Advance and Retreat

(2 of 2)

The student rebels of 2006 had little of the revolutionary optimism or willingness to escape conformity for a precarious existence that infused their brash predecessors at the Sorbonne in '68. "Today's demonstrators are in a very real manner reactionaries," says Dominique Moïsi, deputy director of the French Institute on International Relations, "rejecting any prospect of more risk." Fear of losing jobs in a country that is poor at creating new ones may be the cause of the moment. But French ambivalence about a changing world is nothing new. In the 1950s, French novelist Pierre Daninos suggested it was part of the national psyche to battle gallantly — if often fruitlessly — against invasion, as national treasures such as Joan of Arc once did. By that measure, the French in the streets last week were fighting to hold back the inexorable challenge of international competition. "It's pure negativism, and that's typical of today's France," says Ezra Suleiman, professor of European studies at Princeton. "No one is suggesting what should be done instead to increase employment. It seems like the only solidarity France can find these days is solidarity in negative action."

That doesn't make last week's outpouring of opposition any less a problem for Villepin, whose government was badly damaged by the rioting in the dense minority neighborhoods last fall. There's a sense in Paris that, this time, the Prime Minister must stand up to the student protesters to show a certain toughness, before facing a possible showdown with his right-wing rival, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, in next year's presidential election. But clinging resolutely to a deeply unpopular policy seems unlikely to help Villepin — whose personal approval rating has sunk to the mid-30s — with the voters.

He may be looking for some room to maneuver. On Friday night, the Prime Minister met with university rectors, many of whom have urged him to retract the law. Villepin signaled little willingness to do so, but there were signs that the government may be ready to beef up job protection in other ways, possibly by increasing the tax burden on employers who purposely use short-term contracts for revolving-door workers, and stiffening the laws regulating the use of internships. Yet withdrawing the law is no easy matter: the only legislative course would be a humiliating request to Villepin's own party to approve new legislation trumping a law enacted just weeks ago. Villepin's best political hope, Moïsi suggests, might be for the Socialist opposition to win a court challenge it has filed to overturn the law.

But dumping an unpopular policy would leave the larger problem unanswered: How to modernize France? Jobs will not spring magically into being if the hated employment law is abandoned. Eventually, structural reforms will be needed to transform France's prospects — and that will need fresher, more politically astute leadership than the country has now. André Glucksmann, one of the new philosophers who emerged in 1968, thinks that the great majority of French voters — the ones who didn't march last weekend — know that things have to change. "Every generation we have a war, a revolt or a revolution," he says. "That's how we recycle our élite." Rising to the top of preliminary polls for the presidency are politicians who propose new ways of doing business: Sarkozy, who talks of a "rupture from the policies of the last 30 years," and Socialist Ségolène Royal, who has scandalized her party leadership by praising Tony Blair's pragmatic market policies. They'll hear none of that at the Sorbonne these days. But for all the fury last week, even France can't resist the winds of change forever.