God gave Noah the rainbow sign
No more water, the fire next time!
--Epigraph to James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963)
GALLIC REASON has succumbed to French revolutionary reaction. At length President Jacques Chirac, who withstood U.S. pressure on Iraq, surrendered to marching unions, students, and radical sects, and withdrew the modest labor-law reform his government had backed in an effort to create jobs. The marchers thus have secured for their country economic stagnation and political paralysis. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has blown his scripted Reagan/Thatcher moment from which he was to have emerged strengthened by a duel with the unions. Instead, France's conservative leaders must sit, fingers-crossed, hoping vainly that the volatile second and third-generation immigrant suburbs--now deprived of even the slim promise of a shot at stable employment held out by the cashiered labor reform--will not burn again.
I stood in the Paris rain and watched the ghosts march. The walking museum exhibited every brand of revolutionary familiar in another life: Trotskyites distributed leaflets announcing "world revolution." Class struggle (la lutte des classes) got major poster board. Adorned with hammer and sickle, red flags stood out against black anarchist banners vowing "Death!" to "Capital" and "Democracy." Followers of Mao Zedong and Lyndon LaRouche strolled with aging militants of the French Communist party. Lycée students in Ché Guevara T-shirts ambled alongside grey-bearded Sorbonne professors chanting slogans from the Spanish Civil War. Blimps hoisted by labor unions dawdled above plump public employees. Causes and ideas that were young in 19th-century Europe had escaped from their nursing homes in Pyongyang, Havana, and Minsk. The marchers in their millions around the country would soon be celebrating victory, but when viewed from the standpoint of economics and history, they had joined a funeral procession.
The marchers paused and unfurled their umbrellas, chanting solidarity with the sans papiers, France's undocumented workers. But uninvited to the protest party, unmentioned on any of the banners and posters and pins and leaflets, were the angry young men of the banlieues, the bleak suburbs of French cities where less than six months earlier 9,000 cars were torched, 500 public buildings attacked, and nearly 5,000 residents arrested in three weeks of rioting sometimes called "the French intifada."
It was an absence Professor Axel Honneth--the new guru of the Frankfurt school, inheriting the mantle of Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas--seemed unaware of. In a celebratory interview in Le Monde, Honneth intoned: "The revolt of the banlieues has played a decisive role in the current protest movement against the [labor reform] in the sense that it permitted the students to realize that they too could change things."
That statement and the scene at the Paris demonstration in March perfectly represent the musty dream castle of the unreconstructed European left. In reality, the rioters from the banlieues--most of them born in France, though of African descent--loathe the marchers who gathered to protest a mild labor reform designed to offer the slum-dwellers a shot at decent jobs.
Young men from the banlieues rather fancied the new law mandating a two-year trial period during which an employer would be entitled to fire a young worker. "It gives us a chance to prove ourselves; that's all we're asking for," I was told in Asnières, Saint-Denis, Garges, Stains, Pierrefitte, and Aubervilliers, quartiers where cars burn and youth unemployment reaches 50 percent.
The marchers saw the February law (establishing a new "First Employment Contract" or CPE) as a threat to the lifetime job that most of them devoutly wish to inherit from their parents. But French employers now rarely hire, precisely because they cannot fire: They cannot adjust the size of their work force to the demand for their product. So, sad to say, there is no future for France's lifetime job, with its 35-hour week, six-week vacation, and medical package that the World Health Organization rates best on earth. What such marchers used to call "objective forces"--in China and India, Vietnam and Eastern Europe--are shaping economic reality far beyond their own poor power to add or detract. The lifetime job is on its way to extinction.
