I've been in France for the semester, researching my final thesis, futilely trying to talk to French girls and hiding from Ron Paul supporters. As part of my cultural education/desperate fantasy of impressing Melissa Theuriau (worth Googling, guys) should I ever see her on the Metro, I make it a habit to pick up a newspaper or watch the news each night.
On Nov. 26, LCI ("The News Channel") showed some particularly disturbing images of a crash between a police cruiser and a moto. Grisly to be sure, but nothing you don't get on KEYE most every night. The police car, the anchor explained, had a deadly collision with two helmet-less teenagers when the driver of the scooter failed to follow traffic laws and yield the right of way to the car.
The account seemed believable - if you have ever been on European roads and seen the insanity of your average MoPed operator, then like me (three accidents and counting), you're probably surprised this kind of thing doesn't happen more often. The anchor soon passed to the next story, an account of President Sarkozy's visit to China, where he chastised the Chinese government for not pulling its weight as a global citizen (while still managing to see through the signing of multi-billion dollar deals for Airbus and Areva, a French nuclear energy firm).
Yet the next day, I was quite taken aback to see a reporter in the same city of Villiers-le-Bel, speaking over photographs of burned-out schools and libraries and a video of bandana-sporting French youths using bats and a chair to smash the windows of a car whose only crime, as far as I could tell, was to have the audacity to be parked near the site of the crash. The anchor reported that a number of French officers were sent to the hospital after rioters had begun using homemade petrol bombs and a hunting rifle during clashes with the police.
To be sure, working-class French face a lot of problems, most notably an unemployment rate that can reach almost 50 percent among young minorities in some Parisian suburbs. It doesn't help that the aftermath of the 2005 riots created a zero-tolerance policy to crime and violence in the banlieus that have given many disposed teens a closer look at the harder side of the criminal justice system than they would like. But is killing police or burning down your own schools and government offices really the answer?
Nicholas "Don't Call Him Napoleon" Sarkozy thinks not. Far from disinterested in his country's youth, Sarkozy is attempting to push reform through a notoriously stubborn combination of French bureaucracy and labor unions in order to allow a growing French economy to create more jobs. Aside from (rightfully) calling those who would shoot or firebomb police officers "scum," the president hopes to give employers more rights when it comes to hiring and firing employees (making the taking on of new workers less of a life-long investment) and aims to make paying for the generous French retirement less expensive to firms, thus freeing up capital that could in theory be used to hire more workers. The economic merits of his case will be saved for another article, but suffice to say Sarkozy's campaign promise to have France "Work more to earn more" is very much a nod to the large problem of French unemployment.
If we want a model of an effective protest, we should look to the reaction of French students to another of the Sarkozy government's recent policy proposals. Little reported outside of the French media during the transportation strikes that crippled France for two weeks in November, students from Toulouse and Rennes to Lyon and Paris were held sit-ins and strikes to oppose Sarkozy's plan to allow private funding (and thus some private control) of historically state-run universities.
A Texan wouldn't bat an eye at The Pécresse Law, which grants a degree of autonomy to university presidents to set curriculum and solicit private donations and for universities to own their property directly, and yet French students were at the barricades for two weeks, calling for walk-outs, lock-outs and student referendums to gauge their positions on the new law. In some cases, classes were canceled for more than a week, but instead of using the time to study or drink heavily, the students marched and chanted by the thousands. The National Union for French Students (yes, such a thing exists!) even sat down with representatives of the government to present their demands and reach a compromise. Though no agreement has been officially reached, there was no doubt government officials were sufficiently notified of the students' desire to play a large role in charting the course of their own education.
We are indeed in the era of the Great American Apathy, but there is a right way and a wrong way of enacting change in the world. No matter what NWA or Sublime might tell us, "letting it burn" is definitely the wrong way. Vickers is a Plan II junior.
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