Advance and Retreat

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"Ah, to breathe the fine air of France!" As he spoke in mock-heroic tones last week, Sayed Diakite, 19, a student from the southern suburbs of Paris, was smiling gleefully, and weeping at the same time. Like hundreds of other young people boxed in by riot police between the Bon Marché department store and the Hotel Lutetia in the heart of the Left Bank, his eyes were running in reaction to pungent tear gas and smoke from a burning newspaper kiosk. Amid the uproar, Diakite and his fellow students felt a budding sense of empowerment. Up to half a million young people had gone, some riotously, to the streets throughout France on Thursday. Then, joined by union members and sympathizers, as many as 1.5 million participated in marches on Saturday, some of which ended in violent clashes with riot police. Would this show of force bring a government that seems ever more out of touch to its knees?

As street sweepers cleaned up after Saturday's throngs, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin was already deep in discussion about how to calibrate a response between outright retreat from an unpopular step toward greater labor flexibility and holding a tough line. "The government is ready for dialogue," President Jacques Chirac said on Friday, "and I hope this will start as quickly as possible."

And not a moment too soon. France is in another bout of revolt against its government, conducted with the kind of theatrical brio that seems more the antithesis of dialogue than its prelude. Union leaders are threatening a general strike later this week. Many of France's universities have been in an uproar for a month. The Sorbonne, the iconic epicenter of the idealistic May 1968 student uprising that nearly brought down an earlier government, has been closed for the past two weeks. At issue this time, though, are not the heady concerns of '68: the Vietnam War, or the ideas of socialism and free love.

The 2006 rallying point is a new law, backed by Villepin, to reduce France's chronic and debilitating youth unemployment, which has rarely fallen below 20% since 1983 and currently stands at 22% — and at more than 40% in the poorer neighbor-hoods that exploded in bitter rioting last fall. His plan: a "first employment contract" that allows employers to fire workers under the age of 26 within two years of their hiring, without cause and with no obligation to shell out France's hefty severance payments. Making it easier to get rid of unsatisfactory workers, the government believes, will help employers overcome their reluctance to hire young people in the first place. The law's critics say it will promote tenuous jobs and make it even harder for young people to find steady employment.

The law has hit a raw nerve in a society deeply attached to the idea that a job is forever. A poll last week found that more than two-thirds of the population — and more than 80% of the young people the law aims to help — want the government to rescind the law's terms. For some, opposition justified violence. At the Sorbonne, a minority of protesters hurled anything they could tear loose — umbrella stanchions, metal barricades, café chairs — at the shields of riot police, who replied with water cannon and tear gas. "The bourgeoisie to the gulag!" read a wall scrawl.

Most of last week's demonstrators deplored the violence — but not the passion that underlaid it. Marchers derided throwaway "Kleenex jobs" for the young as the first chink in the armor protecting France's tradition of jobs-for-life. "This law is a sign of social regression," said Gilles Debin, a white-collar union official who joined the Saturday protest in Paris. "It leaves the workers with no recourse, and we'll oppose it and anything like it until it's withdrawn." Even many with sinecures in the public sector saw the law as the start of an invasive ultra-liberalism that would one day threaten their livelihoods.

The young — those most in need of a leg up — heaped scorn on a law intended to help them. Serbian-born Zeljko Stojanovic, 19, joined the march with fellow high school students of foreign origin from the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis. "They want to close off immigration and doom young people to the lousy jobs nobody else will take," said Stojanovic, who wants to be an auto mechanic. "We're the ones who'll suffer if the bosses can just fire people without cause." Privileged university students saw matters no differently. Said Florian Louis, 22, a history student at the prestigious L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales: "Maybe you can talk about labor flexibility in England or America, where there are lots of jobs. But not here. France wants no part in a race to the bottom." Neither young man seemed to understand how labor flexibility created those jobs in Britain or the U.S., underscoring the failure of the government to make a persuasive case for its policies.