France Liberte, Egalite, Chaos

By Jordan Bonfante/Paris

The Parisian dramatist Jean Cocteau once characterized his fellow Frenchmen as a bunch of Italians in a bad mood. As thumbnail assessments go, that may have been incomplete, but it was not too far off the mark. France last week continued to be seized by a wave of train and other public-service strikes that have disrupted the country for a month. Not only was the typical Frenchman's mood even sourer than usual, but there were numerous signs that French political life, and daily life for that matter, was Italianizing at the edges. The successive crises that have beset the nine-month-old conservative government of Premier Jacques Chirac began to look like those of Italy -- not the Italy of recent political stability, but the once notorious Italy of disorder and unpredictability in the 1970s.

( There has been, first of all, the terrorism. The Middle East-connected bombings that killed eleven people in September, for all their horror, were different from, and far more limited than, the terrorism that plagued Italy for a decade, starting in the early 1970s. But the holdups and cold-blooded assassinations of symbolic targets like Georges Besse, the Renault auto- company president who was gunned down last November by the extreme-left terrorist group Action Directe, are beginning to resemble those of the Red Brigades of 1977.

Then came the students. Their massive marches in December, protesting a selective-admissions policy contained in a university reform bill, were in many ways quintessentially French. But the anarchist and Marxist youths who emerged among the students were reminiscent of young Italian zealots who consider the Communists stodgy old fogies.

The French public-service strike, the most serious in nearly two decades, looks more Italian every day. Workers are demanding, among other things, wage increases higher than the government's 3% ceiling. Police have had to clear picketers off railroad tracks at scores of stations, and labor unrest has spread to Communist-led work stoppages on Paris subways, in the electric-power service and on the docks. At week's end the rail strike finally seemed to be losing steam, but the unrest could be prolonged in other areas.

Railroad stations in cities as staid and ordered as Grenoble and Lyons look like those in Naples. Among the throngs of stranded passengers, French families accustomed to better things share sausages and bread, using newspapers as picnic tablecloths. With rail traffic cut to 40% of normal, queues form behind charter-bus drivers showing their destinations on cardboard signs and shouting out the departure times. In Lyons's Part Dieu station, an illuminated advertising billboard shows a streaking orange superspeed train and carries the slogan that with the national French railway EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE! Some irate, but erudite passenger has scrawled across the sign in Latin "Mirabile Dictu!" (Strange to Say).

Some of Chirac's troubles, like his country's desert duel in Chad with Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, are hardly of his own making. But the combative, hard-driving Chirac has created many of his problems himself. In his zeal to carry out his electoral platform, the Premier has unleashed a bewildering windstorm of legislation. He is pushing to deregulate the economy, trim the budget, change the election law, curtail immigration, increase police powers and shake up the country's broadcasting system -- all at the same time. Socialist President Francois Mitterrand, the other partner in the uneasy power-sharing truce known as cohabitation, has grudgingly complimented the Premier for his "extraordinary dynamism," even as Mitterrand has balked at some of Chirac's more right-wing initiatives.

The strike crisis, however, has also provoked barbed exchanges between Chirac and Mitterrand, who on New Year's received a delegation of striking railworkers at his holiday retreat on the Mediterranean. Officials fumed at what they considered a flagrant presidential show of partisan support for the strikers, and Chirac noted acidly, "The nation's highest authorities should show their sense of responsibility for the sake of national cohesion." Mitterrand responded mildly that he supported the government's anti-inflation policies but that the sacrifices involved in carrying them out should be shared equally. The opposition Socialists have long charged that Chirac favored the rich over the poor by abolishing a tax on large estates and lowering the income tax in the highest brackets.

During the strikes, Chirac's contenders for next year's presidential race in the conservative camp also joined in reproaching his government. Former President Valery Giscard d'Estaing criticized Chirac's "methods" and "priorities" and expressed sympathy for the striking workers by stressing that "economic liberalization must be accompanied by social conscience." Former Premier Raymond Barre endorsed the main aims of Chirac's economic policies but rebuked the government for an "overdose" of other reforms.

Chirac's hyperactivity has clearly unsettled many people. For one thing, some of his programs, like turning the country's largest state-controlled television network over to private industry, are mainly ideological trophies rather than a response to popular demands. For another, segments of French society, beginning with the students and railwaymen, have clearly had a hard time digesting Chirac's agenda. The Premier has realized this and deliberately slowed the pace of further reforms. But his public standing has suffered. One poll last week showed his approval rating off by 7 points, to 46%.

Chirac's supporters insist that all-out, Italian-style chaos is unlikely in France because the state and its authority reign supreme, whereas in Italy political institutions are less stable and established. Nonetheless, some political observers last week were starting to speculate about still another Italianization: the possible erosion of central-government authority. They speculated that the state's power could be chipped away from two directions. On one side, there are the protesting students, the spreading strikes and further demonstrations. On the other stands an ambitious government program for privatization, which, if it goes all the way, will sell off 65 large state-run companies and banks and thus reduce the government's power and purse strings.

Chirac believes turning France more to private enterprise will be beneficial, infusing the economy with fresh dynamism. The unrest, though, is decidedly not leading to new growth. As usual, the French have a word for it. The strike situation, they say, has become so confused that it is downright bordelique, or chaotic. That, of course, very probably comes from the Italian bordello.