Paris: The first thing I noted on arriving here at the New Year was the number of homeless in an especially cold winter. They seemed to me, a frequent visitor, to have expanded exponentially in recent years. Then, in ensuing months, I saw more and more people in the streets—not the homeless, but protesters. First in small clusters, later in larger numbers, and soon in large demonstrations. The principal target was a government bill, the CPE (Contrat première embauche or “First employment contract”), which allowed employers of large firms to fire new hires under age twenty-six without explanation within two years of taking them on. But there is a broader picture. The French word for “demonstration” is manifestation. A very uneasy society was manifesting itself loudly.

You expect to see demonstrators if you live, as I have been, near Place de la Bastille, whose most famous protest turned into a world-historical revolution. A tall greenish column stands where the famous fortress sat in 1789. It is surrounded daily by swirling traffic. On its crest, perched forward, a gilded, winged “Génie de la Liberté” holds a torch in one hand, broken chains in the other. At the pillar’s base reads the inscription “To the Glory of French Citizens/who armed themselves and/fought in defense of Public Liberty.” These words memorialize the Revolution of 1830, when a liberal monarchy replaced a conservative one, not the Revolution of 1789, when a fumbling absolutist monarchy was replaced by a constitutional one, which was then replaced by a republic that was consumed by the Terror, which was then supplanted by a sort-of-constitutional-this-and-that, and then by Napoléon, and then by the conservative monarchy that was overthrown just when this sentence began, in 1830.

If you peer into the Place today from the corner of rue St. Antoine, you will see, looming behind the column, a shimmering hulk, not a fortress but the architectural equivalent of a beached whale of metal and glass. This is the new opera house of Paris, inaugurated in 1989 just before the bicentenary of the Revolution by the late president, François Mitterrand. It is one of several imposing public works he built in tribute to his socialist self. As I looked into the Place on March 28, 2006, I saw a large banner hanging on the house with words in red and black, “Opéra Bastille en Grève.” The Opera was on strike, but not due to one of the usual management-labor disputes. Another banner read, “Retrait du CPE,” “Withdraw the CPE.” A nationwide, one-day general strike had been proclaimed by the unions. Lines of policemen stood behind me in black-blue padded uniforms, truncheons at hand. In the Place itself, for some four hours, chanting demonstrators marched by. Banners identified protesters from the various trade unions, student marchers from universities and lycées, and various parties of the left. This immense show of discontent was peaceful, although I heard that some clashes and trashing occurred later.

The scene was very different from the confrontation I witnessed a few weeks earlier in the Place de la Sorbonne, abutting the most venerable buildings of the University of Paris. There, on the site of the fabled student rebellion in 1968, I watched some two thousand demonstrators, mostly students, I suppose, move back and forth in the face of police phalanxes. Steel barriers protected the university, which had been occupied (and vandalized). Demonstrators chanted, a few black flags fluttered, and there was occasional smoke, perhaps some tear gas, in the air. A nineteenth-century French professor stood there amid defiant demonstrators and helmeted police. It was Auguste Comte, or rather the statue of “the father of sociology,” who championed the “positivist” belief that it is possible to study society as “scientifically” as natural scientists study their domains, yielding “objective” results and laws. What would he have thought of the clashes? Behind the CPE dispute lurks an old argument over whether or not “laws” of the market are “objective,” “natural,” and ought to rule working lives, indeed all of social life.

Many newspapers reported that protestors knew what they were against but not what they were for. What policies would actually alleviate unemployment? Could France sustain its social protections in the “globalizing age”? There seemed to be few answers and just a little of the spirit of ’68. At the Bastille, I did see people wearing stickers that read not “Grève génerale” (General Strike) but “Rêve general” (General Dream). But what dream? The last time I had observed so large a demonstration was in a huge public square in Budapest in June 1989. A quarter-million Hungarians were paying tribute to the executed leaders of their 1956 Revolution. That demonstration, too, signaled a world-historical moment, the beginning of the end of communism, and it occurred just weeks before the bicentenary of the Revolution that started at the Bastille. A Hungarian philosopher commented to me, somewhat ruefully, that communism’s end was coming without “any imagination,” just as a “relief.” Between then and 2006, Europe’s ex-communist lands joined or hanker to join the European Union. France, in the meantime, struggles to place itself in the world and to find itself at home. A poll in May by CEVIPOF (Center for the Study of French Political Life) showed that 76 percent of the French think the next generation will have less chance of success than their own. “Declinism” preoccupies pundits.

France’s crisis is also the worldwide crisis of today’s democratic left. This may not be evident at first, because it was a center-right government that was besieged this past spring, and the French left was the immediate political beneficiary. The popularity of President Jacques Chirac and his prime minister and protégé, Dominique de Villepin, plummeted. After tough talk, they abandoned the proposed law. Although the Socialist Party (PS) followed, rather than led “the events,” some eighteen thousand new members joined it in March. Why is this a crisis for the left as well as for France’s neo-Gaullist rulers? The reasons become clearer if we look more closely at the French predicament, its context(s) and implications.

The Fifth Republic’s political class has had its worst spell since May 1968. The electorate rebuked it last year in a national referendum on the proposed European constitution. Most of the country’s leaders, across the spectrum, urged a “yes” vote. Citizens retorted “no.” This was due, at least in part, to umbrage toward an elite that seems to say to citizens: “We talk, you listen.” Villepin became prime minister in the aftermath of this “no,” yet somehow didn’t hear it. He rammed the CPE through the National Assembly this past winter without debate or public dialogue with interested groups (like unions). So the public said “no” again. The front cover of Libération, the left-wing daily, captured the mood on March 20. It presented a picture of Villepin’s back to the reader with a banner that read, “A la rue!” (To the streets!) A survey in the same issue reported that 71 percent of the French thought the anti-CPE demonstrations represented “a profound social crisis,” not a momentary problem.

At the end of March, Le Monde reported that 63 percent of the population opposed the law. Nonetheless, Chirac and Villepin complained that it would be “anti-democratic” to rescind it because it had been passed by a duly elected legislature. But if a bill mobilizes so much antagonism to it and polls show two-thirds of the citizenry are opposed, “democracy” becomes a feeble justification for going forward, especially when the bill’s point man, the prime minister, has never been elected to the many offices he has held (foreign minister, interior minister, and general secretary of the president’s office).

Chirac was returned to the presidency in 2002 by a huge majority (some 80 percent), but this was due to a glitch in constitutional design. His victory was a little like that of George Bush in 2000, and Chirac behaved a bit like the American president. Bush lost the popular vote, won the presidency constitutionally in the Electoral College, and proceeded to treat imperiously everyone save his loyalists. Chirac seems to have taken his reelection for a reanointment, even though his victory was not due to popular enthusiasm.

France’s two-round electoral system permits a political free-for-all among diverse candidates in a first balloting. Contenders are then winnowed for a runoff, traditionally to representatives of two broad blocs, left and right. But in 2002 the socialist candidate was eliminated in the first round. In effect, the far left did to Lionel Jospin what Ralph Nader did to Al Gore, enabling Jean-Marie Le Pen, the outré apostle of national chauvinism, to edge him out. The margin was negligible statistically but momentous psychologically. And Chirac barely reached 20 percent in the first round. French voters then took the sole sober option when faced with a runoff between Chirac and Le Pen.

IF THE FIRST round of next year’s presidential elections produces fragmented results and, consequently, unappealing alternatives in the second, question marks may appear around the constitutional order. Charles de Gaulle designed the Fifth Republic to remedy the parliamentary chaos that beset the postwar Fourth Republic. Factionalized politics in the 1950s and 1960s produced wobbly governments that could not cope effectively with major issues (like Algeria) or smaller ones. The Fifth Republic, after some adjusting, centered on a muscular chief executive who was elected for seven years and who appointed a prime minister to serve his policies (and as fall guy when necessary). Parliament was to be the president’s servant, because citizens were expected to vote in a pro-president majority (for a five-year term). But staggered elections and political discontents in the 1980s and 1990s upset patterns. Presidents from one camp found themselves “cohabiting” in power with parliamentary majorities of their opposition, and were compelled to appoint foes as prime minister. The latter’s power now waxed while the president’s power waned. Still, the system was flexible enough to manage the ensuing political discomforts.

According to the CEVIPOF poll, 3 percent of the French situate themselves on the extremes of left and right, 24 percent identify as left, 15 percent as center, 17 percent as right, and 37 percent say they are neither left nor right. What happens if fragmentation in next year’s first round produces a second round that again pits two right-wing contestants against each other—or a socialist and an extreme rightist (who might do unusually well with no other outlet for the moderate right)? The cast will be somewhat different from 2002, except for Le Pen, who returns like a bad dream. He does relatively well as a presidential candidate—around 20 percent in some surveys—drawing on fear as he always has, but accented now by last fall’s tumult in the banlieues (suburbs), tensions produced by the disruptions of the city-based anti-CPE marches, and dread of a future overlap of these discontents. At the same time, a mélange of Trotskyists, communists, and anti-globalists is also doing respectably in polls. They draw on left-wing displeasure with the Socialist Party.

Does France need a “Sixth Republic”? There is talk to this effect. It would be louder had the presidential term not been shortened from seven to five years, confining the fumbling Chirac to one more year in office rather than three. Laurent Fabius, a former PS prime minister, describes France as a “republican monarchy that is out of breath.” Chirac, surely, cannot blow fresh air, or perhaps any air into the sails of a country that is unsure of its place in the world, even in Europe, and whose citizens worry about the well-being of their social, economic, and cultural life.

In March, while anti-CPE demonstrators clogged Parisian streets, the French president walked huffily out of an economic meeting in Brussels to rebuke a leading French business figure for addressing it in English. Chirac’s pique put on display his flailing presidency. He has been president for eleven years, and unemployment has been a relentless issue, but for him Anglo-American linguistic hegemony is the problem. Consider: when Villepin became prime minister, his replacement as foreign minister was Philippe Douste-Blazy, who speaks no language besides French. That’s foreign minister, not minister of the interior.

And consider the past year’s main events:
• In May 2005 came “no” to the European Constitution. Voters thereby weakened dramatically what Chirac hoped would be a principal means of projecting France internationally in coming years. He had hoped a strong continent under French leadership—with Berlin in tow to it—would compete with the United States in a “multipolar” world. Then, not long after the rejection of the constitution, German elections brought to power a new chancellor, Angela Merkel, who sought to repair ties with Washington, frayed by German and French opposition to the Iraq War. Chirac’s strategy was in tatters.

Gaullism’s passion was always nationalist—the reassertion of France’s grandeur and global status after the ignominy of World War II and, later, of Algeria. Its premise, a vigorous state in both foreign and domestic affairs, is an old Gallic tradition. De Gaulle’s problem, as Henry Kissinger observed, was how to govern a country “racked by a generation of conflict and decades of humiliation.” De Gaulle “judged policies not so much according to pragmatic criteria as according to whether they could contribute to the restoration of French esteem.” And so his statecraft was characterized by symbolic assertiveness. France was part of the West, certainly, but it would be independent of the American-led Western alliance and promote third worldism. France would be European, but this meant a “Europe de patries,” for de Gaulle did not want a “supernational” Europe to overshadow the Hexagon. He fostered reconciliation with West Germany while limiting British sway on the continent because of London’s trans-Atlanticism.

In fact, the French center-right is diverse, and the clout of its market-oriented republicans has increased, reshaping the dominance of state-oriented Gaullism. Because de Gaulle’s heirs, like him, were never principally interested in economics, some of them could lean more toward and others away from a potent state role in the economy. Gaullism did not preside over most of France’s remarkable post–World War II recovery, but its étatism was congenial to it: a combination of dynamic state initiatives and industrial policy, an energetic public sector, and indicative national planning. But the world economy worked differently in the late 1940s and 1950s than it does today, and the advocates of more liberal economics within the French center-right have gained more influence.

Mitterrand’s socialist presidency recalibrated Franco-American relations. They became more accommodating. At the same time, Mitterrand often engaged in a balancing act in which he would tilt toward Washington, while his various foreign ministers leaned a bit elsewhere. New, fluid realities came about with the end of the cold war, the Soviet Union’s dissolution, and the decline of the French Communist Party (which Mitterrand despised even as he allied with it), together with Germany’s reunification. The fact that there was only one remaining superpower was a stark, new global reality. Chirac’s neo-Gaullism sought another recalibration in response to American “unipolarism.”

If Mitterrand’s policies often encouraged democratic multilateralism (in the Gulf War, for example) rather than futile competition with Washington, Chirac projected a “multipolar” world in which Europe would “counter-balance” the United States. His multipolarism is “neo”-Gaullist because France is no longer de Gaulle’s state, especially in a globalizing era. Consequently, a Gaullist project cannot be what it once was. By making Paris the leader of Europe and especially influential in the third world, Chirac could project grandeur in a post-grandeur age and compensate for the weaknesses of the contemporary French state. He assumed that what was good for France was good for Europe, and that this would be embodied in a common European foreign policy, among other things.

But the world looks different from, say, Warsaw than it does from Paris. A Polish prime minister, of whatever stripe, and however supportive of the European Union, will always be edgy about a large neighbor to the east. Paris may want to counterbalance the United States, but Warsaw thinks of the United States as a potential counterbalance to a reassertive Russia. Improved Franco-Russian ties makes obvious sense for Paris and were an aspect of de Gaulle’s assertion of independence (they also featured in French “Great Power” diplomacy in earlier centuries). But post–cold war East and Central Europeans fret that some of their interests might be forfeit to those ties (similar qualms are evoked by the memory of West German Ostpolitik). Villepin, when still foreign minister, argued, “France’s place is at the head of Europe,” and that Europe could be a “pole” in a multipolar world in partnership with Russia.

Chirac and Villepin’s neo-Gaullist aspirations were soon diluted by the enlargement of the EU. Their dramatic threat to veto UN endorsement of the Iraq War—a gesture that did nothing to stop war—may also have diminished France’s ability to project itself through the EU. EU citizens in the former Soviet bloc remember the United States as a principal source of hope during the cold war and are uneasy about a common European foreign policy under French sway. These concerns were undoubtedly sharpened when French foes of the EU Constitution complained loudly that “Polish plumbers” would come to the country, take away jobs, and push down wages. If these complaints irritated Poles, they also echoed real French worries that their welfare state would be weakened in the pursuit of a more liberal economic order. These qualms provide part of the backdrop to the anti-CPE mobilization.

• In the fall, there was another “no.” French suburbs irrupted in widespread violence. It went on for three weeks, causing enormous destruction. This violence challenged the claim, made confidently and often after the London bombings of summer 2005, that France’s “republican model” had succeeded at national integration much more than Britain’s “soft multiculturalism.” But youth now shouted “no” from the banlieues that ring Paris and other major cities with poor, ghettoized, and significantly unemployed North African immigrant populations. Villepin, who presented his CPE as a response, has also been an ideological foe of affirmative action programs. Citizens in a republic, he insisted, have equal status. His rival, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, a politician with open presidential ambitions, has been something of a maverick on the right on this issue, supporting affirmative action. But he is viewed with great wariness by those of North African origin because of his penchant for prejudicial pandering.

For instance, Sarkozy declared recently, “If certain people don’t like France, they shouldn’t hesitate to leave.” Certain people—many in fact—note how these words evoke Le Pen’s jingoistic slogan, usually imposed on a map of France on posters at National Front rallies: “Love it or Leave it.” Sarkozy would prefer next year’s presidential campaign to focus on the link between immigration and the upheavals in the banlieues rather than on labor law. This will allow him to be a nationalist and populist, and compete for Le Pen voters, all while he largely supports neoliberal economic reforms. He often speaks of the need for a “rupture” with the past, and he endorsed the CPE, then distanced himself from it as the demonstrations grew. He was the only major figure in the center-right to emerge strengthened from the CPE debacle, and just afterward he proposed a bill to make immigration policies more selective (emphasizing skilled newcomers rather than family reunifications).

There is still considerable debate about whether or not the “no” from the banlieues is part of an internal “clash of civilizations.” Was it due mainly to socioeconomic grievances? Or to political culture and resentments of Muslim minorities, who are the second biggest religious denomination in the country, toward a secular elite that shies away from affirmative action while secular society still retains a certain Catholic flavor? Only months after the foulard (Muslim head scarf) was barred from French schools in the name of secularism, the interior minister (then Dominique de Villepin) ordered flags lowered on schools and other public buildings following the death of John Paul II. Most French Muslims, whether secular or religious, are unsympathetic to bullying Muslim fundamentalism, which has a well-organized and frightening presence in many banlieues (and was one cause of the foulard law). Still, they surely registered the government’s inconsistency with chagrin.

When analysts address the problems of the banlieues they often have difficulty distinguishing political from cultural issues and prejudices from socioeconomic problems. Media often made it appear that everyone detained in last fall’s violence was North African, but recent studies complicate the picture. A study of the Yvelines suburb near Paris showed that 33 percent of those questioned by authorities were “European” in origin, 35.5 percent were North African, and 28.9 percent African. Twenty-three percent were high school students, 13 percent junior high schoolers, and 6.6 percent university students. Twenty-four percent came from the ranks of the unemployed (Le Figaro, May 19, 2006). This latter figure may seem high, but it is much less than the average unemployment rates ascribed to banlieues. [1] 

• “No” to free expression? The “Cartoon Controversy” came so soon after the upheavals in the banlieues that it left many citizens worried again, this time about republican values, laws, and the constitutional guarantees of an open society. Decades ago a French president, Charles de Gaulle, refused to jail philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre for his radical opposition politics on the grounds that “One does not arrest Voltaire.” But Voltaire would have been arrested by many of the demonstrators, mostly Muslim, throughout Europe and other parts of the world, who took to the streets last winter to denounce, often violently, political cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. They were published in a right-wing Danish newspaper and reprinted in France and elsewhere.

A demand for extraterritoriality often seemed to lurk within these protests, as if global Muslim outrage rather than, say, the French citizenry ought to determine what freedom of expression means within the country’s borders. In this sense, the cartoon controversy raised the most poignant political question of globalization and also of Europeanization: What is the status of a democratic republic in this era? If you think “the market” is the “natural” order of things and that its “global demands”—or, indeed, pan-European demands—should prevail over social priorities set by the citizens of a self-governing polity, why shouldn’t that polity’s norms also be trumped by the global demands of religious movements insisting on the priority of “god-given” laws? In both cases, fundamentalism (economic or religious) is granted the right of sway, pushing to the side what is, respectively, unnatural or ungodly concerns.

Another large demonstration occurred almost concurrently with the cartoon controversy. It protested the murder of a twenty-three-year-old Parisian Jew by a gang from a banlieue. Islamist pamphlets and literature from a pro-Hamas charity were found in the room where Ilan Halimi was tortured for three weeks. The kidnappers, who call themselves “The Barbarians,” were led by an Ivory Coast–born French citizen named Youssef Fofana. They had decided that all Jews are rich and therefore ripe for extortion. Their victim was a mobile phone salesman. Le Monde called the slaying “a magnifying glass on the real state of our society.” Among those marching in Halimi’s memory were Sarkozy, Socialist leader François Hollande, and a wide range of political and social groups, including CRAN (the Representative Council of Black Associations). Libération observed that “hatred of Jews has left the category of the unacceptable to become something normal—especially in the eyes of many young people.”

A poll in February showed that 57 percent of the French thought anti-Semitism was rising in their society. In reality, anti-Semitic attacks in 2005 fell to half those of the preceding year, due in part to vigorous government efforts. Both Chirac and Villepin made a point of attending Halimi’s funeral. Anti-Semitism is a real issue in France, but clearly it ought not to be exaggerated. Still, one hears a little too often that “provocative” Israeli actions across the Mediterranean incite anti-Semitism. More candor might find that the French government’s one-sided Middle East policy, which is part of its quest for influence in the third world, blends easily with the show-trial tone of some intellectuals when they address the Israel-Palestine conflict (Israel is inevitably in the dock). This combination helps to generate an ambiance that permits bigots, homegrown or immigrant, to imagine that they have allowance to act against “Zionists.” Consider a cartoon published by Le Monde a few years ago. It presented an orthodox Jew, in vulgar caricature, with “settlements” strapped to him. Next to him an Arab, also in vulgar caricature, had bombs strapped to him. “Two Kamikazes,” read the caption, as if land-grabbing by religious nationalists, however reprehensible, is equivalent to blowing up children in a pizza parlor. No violent demonstrations by Jews or Muslims protested this cartoon in France or elsewhere.

• ”No” to the CPE came in late winter and early spring 2006, and a national crisis crystallized. After France’s Constitutional Council ruled that the law was legitimate, the president addressed the country. He declared on television, in his usual regal tones, “It is time to unblock the situation by being fair and reasonable.” How to unblock? By putting the law into effect, he explained, but not applying it, because it would be changed. This left many of his twenty-two million viewers mystified. The head of state had signed on principle a law opposed by two-thirds of the citizens and then told them not to follow it. Chirac might as well have proposed foie gras light as a remedy to a cholesterol problem. One Socialist parliamentarian called all this “abracadabrantesque.”

Many commentators, especially in the United States, explained the CPE-conflict through a neoliberal narrative that goes something like this: The world has changed and France refuses to “adjust.” The French are “coddled” by the state. Social protections are “too generous.” Employment regulations are too “rigid.” This discourages foreign investment. Unions are always striking. Growth is inhibited. No wonder there is a long-standing unemployment problem. (Ten percent of the population is unemployed, including a quarter of the youth, with numbers going up to 50 percent in poor banlieues.) A poll in March revealed that only 36 percent of the French think “the free market” is the best economic system in contrast to 71 percent of Americans, 66 percent of the British, and 65 percent of Germans. Imagine that!

What is to be done? The “solutions” have a familiar ring: retrench the welfare state and make the labor market “flexible.” The CPE, a modest reform, responds to last fall’s riots among deprived youth. They would have benefited disproportionately by eased rules for first-time hires, whereas demonstrating students, who shut down eighty-four universities and some five hundred lycées, defacing some of them, are privileged brats who want risk-free lives for themselves. They aren’t from poor neighbors and are poised to get the better jobs in France thanks to the education system they disrupted. And whoever heard of lifetime security in your first job? As for protesting trade unionists, they are out-of-date leftists whose strikes regularly disrupt economic life on behalf of failed ideas.

Here are some things unmentioned in the preceding précis. The Paris Bourse (stock market) reached its highest point in five years in March 2006. France’s top forty companies reported record profits in early 2006, up 50 percent since 2004 (The Economist, April 1, 2006). France is the fifth richest country in the world and somehow managed to achieve that rank with social protections. Direct foreign investment is at 42 percent of GDP, six percentage points higher than in Tony Blair’s Britain. In fact, the country loses few days to strikes, and French workers are more productive per hour than their American and British counterparts. (It looks different in some statistics because of France’s thirty-five-hour work week.) In this context the French government presented a proposal with an Orwellian whiff: unemployment is best fought by making it easier to unemploy people. “We all know that work has become more precarious,” observed Michel Rocard, the former socialist prime minister, when I met with him in late May to discuss the situation. “And it is true that France has a very centralized, administrative state, but this means its symbolic response to problems is especially important. The CPE demolished the symbol of a state that is here to protect and serve us all by making precariousness part of the law.”

It is not evident that the CPE would have had its intended effect. Critics note that close to 60 percent of French youth under age twenty-six already work on short-term contracts. The law would, they say, simply have widened a revolving door of short-term employment in the name of “flexibility.” Moreover, if worker productivity in France is good why make people less secure? Would it not discourage consumer spending by worried workers, leading to less growth and more unemployment? Of course, that implies also that the more secure workers are, the more productive they may be, that a society’s economic well-being may be enhanced by social fairness and cooperation rather the marketization of all domains of life. As for the students, although it does not justify violence or vandalism, why shouldn’t they want more secure futures?

Laurence Parisot, who is the leading voice of the Patronat, France’s business leadership, as president of its principal association, MEDEF (Mouvement des Enterprises de France), revealed what was finally at stake. She criticized the CPE for applying only to younger workers. Because her logic supposes that all ages should have the same insecurity, she rebuts, in a revealing way, one left-wing reprimand of the CPE—that it would have promoted intergenerational rivalry rather than a sense of common social citizenship. What the Patronat wants is a complete revamping of France’s standard work contract and more. The CPE was not an isolated proposal or simply a response to this past fall’s upheavals in the suburbs. A similar rule, the CNE (Contrat nouvelle embauche, or New Employment Contract), was already approved last summer for small businesses (defined as less than twenty employees). First the CNE, then the CPE, and what would be next, ask critics, if not general retrenchment of labor rights and protections of older workers in the name of “flexibility”? Then workers will be told that they will be better off when “the country” becomes “more competitive” by means of wage cuts, outsourcing of jobs, rollback of social insurance.

With unemployment widespread for so long, why would French citizens accept laws that make it easier to unemploy them or their children, especially when champions of a “liberalized” labor market—that is, of a labor market that is more profitable for one part of the population and more precarious for the other—also want to trim the welfare state and social benefits? These things are of some use if you are jobless. One day “they” might say that, well, lowering your lower wages is simply the unfortunate collateral damage of the natural workings of globalizing markets. “They” point to the privileges of student demonstrators, “spoiled” compared to counterparts in the banlieues. But one would think that republican leaders who inveigh about patriotism might praise young people if they champion needs beyond their own. (In any event, public universities are cash-starved and overcrowded).

It is more difficult to fire someone with a long-term contract in France than it is, say, in the United States. A French worker can appeal to state tribunals. Although the Patronat complains that this leads to protracted, costly processes that favor workers, only a quarter of those who lose jobs turn to these boards. Their cases usually take two-and-a-half years. About two-thirds are resolved in favor of the workers. Think about it: the tribunals benefit two-thirds of one-quarter of fired workers, and this is branded “inflexible.” These are MEDEF’s statistics. Perhaps I have old-fashioned left-wing attitudes—as opposed to the eighteenth-century idea of unregulated capitalism—but I cannot see why this is bad. A democratic state ought to provide counter-ballast to hierarchical powers in the workplace, especially in a society with a relatively weak labor movement. Only 8 percent of French workers are unionized (heavily in the public sector, which is why strikes sometimes have disproportionate impact). Organized labor is fragmented among five confederations. Union membership has been in decline since the 1970s.

In the meantime, French businesses have prospered with the existing system of labor contracts. Telecommunications firms, the cosmetics industry, and the banking sectors thrive. The head of research and EU affairs for Hewitt Management Consultants, Leonardo Sforza, told the International Herald Tribune that companies simply find suitable ways to run their concerns within the existing code but with “a more sophisticated approach to management of employees” than in most other countries. These views are echoed even by McDonald’s, that infamous American economic “hyper-power.” It employs some thirty-five-thousand French youth, average age twenty-two, and will open thirty new restaurants this year. Its vice president for Human Services, Hubert Mongon, boasts that McDonald’s has used the “old” system “successfully for 25 years and we see it being a success for us for the next 25 years” (International Herald Tribune, March 24, 2006).

A critic might add that Chirac and Villepin become remarkably illiberal—they call it “patriotic”—when it comes to maintaining French control of French companies and asserting French control over foreign companies. It is a little like neo-Gaullist foreign policy: present yourself to the world as a moral hero (say, in the Security Council debate on Iraq) while you pursue national interests (a “multipolar world” in which you lead one pole). Patrick Sabatier, deputy editor of Libération, calls it a policy of “globalization à la carte.” France has not been “inflexible” or detached from a globalizing world. There were 190 mergers and acquisitions by French groups last year, an increase of 157 percent. The government helped to thwart a takeover by Pepsico (an American firm) of Danone (a French firm), and likewise, in February 2006, it sought to hinder the takeover of Suez, a private French firm, by an Italian firm. The government had no problem when BNP Paribas (a French bank) took over an Italian bank or when L’Oréal Cosmetics took over a British chain (“Body Works”). France is not the only country that pursues this sort of policy. But it profits by globalization while, in Sabatier’s words, “resisting others’ efforts to do the same with French companies, along the principle ‘What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours’ is open to negotiation’ ” (International Herald Tribune May 19, 2006).

Or, what belongs to France and its companies belongs to France and its companies, but the social rights of French citizens are open to negotiation. After the CPE was withdrawn, the prime minister warned citizens that society would decline if they did not accept more risks in life. Not to worry too much, though, he elaborated. With his government’s help this would be “totally controlled risk.” Considering this past year, it is easy to grasp why many French citizens might refrain from giving their political class a benefit of the doubt to manage something called “totally controlled risk.” It would be like Americans in 2006 giving Donald Rumsfeld a benefit of the doubt to run a war in Iraq.

There were alternative strategies open to the French government. It could, for example, have fostered collective bargaining. Proposals to liberalize the labor market could have been offered with compensatory concessions by the Patronat if Villepin wanted to convince critics (the never consulted unions, for example) that the agenda was not one-sided, that the CPE was not part of an ongoing effort to roll back labor rights and whittle away social citizenship. The government opted instead to legislate. This was a political choice against social partnership, and that choice, rather than the CPE itself, is the important issue. As a consequence, Villepin managed to unite France’s historically divided labor leadership against him, even the heads of the two largest labor confederations, Bernard Thibault of the Communist-led CGT and François Chérèque of the CFDT, who are famous for their bitter rivalry with each other. Government supporters accused labor leaders of being “conservatives,” that is, against change. Thibault, however, has shown a willingness to take positions that are unpopular on the left, including within his own ever-pathetic Communist Party, such as supporting the EU Constitution. Chérèque argued that “it is necessary to help young people enter the workplace, but with contracts that respect basic labor rights.” He supported “what in other countries is called ‘flexi-security,’ that is, strong guarantees for wage earners in a more supple labor market” (Le Monde, April 7, 2005).

What of the intellectual world? “These days we have fewer intellectual prophets, which is a dangerous category anyway,” remarks Rocard. “They are useful for a society’s ethics but not when it comes to pragmatic ideas for social change.” What the French need are ideas that can address their lives, and this is not coming from the French intellectual currents best known to Americans. Postmodernists, whose repute in France is much more modest than across the Atlantic, have had little useful to say about their country’s crisis. The “New Philosophers” of the 1970s, such as Bernard-Henri Lévy, are as “médiatique” as ever, yet one searches in vain for some novel substance in their reproofs—not all wrong but now tedious—of left-wing foibles. Many of them had identified with some species of Leninism and transformed into “anti-totalitarians” without a change in voice, as if they were the first to notice something wrong with Stalin or Mao. They speak much of Tony Blair, just as Britain prepares to move beyond him. Décalage—lag—is a curious phenomenon in French intellectual history.

But something is stirring. An “intellectual atelier” of academics and intellectuals, mostly in their thirties and early forties, met in Grenoble in May to prompt a public conversation based on “New Social Criticism.” In addition to official participants, some eight thousand people came over several days to hear the meetings, which were initiated by “The Republic of Ideas,” an intellectual network fostered by historian Pierre Rosenvallon, and “The Solidarity Activist Association.” Roundtables debated a wide range of issues: To what extent are France’s multiple crises reflections of the general problems of Western democracies and to what extent specifically French? How has French society been reshaped by social differences and tensions beyond class? To what extent has the current education system or unequal access to culture shaped the country’s current malaise? How can a new conversation—one with practical consequences—engage a generation that grew up after—rather than through—upheavals like Algeria and 1968? The debates that once animated the left were absent from these deliberations, at least from the reports I read. Nobody quarreled about who was an authentic leftist and who a treacherous social democrat. Le Monde gave six pages of coverage to the atelier. A week earlier Le Nouvel Observateur’s cover story was about young “intellos” who “want to change the left.” The article had a People magazine quality to it; still, it indicated desire for new thinking within France’s gloom.

The Socialist Party doesn’t have many innovative ideas. But its frontrunner for the presidency, Ségolène Royal, would represent something novel and positive, were she to win. Women have served as prime and defense ministers, but never president. Although Royal has been criticized for inexperience and subjected to sexist gibes from male competitors within her party (the “elephants” of the old guard), she is a seasoned politician, a member of the National Assembly, a former minister, and has governed the western region of Poitou-Charentes. Her longtime companion, François Hollande, is head of the PS. What ideas govern her political thinking? They are difficult to discern, despite some compliments she has paid to Blair and tough words responding to a new outbreak of violence in the banlieues in late May.

To have a candidate and to have a project are different things. The PS, like so many left parties, has been unable to situate itself in a globalizing world. “The PS is the only socialist party within the EU that has not truly accepted the market economy,” says Rocard. “All the others are trying to find ways to counterbalance the market,” he adds, “but the French socialist mainstream still thinks too much of an administered economy.” Last summer he wrote an article warning his comrades not to imitate Jules Guesde, a pre–World War I socialist leader whose intellectual and programmatic dogmatism conflicted often with the more agile spirit of Jean Jaurès, the movement’s greatest leader. Speaking broadly, the PS is differentiated among those more oriented more toward an activist state and those who are more “market socialist.” The former, long dominant, stress the role of a democratic state in furthering equality; the latter stress democratic self-management from below. Blairism has now made its appearance as well.

In mid-May, “Clearstream,” a murky scandal, compounded the government’s woes. Villepin was accused of trying (at Chirac’s behest) to implicate Sarkozy, his rival, in a corruption scheme involving a clearing house that named the scandal. Hollande declared that “the right has taken the state hostage.” His remark reveals the left’s real difficulty just as much as “totally controlled risk” captures that of the right. The problem for French Socialists is not how to free the state; it is how to reimagine it, together with its relation to civil society and foreign and domestic markets. One way to understand why the Socialists are stuck today is to look back to when they first used the state creatively to transform the country.

The Popular Front government of 1936 was, for the French, “100 Days that changed our life,” as a well-timed cover story about it proclaimed in Le Nouvel Observateur just after the CPE was withdrawn. It was led by Léon Blum, who rebuilt the French Socialist movement after three-quarters of its members joined the French Communist Party in 1920. Blum believed that democratic commitment had to animate socialist pursuit of an egalitarian society. A speech he delivered to a socialist congress in 1926 showed how. He addressed an old argument within the French (but not only the French) left: should socialists, who aim to transform society, enter government within a “bourgeois” order? Blum opposed “participation in power,” that is, just sharing government responsibilities. He was for the “exercise of power,” that is, serving in government if socialists could initiate far-reaching reforms to point a new social direction. He contrasted both these to “the conquest of power,” which meant achieving an overwhelming popular mandate to revolutionize society.

The Popular Front “exercised” power after an electoral victory by a coalition of socialists, radicals, and communists (the latter did not enter the government, preferring credit without responsibility). As Blum became prime minister, strikes spread throughout France, and he was able to use their pressure to extract concessions: workers received a 12 percent raise and paid holidays for the first time, a forty-hour work week and collective bargaining were established, state control was extended over the arms industry and the Bank of France. These “Matignon Accords” (named for the prime minister’s residence) pointed France in a new social direction that continued, reconstructed and with modifications, for decades after the war. That achievement is, finally, neoliberalism’s nemesis because it began to socialize citizenship.

Some radicals, mostly of communist or Trotskyist bent, spoke contemptuously of Blum’s tenure; read them today and they sound a little like contemporary neoliberals, dismissing the welfare state. Of course, the starting points are different: the former complain that Blum did not “make the revolution,” the latter that social citizenship constrains the market truths of Margaret Thatcher. Blum insisted that he had a Popular Front electoral mandate for real social change, but not that of a vast majority demanding a revolutionized world. An American academic once harangued me about how Blum “betrayed the workers” because he only reformed France. I suggested that utopia might not have been plausible then, but that it was a very good thing that workers had paid holidays for the first time. It was an attempt “to bribe workers,” he retorted. And he gestured contemptuously when I pointed out that we were having this conversation in a Paris café only because we were both professors who didn’t teach during the summer.

IN FACT, Blum pressed social transformation about as far as any democrat could in the circumstances. Adam Przeworski pointed out in his 1986 study Capitalism and Social Democracy that Marx’s working class, the industrial proletariat, never made up more than about 40 percent of Western societies. Its status as a universal class—society’s inevitable vast majority and incarnation of transcendent interests—was ascribed. It was never a reality, even if support for its (differentiated) interests did push Western societies toward more social egalitarianism and democracy. Without more agile notions of history, social structures, and change, the left—or at least part of it—was fated to be the proponent of a social minority to which it imputed universalistic aspirations and of a long-term agenda that could never be enacted in a democratic framework. [2]  The alternative was alliances and social democratic compromise.

The phrase “social democrat” was first used in a derogatory way by Marx himself in writings on the French revolutions of 1848–1851. (Lenin made it an epithet, only to be bested by Stalin’s claim that “objectively social democracy is the moderate wing of fascism.”) Marx criticized the French “Demosocs” (“Democratic Socialists”) led by Louis Blanc for their inter-class alliance with “petty bourgeois” democratic republicans. Thanks to this “social democracy,” he explained, “the social demands of the proletariat lost their revolutionary point and gained a democratic twist while the democratic claims of the petty bourgeoisie were stripped of their political form and their socialist point emphasized.” Marx thought their rout proved his case against reformist alliances. The opposite was true. Even though they were defeated, it was his concepts of class and emancipation that proved deficient (even more so today). Social egalitarianism was furthered in Western societies only because of the compromising politics he rejected; it was due to social democrats’ trying to socialize democratic republics. Blum’s exercise of power in 1936 is the outstanding example. True, it never led—and never could have led—to “the conquest of power.” But Leninist alternatives produced only catastrophes. After the 1960s, some left theorists idealized “new social movements,” but these have proven to be relatively limited in scope and impact. Today’s “anti-globalization left” relies on jumbled ideas, which received expression intellectually in works like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire or in outmoded but postmodernized Trotskyism-cum-third-worldism. Its activists are as likely to achieve their goals as Mikhail Bakunin was when he and some supporters marched onto the steps of the city hall of Lyons in 1870 and declared the state abolished, only to be chased off promptly by police.

But the “exercise of power” rested on the state, and the state’s role—and the project of socializing democratic republics—is now in question as a result of globalization. That is why France’s crisis under the neo-Gaullists is also the left’s crisis. The French Socialists tried to go beyond the welfare state after coming to power in 1981, but the international economic environment forced them to reverse course. “External reality,” some said, but the interesting question is whether or not “internal reality” in France and elsewhere will now constrain the conflicted liberalizing efforts of the center-right. It might have been useful for France’s governors and especially the Socialists to read a recent pamphlet on “Sweden’s New Social Democratic Model” published by “Compass,” a London-based intellectual project that seeks to prepare the British Labour Party for a post-Blair era. Its author, Robert Taylor, urges that attention be paid to how Swedish Social Democrats have coped with globalization. Sweden’s welfare state was originally the product of a triangular relation among an efficient private sector, a vigorous trade union movement, and an “enlightened state” (dominated by the Social Democrats). It ran into difficulties in the 1970s, but in the next decades Social Democrats pursued “modernization through consensus.” They adapted to the changing environment and, in fact, conceded a certain amount of economic liberalization, but also maintained social solidarity as the regulative idea of politics. Growth and worker productivity have remained strong in Sweden since the mid-1990s.

“Flexibility” and solidarity were linked. But there was a social prerequisite: 85 percent of Swedish workers are in unions. That statistic differentiates Sweden sharply from France. A measure like the CPE might not have been as controversial if France had combined unionization along with the principle, presented in the Swedish Social Democratic platform of 2004, that “economic interests never have the right to set limits to democracy; democracy always has the right to state the terms for the economy and to set limits for the market.” If French Socialists invent a similar programmatic blend, they will have found a neo-Blumian way to exercise power in neoliberal times. They will have to compete with a center-right in search of a post-Gaullist de Gaulle in the troubled Fifth Republic.

Mitchell Cohen, co-editor of Dissent, has been in Paris in 2006. He teaches political theory at Baruch College, CUNY.

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FOOTNOTES:

• [1] My thanks to Martin Schain for pointing this out to me as well as for his many valuable criticisms of an early draft of this article. Many thanks also to Michelle-Irène Brudny for her very thoughtful and helpful comments on the draft. Any errors or offenses are mine alone.
• [2] I borrow—somewhat expropriate—a formulation in Przeworski.