One — no, two — last chances!
Ever since May, 1968, French protests have always been strongly flavored of commedia dell’arte, with prescribed and circumscribed behaviors: they are announced well in advance, they are scrupulously bounded in place and time (Nancy and I remember once lunchtime protest at the airport — gathering, placards, bandannas, tear gas, and then back-to-work dispersal right on cue), and they never, never resort to force. So the farmers can put their tractors across the motorway, the train conductors can stage a one-day walkout, the air traffic controllers can down tools … and then, the point made, the reform blunted, life goes on.
Are these spring riots the same, or something different?
Last Tuesday, the trade unions staged a massive national protest that in the main followed the traditional radicalism:
When that failed to have the desired effect — both President Chirac and Prime Minister de Villepin have breached protocol by not abjectly backing down — the unions and their supporters, sounding like Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition,
“You have one last chance — confess the heinous sin of heresy, reject the works — two last chances …”
have called for another event, on April 17:
PARIS, April 5 — French union and student leaders said today that if the government did not, by April 17, rescind a controversial labor law to which there have been widespread objections, there would be more nationwide strikes and protests.
At one level, this continues to play out in a time-honored tradition: nothing must interfere with one’s holidays:
The main opposition Socialist Party introduced a bill in Parliament today to repeal the law and called for it to be passed before the Easter holiday, which for many people begins next week.
“All right! Fetch — the comfy chair!”
The continuing standoff over the law, pushed through without public consultation by Mr. de Villepin in February, continued to pummel his popularity.
While imperially autocratic, Messrs. Chirac and de Villepin are signaling their backbones are not merely flexible but positively serpentine:
Mr. Chirac ratified the law but asked Parliament, rather than the government, to draft a new law amending the first. That gives Parliament the power to either modify the law, according to Mr. Chirac’s wishes, or to go further, by revising it in such a way that it would effectively be killed. Few expect the law to emerge as anything close to what Mr. de Villepin intended.
What would M. Chirac think of protest signs in English! Quel horreur!
From the perspective of building consensus — a virtue more commonly practiced in the democracies of les dreaded Anglo-saxistes than the French — the government’s approach has been auto-masochistic: impose a law without parliamentary consultation, then when it is protested via escalating street confrontations, both sign it and call for its suspension and amendment.
“You have three – last — chances. Unrighteous creatures, how do you plead?”
The larger problem is that escalating words create mob pressure to escalate actions:
The unions, meanwhile, are playing out the dispute to the bitter end because it presents them with their best opportunity in decades to demonstrate their usefulness. Two of
Mob pressure from the back raises the stakes, pressing those at the front toward confrontation rather than compromise. And it provides a cover for hooliganism:
creates a climate of violence,
and increases the psychological need for greater violence
What begins as farce may end in tragedy.
