On the American side of the Atlantic, most journalistic accounts of the recent French student protests have been uncomprehending. In most cases, the analysts have been asking the wrong questions. Their major mistake has been trying to understand the student revolt France's largest since May 1968 in narrowly economic terms. They have foolishly faulted the students for not behaving like "rational economic actors" for acting contrary to their own self-interests.
Time and again, commentaries suggested that prime minister Dominique de Villepin's now-withdrawn "first employment contract" (contrat de première embauche, or CPE) law was "not such a bad deal." It permitted French employers to dismiss new employees under age twenty-six without cause during their first two years. In the long run, it would have stimulated job-creation among French youth, among whom unemployment is unacceptably high. (Joblessness in France among those under twenty-six stands at twenty-three percent, one of the highest rates in Europe.)
These mostly middle-class students are "spoiled", we are told. Whereas the 1968 generation revolted against the system, the current one wants to enter into it. Or, as we learn from a patronising 28 March 2006 New York Times article: "This is a protest that uses the revolutionary methods of the street ... in defense of the status quo." The students, we are told, hanker after a level of job security that is "unrealistic" given the brass-knuckle realities of contemporary global economic competition.
But what if the student protestors' main motivations were not really economic? What if, instead, their concerns were more "existential" in many respects, not that different from those of their parents, many of whom experienced the May '68 revolt at first hand? Like the sixty-eighters of yore, contemporary French youth feel that they are, to borrow the American social critic Paul Goodman's felicitous expression, "growing up absurd." They are being funneled into a global economic maelstrom that values competitiveness more than the human beings who comprise the system.
Also on France's political crises in openDemocracy:
Patrick Weil, "A nation in diversity: France, Muslims, and the headscarf"
(March 2004)
Johannes Willms, "The big fear: the European constitution divides France" (May 2005)
Aurore Wanlin, "European democracy: where now? "
(June 2005)
Alana Lentin, "The intifada of the banlieues"
(November 2005)
Henri Astier, "France's revolt against change"
(March 2006)
Henri Astier, "In praise of French direct democracy"
(April 2006)
Patrice de Beer, "France's crisis after crisis" (April 2006)
Devalued as "human capital", French youth feel that they are on a fast track to nowhere. One might even dub them the "Nowhere Generation". They are being fed into a variety of "hi-tech" and "information age" professions that are, in their view, largely unfulfilling and devoid of meaning. Moreover, they are at the mercy of an imperious and aloof neo-Gaullist "political class" Villepin, president Jacques Chirac and interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy that treats them with unremitting condescension. (Commentators agree that one of Villepin's chief blunders was his failure to test the waters of public opinion before seeking to present the CPE as a fait accompli.) French youth felt it was time to emphatically assert their right to say "no." In doing so, they borrowed from a lexicon of urban political radicalism that harks back to the years 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871 and 1968.
The major difference from May '68 is that the sixty-eighters employed a utopian political idiom, well-captured by the popular slogan, "Be realistic: demand the impossible!" Following ten dreary years of Gaullist authoritarianism, they understandably had little confidence in the prospects for internal political change. The current generation of students, conversely, is anti-utopian. By the same token, they emphatically believe that a unified assertion of collective political will can be a meaningful political act. And to judge by the Villepin government's ignominious retreat on the CPE issue, they have proven their point quite effectively.
The "first employment contract" was, therefore, merely a pretext. The students were not so much protesting against a specific employment measure as rebelling against a social and political system that could consider such a law firing young people at the employer's whim and without due cause as acceptable and reasonable.
The sixty-eighters were influenced by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's notion of radical freedom. But the figure who may have unwittingly served as the catalyst for the recent French student protests is the novelist Michel Houellebecq. These days, it is fashionable to dismiss Houellebecq's writing as bleak and nihilistic. But that's largely due to his penchant for saying things that mainstream French society would prefer not to hear.
In novels such as Extension du domaine de la lutte (translated into English as Whatever) and Les particules élémentaires (The Elementary Particles), he offers us an affecting portrait of generational disorientation: the vocational sterility and emotional vacuity of France's new professional class. They are the new "hollow men" and women. The lives they lead are compartmentalised, regimented, insubstantial and soulless. They travel from sleek, prefabricated apartment buildings to sterile and impersonal office complexes, often working twelve-hour days. After hours, they are good for little more than a stiff drink and a meaningless stretch of satellite-television viewing.
In Extension du domaine de la lutte (the title itself is an untranslatable play on 1960s political militarism), Houellebecq effectively describes the existential void eating away at his protagonist's soul in the following passage:
Sure, you manage to live according to the rules. Sometimes it's tight, extremely tight, but on the whole you manage it. Your tax papers are up to date. Your bills are paid on time. You never go out without your identity card. Yet you haven't any friends ... The fact is that nothing can halt the ever-increasing recurrence of those moments where your total isolation, the sensation of an all-consuming emptiness, the foreboding that your existence is nearing a painful and definitive end, all combine to lunge you into a state of real suffering ... You have had a life. There have been moments when you were having a life. Of course you don't remember too much about it; but there are photographs to prove it ... Existence seemed so rich in new possibilities. You might become a pop singer, go off to Venezuela.
Houellebecq's fiction possesses an understated, matter-of-fact, documentary quality which, after a while, sends chills up the spine. The main concern of the student protestors, far from being economic, was to avoid becoming supernumeraries in the unspeakably shallow emotional universe portrayed in Houellebecq's novels.
