet -- along with my friend Naouel (a Tunisian-born lit student) and other some students who were going out to trade schools and poor neighborhoods. We pointed out the rarely mentioned racist and discriminatory aspects of the new labor law (ironically called ‘The Equal Chances Act’). Our headline: “Kids from the projects, kids from the schools! All together against the ‘UN-equal Chances Act!’ For the government, we are all ‘Scum!’(De la racaille! See note ) Unite the power of last November’s uprising with the big numbers of this March’s strikes and we will win!” A little crude, perhaps, but it gets the point across. (For more historical perspective on last November’s rebellions, please see my “Religion, Racism and Republicanism in France” at www.richardgreeman.org .)  

To conclude this point, with the painful exception of the shocking attack at the Invalides, most European observers agree that the movement so far has been generally massive and peaceful with huge street mobilizations, strikes and non-violent student occupations of high schools, universities and now highways and railroad stations. Fringe violence has been played up by French TV and the English-language media, while police violence (including super Robo-cops with hoods on shooting percussion grenades against students here in Montpellier) is ignored. This bodes ill for the next phase of the struggle.


By now you must be thinking, “OK not really that violent, but what’s it all about, Alfie?” The CPE (First Job Contract) is only the latest in a series of incremental changes in French labor law making it easier for companies to fire workers. The government’s logic is that this will cut joblessness by encouraging companies to hire workers. In fact, the CPE creates a permanent revolving door situation of underpaid temporary CPE jobs for all workers up to age 26. It is precisely in the employers’ interest to fire them (no cause need be given) before their two year ‘apprenticeship’ (for example as supermarket cashier) so as to replace them with other low-cost CPE’s.

Of course most American and British workers have never known any other job situation, hence the ‘get real France’ attitude of our media. More shocking for us, the “Equal Chances Act” (of which the CPE is a part) allows French companies to hire workers as young as 14 and to make 15-year olds work at night. This return to the Dickensian era of child-labor better expresses the spirit of the Chirac-Villepin government. To understand the French perspective better, imagine that at the end of WWII, the U.S. Congress had rejected the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act and that labor had won the right to strike without getting fired, the right to basically free health-care, the right to up to five weeks of paid vacations and the right to job security. If you had grown up considering these rights as normal as the right to free public education, wouldn’t you get upset if a right-wing government tried to abolish them?

            Historical Roots of Today’s Crisis

During the 1940-44 Occupation the French business classes largely collaborated with the Nazis. Indeed, ‘better Hitler than Blum’ (the Jewish socialist premier) was the capitalist line in the 30’s. With the Liberation, the war profiteers should simply have been expropriated if not liquidated, but the Communists, who dominated the Resistance, cut a compromise deal with De Gaulle’s conservatives. Under Stalin’s orders they called off the revolution in France (as well as in Italy and Greece). In return, Stalin got East Europe. Thus, in 1945 Maurice Thorez, the French CP leader, called on the working class to “roll up their sleeves” and rebuild French capitalism. As part of the deal, a few big businesses were nationalised (but not socialised), and the post-war Constitution officially declared France a ‘Social Republic.’ Voilà the origin of the enviable labor code, the basis of the ‘French exception’ to outright unfettered capitalist exploitation.

Of course, the French had a lot of help in the post-war rebuilding from imported Algerian laborers who did must of the dirty work. The colonialist Social Republic was a two-tier labor system from the start. Moreover, the Left (CP and SP) voted for France’s brutal reconquest of her colonies in Indochina and North Africa and largely ignored the plight of the immigrant workers, mostly Arab, suffering discrimination and exploitation in France. Now these colonial chickens have come home to roost. Today, the traditional Communist voters of the ‘Red Belt’ of suburbs to the east of Paris have mostly succumbed to racism and vote for the proto-fascist Le Pen. The same ex-Red suburbs now harbour a large and dangerous underclass of unassimilated, French-born, so-called ‘immigrant’ youth. Naturally many of these unemployed desperados are tempted by the macho gangsta life, by Islamic fundamentalism or by both. Many of my leftie French friends see them as a serious proto-fascist threat.

These divide and rule tactics have historically allowed French imperialism to continue to dominate its African ex-colonies and divide the working class by race. As a result, France is still dominated by a surprisingly small political elite, exemplified by the aloofly aristocratic de Villepin, who has never held elective office, the Baron Sellières, president of MEDF the big business lobby, and the corrupt President Chirac, heir to the Gaullist party. Thus France’s exclusive pre-war ruling class, the famous ‘300 families,’ has maintained it hold on power by sending its scions through the exclusive Napoleonic ‘Grandes Ecoles’ whose diplomas lead directly to careers in business, government and administration. François Mitterrand, the two-term Socialist President, was a member in good standing of this narrow ‘political class.’ Decorated for his work in the Vichy government, he switched sides near the end of the WWII. Coincidentally, Mitterrand also served as Minister of the Interior during the Algerian War while Le Pen was torturing prisoners there, before again switching sides at the last minute. Nonetheless, Mitterrand defended most of the 1945 French social contract during his two 7-year terms, which corresponded, in the Anglo-Saxon world, with the successfully brutal Thatcher-Reagan offensive against workers’ rights. Today, de Villepin thinks it’s time for France to get Thatcherised and that he’s man enough to play the Iron Lady in the remake. Time will tell.

            A Note on Political Taboos in France

As we have seen modern France, like the U.S. and G.B., is the product of a historical interaction between race and class, democracy and empire, Stalinist ‘Communism’ and Western capitalism. Alas, the French don’t think in these categories, so such matters are rarely discussed here. Not only are the struggles against French racism and French imperialism absent from the agenda of the left (and far-left), much of the vocabulary Anglo-Saxon sociologists use to describe it is missing from political discourse, taboo as it were.  Taboo are  basic words like ‘white,’‘colored’ or ‘Arab.’ ‘Community’ has a purely negative connotation. Since in officially color-blind France it is illegal to count Arabs (or Muslims or any other community) it is impossible to say they are unrepresented in French democracy, although there are apparently none in the National Assembly, and I have never seen one in uniform or behind a window in a government office. How to protest what you are not even entitled to mention?

Another taboo (or rather sacred cow) is the French Communist Party (FCP). Traditionally the most Stalinist CP in the West, it ignored Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin in 1956 and has still not done any serious self-criticism. Nonetheless, the FCP’s trade-union affiliate, the CGT continues to play its traditional role of manipulating, diffusing and de-fusing mass movements. In 1936, it reined in the historic General Strike and worker occupations of industry (“It is necessary to know how to end a strike!”). In 1945, it betrayed the revolutionary promise of the Liberation (“Frenchmen, roll up your sleeves!”). It sabotaged the 1968 student-worker rebellion (“The students are counter-revolutionary provocateurs!”) and on down the years to 2005, when the CGT (and other unions) undermined the huge mass movement against painful pension cuts. Instead of giving in to the popular demand for a general strike, the CGT strategy was to drag out the struggle and beg for negotiations -- until summer vacation came and the movement evaporated. How does the CGT get away with it?  For one thing, no one on the left exposes them, and now I see the Trotskyist LCR is fishing for an electoral alliance with the FCP. Not for nothing did Lenin accuse the French left of ‘parliamentary cretinism.’

Thus, between unacknowledged racism, manipulation by the unions, mindless electoralism and government-provoked violence, today’s French social movement faces many pitfalls. On the other hand, a whole new generation is becoming massive politicised, and once unleashed the genie of French revolution is hard to put back in the bottle.

April 1, 2006