The Revenge of the Not-So-Radicals

By James Graff

Ah, to breathe the fine air of France!" As he spoke in mock heroic tones last week, Sayed Diakite, 19, a student from the banlieues south of Paris, was smiling gleefully and weeping at the same time. Like hundreds of other young people boxed in by riot police between the Bon Marche department store and the Hotel Lutetia in the heart of the Left Bank, Diakite was choking in air pungent with tear gas and smoke from a burning newspaper kiosk. Amid the uproar, he and his fellow students felt a budding--and maybe false--sense of empowerment. Could half a million young people in the streets throughout France bring an embattled government to its knees?

It wouldn't be the first time. France is in another bout of revolt against its government, with familiar theatrical brio. For weeks, France's universities have been on strike. The Sorbonne, the iconic epicenter of the May 1968 student revolts that ushered in a new era in France, has been closed for the past two weeks. At issue this time are not the heady concerns of 1968: Vietnam, Mao, Foucault and free love. The rallying point is far less stirring: a law backed by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin that is meant to reduce France's chronic and debilitating youth unemployment, which stands at 22%--and at more than 40% in the poorer banlieues that exploded in rioting last fall. The new law allows employers to fire workers under age 26 within two years of hiring them-- without cause and with no obligation to shell out severance payments. Making it easier to fire workers, the government believes, will help employers overcome a reluctance to hire them in the first place.

The law has hit a raw nerve in a French society deeply attached to the idea that a job is forever. A poll last week found that more than two-thirds of the population--and more than 80% of the young people whom the law aims to help--want the government to rescind it. The most agitated of them flocked to the Sorbonne last week and hurled anything they could tear loose--metal barricades, a camera tripod and dozens of Parisian cafe chairs--at the shields of riot police. A Mercedes was flipped over, and a Renault set alight; Minis were tossed about like toys. THE BOURGEOISIE TO THE GULAG! read a graffito. "Maybe you can talk about labor flexibility in England or America, where there are lots of jobs," says Florian Louis, 22, a history student in Paris, "but not here. France wants no part in a race to the bottom."

That's a noble sentiment, but lurking beneath it is something darker: a deep fear of change. "French youth of 2006 are the exact opposites of those behind May '68," says Dominique Moisi, deputy director of the French Institute on International Relations. "Today's demonstrators are in a very real manner reactionaries, rejecting any prospect of more risk."

The outpouring of opposition is the latest challenge to the government of Villepin, already damaged by the rioting last fall. Villepin has vowed to stand up to the protesters, a move that many commentators see as a bid to display toughness in anticipation of a possible showdown with his right-wing rival, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, in next year's presidential election. But hanging on to a deeply unpopular policy won't help Villepin--whose personal approval rating has sunk to the mid-30s--or the rest of his party. His best hope, Moisi suggests, might be that the Socialist opposition wins a court challenge to the employment law, allowing it to die without his fingerprints.

But that would leave the larger problem unanswered: how to change France. Andre Glucksmann, a veteran of the 1968 protests, says things may be churning beneath the surface already. "Every generation we have a war, a revolt or a revolution," he says. "That's how we recycle our elite." Riding at the top of preliminary polls for the presidency are Sarkozy and Socialist Segolene Royal, who both support greater labor-market flexibility. That might not win them friends at the Sorbonne. But the fine air of France can't resist the winds of change forever.