It is
hardly necessary to go back to the storming of the Bastille on July 14,1789 to
find examples of insurrectional violence of the kind that occurred in Paris
last Saturday. France’s history is pockmarked with citizens’ uprisings of
varying degrees of severity. Now over 50 years old, the uprising of May 1968
for instance is too far back for those born after 1960 to remember this seminal
event in the history of the Fifth Republic. But there are also the strikes of
November 1995 that brought he country to a standstill for a few weeks or, in a
more recent variant, the violence that accompanied the normally peaceful May
Day march on May 1st of this year. Not to speak of the torching every year of
about 1000 cars on New Year’s Eve around cities like Paris, Marseille, Toulouse
or Strasbourg. Journalists on the rolling radio or TV news networks with their
breathless coverage of barricade building and grenade throwing tend to forget
the precedents or the context, especially when violence ignites around a national
monument like the Arc de Triomphe. The
fact is that the French temperament has a habit of boiling over every so often,
more often than not triggered by a seemingly insignificant event. Such has been
the case this time when a protest against a rise in fuel taxes, ostensibly to
reduce pollution, has led to scenes of urban violence that have taken everyone
by surprise. Par for the course in this hot-blooded country, whose
revolutionary streak is never far below the surface, many observers would say.
The violent
young men who smashed shop windows, battered down doors and railings and tagged
the Arc de Triomphe are not, by all
accounts, an integral part of the yellow jackets movement. They have certainly
piggy-backed on it, but are driven mainly by their own anger and aggression and
a burning desire to vent it on the symbols of capitalism and the security
forces. It is not easy to pin a label on them. “Alt right” and “alt left” have
been bandied about by politicians and the media. The OECD, in its inimitable
jargon, would probably qualify most of them as NEETs (not in employment,
education or training). Nobody has revealed where these young men come from.
And as violence breeds violence, it seems clear that some of the yellow
jackets, especially the younger ones, have felt encouraged to join in the
smashing and breaking.
What the two
groups do have in common however is their rejection to varying degrees of what
is held up with pride by most French citizens as the French social model: a
supposedly all-encompassing set of services and benefits administered by both
central and local governments designed to shield the less well-off from the
adverse consequences of capitalism, give every citizen equal chances and reduce
inequalities. It is clear that the model is not working satisfactorily for some
and the current protest movement suggests that their number is increasing. The school
system lets far too many pupils leave school without any useful qualification,
only 40% of first year university student finish their degree course, the
monolithic employment and benefits agency has made little impact on some of the
highest unemployment figures in the EU and the vocational training system seems
unable to train people for the numerous job vacancies that employers are trying
desperately to fill. And at the same time, a hugely complex web of benefits
leaves many claimants without enough to live on. The trouble is that this enormous
state-run system costs an enormous amount of taxpayers’ money, as France’s
outstanding debt approaches 100% of GDP. Reforming it in depth, something Emmanuel
Macron promised in his election campaign, is not going smoothly and, above all,
is not producing results quickly enough for those who should be benefitting. The
rise in fuel taxes seems to have been the last straw for many, particularly in
the French provinces, who often have to drive a long way to work and back.
Commentators
have been falling over themselves to find sociological explanations for the phenomenon:
“peripheral” France against the urban elites, say some, rural areas against the
cities, or, quite simply, the rich against the poor, say others. None of these
explanations are fully satisfactory. My own feeling is that the cost (and the taxes
required to pay them) of public services, whether in cities or in rural areas,
outweighs their usefulness for many people. In their regular contacts with
these services, most French people deal with a plethora of lowly civil servants
in central or local government administrations. Far too often, they are unsympathetic,
unresponsive and inflexible, sometimes even downright incompetent. And their attitudes
and culture have changed little over the 40 years that I have been living in this
country.
Emmanuel
Macron has promised to bring profound transformation to the country that
elected him President in May 2017. His intention is obviously sincere and his
only option is to continue to try and reform the system he has inherited and that
his predecessors were unwilling or unable to change. He has chosen to do so over
the heads of the traditional intermediaries in society, like the trade unions, that
he clearly considers to have failed in their representative missions and grown too
flabby and out of touch. In doing so, he has adopted a monarchical and
authoritarian posture that puts him in the front line when things go wrong, generating,
whether he likes it or not, the perfect figure of a scapegoat in the eyes of
the protesting masses. It is surely
significant that many of the recent demonstrations have called for his immediate resignation.
Backing
down now would invalidate his whole strategy and make it a largely ineffective
for the rest of his term of office. In 1789, faced with sudden and violent
demonstrations, Louis XVI took fright and tried to flee the country. He was
caught, put on trial and executed. In 1968, General de Gaulle, it is said,
considered ordering tanks to roll on Paris before he recovered his composure,
delivered a hard-hitting speech to the nation, called fresh general elections
and won them handsomely. Emmanuel Macron will now need all the political and
leadership skills he can muster to strike the right balance between authority
and concessions and find a political solution to the current wave of protest
and violence, while keeping his programme intact. If he succeeds in overcoming
what is undoubtedly the most serious crisis since he won power, he has a good
chance of being re-elected to continue his reforms in 2022. If he fails, he will
probably lose no more than that election. But France could stand to lose a lot
more. Looking at events in many other countries in Europe and around the world,
the omens in that case are not good.
