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PEOPLE POWER GRIPS FRANCE
The BBC’s Caroline Wyatt reports from a doomed nation:
"To the barricades!” is the cry heard again on the streets of France, as they ring to the sound of student chants.
Too bad they’re drowned out by the sound of smashing windscreens.
The crisp early springtime air on the Left Bank is filled once more with the heady scent of revolution, black coffee and Gauloises.
If only the French were stereotyped as an, er, aromatic people. Then I’d be able to make an easy joke here.
A delicious sense of people power has gripped the French and most of all, the students I mingled with a few days ago as they marched arm in arm through the boulevards of Paris, shouting their anger with the government.
Yay for people power!
To the barricades, they went, these revolutionaries, to fight for their rights - to pensions, mortgages and a steady job.
Such odd revolutionaries. No heartfelt cry to change the world, but a plea for everything to stay the same.
For France to remain in its glorious past: a time of full employment and jobs for life - a paternalistic state to take care of them from cradle to grave.
Modern leftoid movements the world over adore their fundamental and cherished institutions.
In an echoing stone courtyard at Paris University, Marion and other students are making banners to carry on their march.
"Mr Villepin, you are not the king”, they read, a reminder of what happened to France’s aristocracy after people power won out in times gone by.
Seeing as he isn’t the king, Villepin presumably has little to worry about.
"I haven’t studied hard to get nothing at the end of it,” says Marion, with indignation. “I’ve earned the right to a secure job."
And you’ve got one: making banners!
A recent survey suggested that for most of the young in France, the real dream is to become a civil servant - a fonctionnaire. To work in government offices with regular hours, long holidays, and a 35 hour working week.
So now we know why the socialist revolution never happened; revolutionaries are lazy.
"The government must create jobs,” Victor, an economics student tells me as he prepares to march again.
I’m guessing he’s a first-year economics student.
France today does feel like a tinder box, a nation dancing on a volcano - just as it did in the troubled suburbs last year.
As the students march, the “casseurs” or hooligans are gathering again, but this time in the heart of the city.
Last week they indulged in an orgy of violence near the Sorbonne on the Left Bank, the intellectual heart of Paris.
Students: innocent. Hooligans (any background on these guys?): guilty. Interesting.
And yet, Paris still feels like the Paris of old ... just faintly comes the echo of May 1968 and a reminder that in France, even revolution for a mortgage and a pension has its own mysterious allure.
Only if you’re a sucker for an accent. Otherwise it’s just idiots setting fire to cars.
UPDATE. Le Pen-supporting French trouble magnets were among hundreds arrested following Friday’s carbake.
UPDATE II. Claire Berlinski in the Washington Post:
Last Saturday morning, needing help to move several heavy cartons of books from my apartment in central Paris to a storage room, I hired two movers and a van from the want ads. Students were in the streets protesting the Contrat de Premier Embauche (CPE)—a law proposed to combat unemployment by giving employers more flexibility to fire young employees—and the barricades and traffic diversions made our four-block drive into a half-hour ordeal. As we turned down one obstructed street after another, the movers—both Arab immigrants—became more and more incensed. “They’re idiots,” said the driver, gesturing toward the ecstatic protesters. “Puppets for the socialists and the communists.” He pantomimed pulling the strings of a marionette.
UPDATE III. Racism? In France?
UPDATE IV. The Hatchback of Notre Dame! Mark Steyn: “In France a business owner doesn’t have the right to fire but the disaffected youth do.”
Marching arm-in-arm through the boulevards doesn’t seem to be in the dictionary of French hand gestures http://french.about.com/library/weekly/aa020901a.htm
>Marching arm-in-arm through the boulevards doesn’t seem to be in the dictionary of French hand gestures http://french.about.com/library/weekly/aa020901a.htm
What’s the gesture for “Let’s burn some cars?”
I’m guessing he’s a first-year economics student.
I’m guessing he’s a socialist masquerading as an economics student.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 03 25 at 03:42 PM • permalinkBut did Wyatt weep for Arafat? BBC viewers want to know!
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 03 25 at 03:47 PM • permalinkThe students provide us with a microcosm of French society and illustrate why their system is doomed to collapse:
"I haven’t studied hard to get nothing at the end of it,” says Marion, with indignation. “I’ve earned the right to a secure job.”
A recent survey suggested that for most of the young in France, the real dream is to become a civil servant - a fonctionnaire. To work in government offices with regular hours, long holidays, and a 35 hour working week. [Can you imagine dreaming to become a civil servant?!]
"The government must create jobs,” Victor, an economics student tells me as he prepares to march again. [What kind of economics are they teaching at the Sorbonne anyway?]
Au revoir, les enfants terribles. Au revoir, la belle France. C’était savoir agréable vous.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 03 25 at 04:02 PM • permalink"A recent survey suggested that for most of the young in France, the real dream is to become a civil servant - a fonctionnaire. To work in government offices with regular hours, long holidays, and a 35 hour working week.”
The figure is 75% . that is correct, 75% of students want to work in the public service!!!
Posted by arnienelly on 2006 03 25 at 04:28 PM • permalinkI am just back from a month in France (very cold, so perhaps burning a car is good exercise, and keeps you warm).
They are in a complete mess, and know it but there are too many entrenched interests who want no change (or more correctly want change for your pension, job rights etc but not mine).
Only people who should be revolting are the poor sods in private enterprise (esp SME) but they are too busy trying to stay alive,
Also from washington post…
“Ipsos, a French polling institute, recently asked 500 people between the ages of 20 and 25 the question: “What does globalization mean to you?” Forty-eight percent of those surveyed responded, “Fear."”
....
“The country, he writes, is paralyzed by “fear of the future, fear of losing, fear of others, fear of taking a risk, fear of solitude, fear of growing old."”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2006/03/24/AR2006032400705_2.htmlPosted by arnienelly on 2006 03 25 at 04:44 PM • permalinkThe Wall Street Journal said in a commentary entitled “The Decline of France” that the student protests were the “latest symptoms of an ailing democracy”.
“How instructive it would be to send Alexis de Tocqueville through France today,” the editorial said. “He’d find dependence on the state and the absence of individualism, symbolized by the low levels of private charity and civic engagement.”
It added that by marching with the public-sector unions to defend the status quo, “the boys and girls of the Sorbonne are saying they want to be ‘mediocre but secure’.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060325/wl_afp/
francepoliticsjobsyouthus_060325014936Posted by arnienelly on 2006 03 25 at 04:49 PM • permalinkFWIW, another forum I post at just had several consecutive days of overly earnest people missing the obvious sarcasm in other people’s posts, so maybe I’m just seeing sarcasm everywhere now. You might well be right that Wyatt’s article is supposed to be on the level, and I’m just unable to see it at the moment.
The Guvernator said that the biggest reason he left Austria, and Europe, for America is that when he was a teenager all his friends could talk about were their pensions and he wanted more from life (and didn’t he get it). Imagine that you’re 18 and your primary concern is the government pension you’ll collect one day. What about the 40 odd years inbetween? Do these kids ever consider that maybe if they applied themselves during those interim years, they might reach a point where government largess is immaterial? Doomed is what they are; doomed is what they’ll stay.
(OT--LA right now is in the midst of a massive rally for “immigrant” “rights”. Everything okay down there, Richard?)
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 03 25 at 06:15 PM • permalink#24 PW
FWIW, another forum I post at just had several consecutive days of overly earnest people missing the obvious sarcasm in other people’s posts…
Ooh! Which one is that?
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2006 03 25 at 06:18 PM • permalinkThe French coach of the Morroco National soccer team has reportedly converted to Islam.
http://www.todayonline.com/articles/108670.asp
The guy has coached quite a few national teams and is well regarded, though thought of as something of a mercenary.
I’d say these French young’uns have an alarming sense of entitlement. I guess that’s what comes of living in an over-indulgent mommy state: the kids end up being spoiled rotten.
Posted by scaramouche on 2006 03 25 at 06:23 PM • permalink“The country, he writes, is paralyzed by “fear of the future, fear of losing, fear of others, fear of taking a risk, fear of solitude, fear of growing old."”
From adolescent to senility, with no stop at adulthood inbetween.
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 03 25 at 07:31 PM • permalinkImagine that you’re 18 and your primary concern is the government pension you’ll collect one day. What about the 40 odd years inbetween? Do these kids ever consider that maybe if they applied themselves during those interim years, they might reach a point where government largess is immaterial?
The sad state of Western Europe is that entrepreneurship is discouraged to such a degree (through excessive bureaucracy and confiscatory taxation, for the most part) in many countries that hoping for a government job and the eventually resulting pension is the rational choice here, unless you’re planning to go all the way and emigrate to the Anglosphere (or perhaps Eastern Europe).
I can tell you from first-hand experience that plenty of smart guys and gals my age (25) who aren’t at all like those idiot “protesters” are wondering where old age is eventually going to leave them...the pension systems are obviously failing (except for state pensions, which is why government jobs are so desired), and the tax rates and ever-increasing fiscal burden leave people little money to create wealth for their retirement, not to mention that at 10+% (and rising) unemployment rates basically everybody’s at risk of having to burn through their savings sooner or later.
Here is little doubt that france has replaced its Aristocrats with the Aristocracy of the public servant, many formed in the grendes ecoles. This is a cradle to grave aristocracy who exist parasitically on the ordinary French.
Civil servants benefit from index linked pensions and spend their retirements travelling the world on endless holidays, whilst their counterparts struggle to keep up with inflation on meagre savings.
Draconian inheritance taxes rob those who have saved throughout their lives to enable their families to live in moderate comfort.
In every aspect of existance in France, the civil servants oppress the population and thus create more employment for their own parasites.
This is what decades of leftism produces and what th revolution should be about.Yes, PW and davo, living in the US, where small businesses provide the majority of jobs, you forget just how very different conditions are over there. In an article I once read (Le Monde I think), a French small businessman lamented about how the rules/regs/tax deck was stacked against him. He said the single best thing about the US government is the Small Business Administration. There apparently is nothing remotely like it there.
Parallels do exist though. In California the public service employees unions pretty much call the shots. We can not wean them from their fixed benefit pensions (while most of the private sector switched to 401-K plans long ago). It’s those obligations to the boomer gen that ultimately will do the state in. That civil servants should have such a stranglehold on public policy is a travesty. Why are they permited to unionize in the first place? It’s like a double whammy.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 03 25 at 08:44 PM • permalinkThe Foreign Office and the London tabloids are advising tourists to stay away from Paris.
Readers comment claim that Paris is of course much safer than Londonistan.
Reader Yassim is quick to point out that it is the perfidious anglos who wish to bring down France. nice to know it’s not the Islamists.Perfidious AlbionI was reading Oliver North’s latest column that someone had posted on another website and in it he was talking about being in Germany and stumbling on some “students” who pigeonholed him about doing a story about them. Now, they obviously had no idea who he was, only that he was a U.S. journalist who might give their cause some publicity. They were trying to decide whether or not to go to Venezuela (to show solidarity with Chavez) or to Paris for the riots. They eventually decided on Paris.
It makes it really difficult not to root for the Islamists in Europe.
#31 PW
It’s a sports forum, which may explain why people tend to take things too seriously around there sometimes.
Ah! I was wondering if it were Fark.com, which used to be a fun Weird News forum that was generally irreverent and rarely had political flame wars (mostly techno-geek pissing matches). But since the Iraq War began it has been overrun by the Morlocks from the Democratic Underground and DailyKos.Posted by Spiny Norman on 2006 03 25 at 10:36 PM • permalinkRe: racism in France.
Please. Be reasonable. Who do you expect the French police to assault, rioters? Those people are dangerous.
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 03 25 at 11:15 PM • permalinkAs we turned down one obstructed street after another, the movers—both Arab immigrants—became more and more incensed. “They’re idiots,” said the driver, gesturing toward the ecstatic protesters. “Puppets for the socialists and the communists.” He pantomimed pulling the strings of a marionette.
With a surrender to marionette strings that belies the French 20th-Century philosophical heritage and presages in its fatalism the stark & severe Islamism which will conquer France and respell the very language into the dancing scimitars of the Arabic alphabet—(whew, hold it, ran out of breath)--
the French behave like their own future ghosts reenacting their own destruction. Like ghosts rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic on the bottom of the sea, only this Titanic hasn’t sunk yet. Clash consciousness, the times out of joint. The 7th Century comes to shouting life in France. But what about our pension plans!?! They can disappear into their pension plans, and into their paintings and scenic scenes. A Twilight Zone episode, right? The French vanish, though their paintings & statuary seem suddenly overpopulated—ask Rod Serling how—with familiar forms & faces frozen into place, rigid. Which the barbarians, who were supposed to fund their retirements, gleefully rip, shatter, toss onto roaring pyres.
The insane French effort to spread rigid, dirigiste privilege instead of freedom to the masses is nothing against the Desert already so hard to integrate and which swarms through the streets and feels it has little to lose. What are all the little French shops in the world against dunes and sandstorms?
Islam was born, conceived, and raised in the desert. (Hold it, that’s not stark enough for Islam.)
Islam is the desert. Islam is war and peace and submission and oppression as the desert is those things. The kif or the hashish is lit, and an Arabic script of golden scimitars dances against a hard perfect blue sky. Islam is fatalistic and absolute. Cultures long Islamized invent little. For Islam, nothing is at liberty, nothing is really novel, and time merely reveals what was fated eons ago as if yesterday, like movements of orbs in ordered and undecaying dynamics. Allah is not sociably triune, as Chesterton noted, much less swarmingly thousand-faced, but as stark over Islam, as sun or moon over a desert while the wind has died. Sometimes the wind blows, and the dunes are ever shifting and ever the same.
I remember a thread at Lucianne.com a few years ago, somebody wrote some beautifully evocative posts defending the France that has been, the “little grandmothers” sitting out by the—I can’t possibly reproduce it, and it’s gone from the Internet. Ford Madox Ford, who valued Britain, France, and the U.S.A. so highly, and who wrote possibly the first modern fisking in tearing the so-called pacifist Shaw apart, would have approved of it.
The form of French doom is still uncertain. Maybe the USS Clueless is right and what’s really in store is violent fascist Gallic reaction rising to absolute power in France. As I recall, Marco Polo’s narrative closes out with expanding perspectives of wars and movements of masses.
"The government must create jobs,” Victor, an economics student tells me as he prepares to march again. [What kind of economics are they teaching at the Sorbonne anyway?]
#13, not surprisingly they teach a very interventionist style of economics where the bureaucrat/regulator is king and knows better than the market (in spite of all the evidence to the contrary).
Posted by Art Vandelay on 2006 03 26 at 12:02 AM • permalinkGee! It makes me wonder where have all our ferals gone?
The demonstrators who flocked to the detention centres to free the poor Asylum seekers. Even the Democrats, Greens and Carmine Lawrence banging her little drum kept us entertained.
What about all the odd ones screaming at Pauline’s appearances, where are they all?
Have they all migrated to France too?Wonder if we’ll see similar levels of protest for job security in Australia this year as we’ve seen in Paris.
Speaking of massive protests, going O/T (forgive me Andrea), could some of our American friends give us Aussies perspective on these massive Immigration related protests underway in the US right now? 500,000 people marched in LA? Wow! So are most Americans ready for immigration laws to be loosened up? Bush is for more open immigration from Mexico, isn’t he?
Posted by LeftieLatteLover on 2006 03 26 at 12:31 AM • permalinkApparently, if this report is correct, the burnings have already begun. From France-Echoes: The Blog in English
http://en.france-echos.com/?p=31 and its “summarized translation of an article of http://www.chretiente.info “Today (march 22, 2006) we learn that this government has let 1,000 years of cultural and religious legacy to become smoke and ashes.
Barbarians and savages entered in the library of “l’Ecole des Chartes” (100,000 books) in the Sorbonne, and destroyed writings of abbeys of Île-de-France containing all the official documents since the middle age.
Documents of more than TEN CENTURIES!
Hat tip to The Anchoress, who is seeking verification.
I couldn’t find anything about it at chretiente.info, but I googled and have been tracking the story back through blogs, & finally came to this one without further sources: Livres religieux rares brûlés ou volés à la Sorbonne (Rare religious books burnt or stolen in the Sorbonne) at Vox Galliae, a French “patriot” blog which I can’t determine just what sort of right-wing it is (it’s all in French; didn’t see LePen mentioned). It blames only the anarchists & leftists. See also “Vandalism at the Sorbonne” at GalliaWatch.
I wonder whether the mainstream press will report this at all.
Oh never mind, it’s some kind of false alarm, that guy who apparently was the origin of the story has retracted, and did so in a wordy, mannered, “literary,” tiresomely hinting way that was nearly impossible to read and not just because it was in French.
http://lesotdelange.blogspot.com/2006/03/post.html
More here:
http://passouline.blog.lemonde.fr/livres/2006/03/des_livres_brls.html
Source of URLs:
http://en.france-echos.com/?p=31#comment-46aaron — When the “liberal” (centrist/socialist/secularist) worldview began to become the public policy of much of the west, and the “liberals” developed a vested material interest in maintaining it.
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 03 26 at 02:46 AM • permalinkThe immigration marches were mostly attended by illegals or the recently illegal. It says something when you can get half a million illegals at a march in LA, and that something isn’t very good.
There’s massive potential for it to backfire on them. Many, many voters get very pissed off when they see a bunch of immigrants marching under a foreign flag on US soil. A similar march in LA a few years ago was almost single-handedly responsible for the passage of an anti-immigration proposition in California.
There’s a sort of spontaneous “undocumented border patrol” movement that’s sprung up to keep an eye on the borders and report illegals attempting to cross. The Republican base is very angry with Bush over this issue.
Posted by Ernst Blofeld on 2006 03 26 at 02:46 AM • permalink500,000 people marched in LA? Wow!
497,000 of them were illegals.
So are most Americans ready for immigration laws to be loosened up?
No, most Americans are sick of illegals being elible for Social Security benefits (faster than we are, no less!), crashing into our cars (or our bodies) with no insurance, getting in-state (i.e., cheaper) tuition at state universities, getting taxpayer-paid medical care, being over-represented in crime, and generally costing us lots and lots of money while getting more rights and privileges than we do.
We’re fed up, and pissed as hell that the Dems kiss their asses for votes, and the Repubs kiss their asses for votes and kiss business’s asses to give them cheap labor.
Bush is for more open immigration from Mexico, isn’t he?
Yes, and it’s putting a serious hurting on his party.
If the Republicans would grow some balls and take a firm anti-illegal stand, they wouldn’t have to sweat this November.
The French had their heart ripped out at Verdun. They just haven’t been the same since.
O/T re the illegal immigration issue - Dave S. is right - polls consistently indicate that taking on the influx of illegals from Mexico is a political winner, even here in notoriously liberal California. It’s simply a matter of the politicos being willing to take the slings and arrown from the mainstream media, with whom the idea is not popular at all.
Dave S, thanks for an American’s view on it. Do you know why Bush might be for it? From what I’ve just flicked through online it sounds like a lot of Repubs are against it.
PW, do you know why the WSJ is pro-immigration? Is it about having more illegal workers on cheaper wages driving down the rest of legitimate American workers wages? Just curious, the US media online seems pretty empty on other perspectives today.
Posted by LeftieLatteLover on 2006 03 26 at 07:28 AM • permalinkAlas, we see the end results of the Msrshall Plan and the pussification of Europe. It seemed like a good idea. What better way to wipe away the radical nationalism of the nazis than with a healthy dose of liberalism? The problem came when the doctor let the patient start self-perscribing and he O/D’d. The French are such fucksticks, they’ll never pull out of this on their own.
People power too at that colesseum of culture the Melbourne Cricket Ground in Melbourne tonite..
as the Commonwealth Games ended.
Great time was had by all with the exception of the stubborn attachment by officials to Leunig’s duck.
The duck returned and descended into the underworld or whatever under the arm of its youthful retainer.
Here is an ode to it.
Every day when I make my way to the p-a-pers
I find a...little fella
That’s cute and fwuffy and r-a-a-cist,
Mikey Looney’s duckie.Leunig’s duckie ...you’re the one
Know you long to cut and run…
Leunig’s duckie we’re awfully shamed by you,
and Melbourne too…er good on ya Arab mover/workers..
they were actually achieving summat and exhibiting common sense..
unlike the silly widdle baby French who remind me of silly Charles de Gaulle blocking all the efforts of the allies in ww2 -who were actually trying to hand France back its freedom.
He seemed only interested in not losing face while his French resistance suffered and struggled alone but for the despised British -Intelligence ...and S.O.E.In response to the plight of the French people and the call by Prince Charles for more diversity, ITV announced today that it is retitling its long-running soap opera Detonation Street...
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 03 26 at 02:26 PM • permalinkrioting and demonstrating is the french national pastime........just like baseball for the yanks.
for the young students it’s like a fashion statement, a place to be seen with your che t-shirt, funny french berret smoking a gauloise and looking tre cool.
this is the only way to pick up those really hot chics.
Bush and Rove want to, at the very least, not lose badly in the Hispanic vote demographic. The illegal immigration has been so massive that hispanic votes are critical in the southwest, Florida, and elsewhere. Their calculation is that they believe they can turn Hispanic votes Republican. The Democrats believe the Hispanic vote is already Democratic. So there isn’t much political incentive for national level politicians to get in front of the issue.
Posted by Ernst Blofeld on 2006 03 26 at 06:38 PM • permalinkThe “Hispanic vote” is a chimera. There is not one monolithic “Hispanic” entity; instead, there are different Hispanic cultures that have widely divergent goals and political views. For instance, the Cubans in South Florida are extremely conservative and tend to vote Republican. Puerto Ricans and Mexican-Americans, I believe, tend to vote Democrat. The news media has at best a vague grasp on this fact, which is why most of the burbling they emit about “the Hispanic vote” is nonsense.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2006 03 26 at 09:13 PM • permalinkAndrea — But, but, they’re all brown(ish)... how could they be different? You’re asking an awful lot of “progressives” and media types to pick up on that…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 03 26 at 10:27 PM • permalinkDave S, thanks for an American’s view on it. Do you know why Bush might be for it?
I said that (I thought) - cheap labor and votes.
PW, do you know why the WSJ is pro-immigration? Is it about having more illegal workers on cheaper wages driving down the rest of legitimate American workers wages?
Don’t want to answer for PW, but I’ll say “yes.”
Just curious, the US media online seems pretty empty on other perspectives today.
You can apply that to any issue on any given day.
Ernst B 52
It says something when you can get half a million illegals at a march in LA, and that something isn’t very good.
It says several things, mostly bad, but one thing that I like. It says: “NYAH NYAH NYAH, antiwar activist losers!! Don’t you wish YOU could rally up numbers like this??!!” heh heh heh…
Posted by Stoop Davy Dave on 2006 03 27 at 06:03 PM • permalink
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That’s not an “odd revolutionary”, dear. That’s a reactionary.