France Liberte, Egalite, Chaos

The Parisian dramatist Jean Cocteau once characterized his fellow Frenchmen as a bunch of Italians in a bad mood. As thumbnail assessments go, that may have been incomplete, but it was not too far off the mark. France last week continued to be seized by a wave of train and other public-service strikes that have disrupted the country for a month. Not only was the typical Frenchman's mood even sourer than usual, but there were numerous signs that French political life, and daily life for that matter, was Italianizing at the edges. The successive crises that have beset the nine-month-old conservative government of Premier Jacques Chirac began to look like those of Italy -- not the Italy of recent political stability, but the once notorious Italy of disorder and unpredictability in the 1970s.

( There has been, first of all, the terrorism. The Middle East-connected bombings that killed eleven people in September, for all their horror, were different from, and far more limited than, the terrorism that plagued Italy for a decade, starting in the early 1970s. But the holdups and cold-blooded assassinations of symbolic targets like Georges Besse, the Renault auto- company president who was gunned down last November by the extreme-left terrorist group Action Directe, are beginning to resemble those of the Red Brigades of 1977.

Then came the students. Their massive marches in December, protesting a selective-admissions policy contained in a university reform bill, were in many ways quintessentially French. But the anarchist and Marxist youths who emerged among the students were reminiscent of young Italian zealots who consider the Communists stodgy old fogies.

The French public-service strike, the most serious in nearly two decades, looks more Italian every day. Workers are demanding, among other things, wage increases higher than the government's 3% ceiling. Police have had to clear picketers off railroad tracks at scores of stations, and labor unrest has spread to Communist-led work stoppages on Paris subways, in the electric-power service and on the docks. At week's end the rail strike finally seemed to be losing steam, but the unrest could be prolonged in other areas.

Railroad stations in cities as staid and ordered as Grenoble and Lyons look like those in Naples. Among the throngs of stranded passengers, French families accustomed to better things share sausages and bread, using newspapers as picnic tablecloths. With rail traffic cut to 40% of normal, queues form behind charter-bus drivers showing their destinations on cardboard signs and shouting out the departure times. In Lyons's Part Dieu station, an illuminated advertising billboard shows a streaking orange superspeed train and carries the slogan that with the national French railway EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE! Some irate, but erudite passenger has scrawled across the sign in Latin "Mirabile Dictu!" (Strange to Say).