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It is oddly disconcerting, for a Frenchman, to watch the latest Paris protests while on a visit to America. Here, too, demonstrators are marching--many of them recent immigrants determined to work in the booming United States, however lowly the job and poor the pay. Back in France, by contrast, youths are marching against a measure designed to create jobs specifically for them. And they are joined, shoulder to shoulder, by the children of those immigrants who would, in fact, most benefit from the new law.
By now, the whole world is familiar with France's controversial Premièr Contrat d'Embauche, or first-job contract, which allows employers to dismiss new hires under the age of 26 without notice or even explanation. With his government weighed down by persistently high unemployment, particularly among the young, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin proposed the law in hopes of buoying his prospects in next year's presidential election. If employers indeed rushed to hire young people knowing they would not be burdened by them in bad economic times, de Villepin calculated, he would put a dent in the country's jobless rates--and in a stroke win the support of France's youth without losing that of older workers. As it turned out, he lost the support of both and sparked the biggest street protests since May 1968. Why?
First of all, it's important to understand that today's youths are not ' 68ers. Rather than revolutionary, this new generation is conservative. It is afraid of change--European integration, globalization, deregulation. Those on the streets may clothe their opposition in the argot of leftist defiance, but at bottom they want nothing more than to benefit from the same social and job advantages their parents enjoy.
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Even the immigrants? In most countries--including the United States--immigrant populations are among the hardest working, asking only for economic opportunity and a chance to educate their kids. In France, last November's riots among the banlieues were interpreted as a similar desperate cry: to create jobs, and to remove the racist barriers blocking access to those jobs. Yet here those same kids are, manning the barricades against change, clamoring for state-enforced guarantees of benefits and job security. The vast majority of French citizens--of whatever background--would prefer a cozy government sinecure to a job in the rough-and-tumble private sector.
This is a remarkable indictment of French sclerosis--and it is a reminder that many of the alienated youth branded "immigrants" by the press are actually second and third generation, as French as any of their compatriots in the streets. But the picture is complicated. Though many are reluctant to call attention to the fact, the recent marches have also been disrupted by the same people who rioted in November. Gangs of school dropouts from the ghettoes ringing the city, often African or Arab, joined the demonstrations to fight the police as well as other youngsters whom they see as "white" bourgeois. Thus, while most protesters were marching against one form of perceived injustice--an unpopular government labor law--others were fighting against the broader social system from which they feel excluded. Never mind that it is these very people who might stand to gain disproportionately under more flexible labor laws. The point was to strike out, in rage and frustration.
Both sets of French youth feel cheated. It's not merely that the previous generation garners for itself the perks of the welfare state, leaving little for them. It's that this generation doesn't trust their leaders, their government, their elders. In the particular case of de Villepin's vaunted CPE, they simply do not believe that the law, as proposed, will secure them more jobs or chip away at ingrained discrimination. Most suspect it to be a sort of trial balloon, a precursor to broader moves to deregulate the whole labor market and make young workers even more vulnerable than they are now. And that suspicion is widely shared. According to polls, 64 percent of the French favor rescinding the law.
In this sense, events on the streets of Paris point to the country's broader problem--a growing sense that France is paralyzed, unable to advance. In the face of public outcry, the government darts and dodges. De Villepin, utterly isolated with his approval ratings plummeting, feels he cannot bend lest he lose even more. True to form, President Jacques Chirac has managed to say both yes and no at once, backing de Villepin by promising to sign the new law but advising companies not to put it into effect until talks can be held with unions to modify its most objectionable provisions. Nicolas Sarkozy, minister of Interior and de Villepin's chief rival for the presidency, has voiced his opposition to the new law. But is his stand one of principle or expediency? After all, "Sarko" is himself an economic liberal strongly in favor of labor-law reform. But in this case, at least, he seems anxious not to antagonize the children of the middle class, even as he talks tough about the "scum" (which is what he called the November rioters) from the suburbs.
Viewed from the street, no change may indeed be better than this sort of hoary politicking. Sitting in America and watching Chirac on television--a man whose reign atop French politics goes back to the era of Richard Nixon--it is hard not to be struck by how hidebound France seems. Its ruling elite has not been renewed for at least two decades. Little wonder that society seems frozen, too, as does business. Why believe in the possibility of change, when your leaders are so obviously uncomfortable with it themselves?
In a speech in New York, I found myself talking about young French entrepreneurs trying to launch businesses at home. To be eligible for a bank loan, to be taken seriously by potential business partners, they must have seniority and be "experienced"--that is, they must be old. In America, teenagers start businesses, and thrive. Is it any surprise that global media are full of stories about the "decline of France," or that the most enterprising young people are increasingly leaving to try their chance abroad? That unemployed French youths have so united against a measure designed to give them work, and are joined by immigrants who came to France seeking just that, is a telling sign of just how hopeless the situation looks to the next generation.
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