Anyone who lives in France, as I do, has by now grown weary of writing about or discussing the contrat première embauche (CPE, or "first employment contract"). March was a cruel month. For the duration, one could barely turn a corner in Paris without getting smacked in the face with a protest sign. While revisions to work laws are still being debated, for a moment we journalists can look away and focus on Nicolas Sarkozy's controversial immigration bill. But after reading Richard Wolin's naïve article on openDemocracy, "Growing up absurd", I must return to the subject of the CPE.
KA Dilday is responding to the article by Richard Wolin on openDemocracy:
"Growing up absurd" (28 April 2006)
Wolin writes about the generation that does not want to "grow up absurd". I was in Paris for the entire month of rioting and I was struck by the vigour of the students. They knew no bounds in protecting the comfortable lives they were born to. The leaders of the student movement were frequently interviewed on French television and never did I hear them mention what prime minister Dominique de Villepin and Azouz Begag, his equal-opportunities minister, had said from the beginning: as part of the law for equal opportunity which was created in direct response to the riots in the predominantly black and Arab banlieues (suburbs) in October-November 2005, the CPE was designed to try to persuade employers to rise above their proven racist hiring practices and give Arab and black kids a chance.
What Richard Wolin ignores, although several people have written of it in the American press (William Pfaff in the New York Review of Books, and my own article in the Los Angeles Times) is that the university students who rioted were themselves unlikely to experience the law. They tend to stay in school until around their mid-20s. The law would affect those who do not go on to university, many of whom are the black and Arab youth who, unemployed and unhappy, burned cars in the banlieues riots. Youth unemployment is not as high as the numbers say on first glance and it is the kids in the poor cites who disproportionately ratchet up the percentages.
One can certainly debate whether the CPE law would have been helpful to them, but the protesting students did not really care to focus on that point. "We want what our parents had" was what I heard during my own interviews and repeatedly on television. In their explanations of their opposition to the CPE, trade-union leaders were far more likely to acknowledge that there was a problem with youth unemployment and with discrimination. After all, union leaders could not get very far if they didn't listen to immigrants, who are typically among their most staunch supporters.
What they said, and this is another point on which Wolin is wrong, is that Villepin should have consulted the unions on something so essential to their being as an employment law. Villepin was criticised more for this than for failing to test public opinion. I agree with Henri Astier's article, "In praise of French direct democracy", that cited the recently departed philosopher Jean-Francois Revel's disdainful assessment of the nature of French politics. The voice of the streets is not always right and it should not always carry the day.
And I still hold in my files a poll conducted by Libération, the leftist French daily which had no reason to support Villepin: even after three weeks of rioting, more than 50% of French people said they supported the introduction of the CPE, albeit with adjustments.
KA Dilday worked on the New York Times opinion page until autumn 2005, when she began a writing fellowship with the Institute of Current World Affairs. During the period of the fellowship, she is travelling between north Africa and France.
Also by KA Dilday on openDemocracy:
"The freedom trail" (August 2005)
"Art and suffering: four years since 9/11" (August 2005)
"Rebranding America" (September 2005)
"Judith Miller's race: the unasked question" (October 2005)
"France seeks a world voice" (December 2005)
"A question of class" (January 2006)
"Europe's forked tongues"
(February 2006)
"The worth of illusion" (March 2006)
"The labour of others" (April 2006)
I protest for me
But in a way and from afar, Wolin does pick up on and recycle a tone that prevails in French society. It is one that has been preventing the country from adapting to its changing demographic. Wolin's French people are the ones of yore reformed Trotsykites, scholars, idealists: the caviar left. Basically they are white people, the only people whom the French of today really seem to recognise as French. French law does not acknowledge race or religion as a factor in anything, yet French society recognises it immediately and it does not like it. Charles de Gaulle's authoritarian, nominally secular fifth republic is in its death-throes, that is clear, but what will be next?
The left has been accused of taking refuge in theory, in wordplay, in lofty discussions, yet theory isn't so popular in the banlieues, where France's fastest growing communities live. There is a lot of anger and hopelessness, sadness and identity-confusion among people who believed what their history books said about equality among the French public. French but not French, different but legally invisible they turn to rap music, dream of being basketball star Tony Parker, street-corner imams.
They haven't had enough to reject to be like Michel Houellebecq's dissolute, indolent, indulgent, loathing and self-loathing, characters. They are not a saintly wronged community (as demonstrated in the horrific Ilan Halimi case, where a young Jewish man was held and tortured for twenty-four days before being killed, amidst a collaboration of silence in the neighbourhood), but their concerns and temptations are very different. One has to believe one will ever get hired before one can worry too much about getting fired.
So yes, I am one of those commentators who thought the university kids were not only spoiled but selfish. They are comfortable in the knowledge that if there are permanent work contracts to be had, they will have them rather than those desperate kids who lit up France for three weeks late last year.
I seem to remember that when I was in college we protested against apartheid and for the rights of others, not to ensure that our lives would continue to be cozy and secure while a less privileged class was left out, people only a few metro stops outside of Paris, but who seem a world, or a nation, away.