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Youth Runs Wild
Anger against a new youth labour law has culminated in a riot on the streets of the Left Bank of Paris.
During a march against the law, rioters set alight a bookshop and smashed a cafe near the prestigious Sorbonne university, using chairs as missiles towards police.
Water cannon and tear gas were used to break up the protest. On national television, one policeman could be seen beating a fallen protester with his baton.
Some sources, including interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, claimed that youths from Paris' poor suburbs infiltrated the protest and caused much of the violence. There's certainly "form" from that demographic: Suburban youths were behind riots last November, the worst in France since 1968. Also in 2005, thugs from the housing estates attacked schoolchildren marching against education reform.
Despite these claims, television images showed that not every rioter was a sportswear-clad suburban youth: Paris' particular species of thirtysomething radical was much in evidence too.
For non-French observers, there's also the uncanny and rather chilling spectacle of the country's media going through one of its periodical periods of unity. Now and again, French newspapers and broadcasters unite around an issue with blanket negative or positive coverage. To outsiders, it looks Stalinist; to the French, it's merely another example of republican unity.
In this case, the press is right behind the protestors, devoting acres of positive coverage to the students and prime time softball interviews with their leaders. In other countries, chants warning that the prime minister "Is toast" because "the students are on the streets" would be met with scornful laughter: In France, they're greeted with misty-eyed indulgence.
Many media executives, of course, are nostalgic for their own radical youth and see this month's protests as an echo of the May 1968 riots. It's odd, though, and peculiarly French to see how dissenting voices have been sidelined.
The anger is directed at new legislation, code-named the 'CPE' (First Employment Contract), which will make it easier to hire, but also to fire, workers under 26.
According to recent statistics, one-in-four young people are without jobs. The overall unemployment rate in France remains stuck at 9.6 per cent. In the country's troubled suburbs, the rate is believed to rise to around fifty percent.
Unfortunately for France, the media's blanket condemnation of the CPE law has made it impossible for its supporters to run a decent debate on the subject. MEDEF, the employers union, is broadly supportive of the legislation, but as France's media treats MEDEF with rather less respect than it treats al-Qaeda, its spokesmen have had difficulty making their side heard. Additionally, the climate of hostility to employers helps the CPE's opponents depict employers as unscrupulous hirers-and-firers of youngsters.
And on top of all this, no-one has asked the question "where else in the developed world does a 21 year old expect to be in the same job for more than a couple of years, never mind the rest of his life?"
The government of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin is under increasing pressure. Much of the protests are said to provoked by de Villepin's "arrogance" in forcing the law through parliament without consultation, under emergency legislation introduced during the November riots.
More student protests are planned for Paris and throughout France. Trade unions are organising even bigger demonstrations.
Meanwhile, Monsieur de Villepin is safe, so far, in the prime-ministerial residence of the Hotel de Matignon, and has stated that he will not alter the new law. His party colleagues, worried that his perceived intransigence and arrogance are fuelling public sympathy with the protestors, are beginning to look unnerved. While de Villepin sees standing up to unions and student protestors as a true test of his presidential ambitions - and proof that France's crippling cycle of tentative reform followed by street protest followed by humiliating retreat can be broken - others in the ruling UMP party are not so sure.
The only thing that is certain is that he is on the hotseat - and it's getting hotter.
