Letter from Paris
It doesn’t just sound important; it is exceedingly so. Tomorrow, an estimated 2 to 3 million workers and students are planning to strike and demonstrate in cities and towns throughout France. In opposition to the Gaullist government’s «First Job Contract» (contrat premiere embauche, or CPE) legislation, which permits employers to dismiss young workers without cause or compensation during their first two years on the job, France has good reason this April to react like a damsel in distress. «The French need to wake up, and wake up very quickly. Our economy is in the doldrums, we are losing market shares to flexible younger countries, and we are doing all of this while trying to support a huge and unsustainable welfare state. The French need to stop rioting, and start working like sensible people,» 32-year-old Alexis (mother Greek, father French) told us over a splendid dinner at Les Fontaines, a restaurant near the Pantheon, a temple to the great men of France, such as Voltaire, Victor Hugo and Emile Zola. Just a short distance away, the university La Sorbonne was strongly barricaded and heavily guarded by a great number of gendarmes, or riot policemen, in attendance. April 1st is my birthday and Euphrosyne and I decided to come to Paris, to the «ville lumiere» – the city of light and spirit – a place we both knew and loved during the 1960s while studying here. Ivan, a young painter from Moscow, accompanied us. At this time of the year, on weekends of fair weather, Paris is just splendid. The night we arrived in Paris it was Friday the 31st; it took us a very long time to reach our hotel on the left bank of the river Seine. Roads and train tracks were blocked by workers, students, even high school pupils, and it was impossible to cross the Place de la Bastille, which is the symbolic heart and mind of the French Revolution. «Why?» I asked an old acquaintance I met the same night at the Cafe de Flore. «The unemployment rate among young people is very high in France, and the government is simply trying to solve this by making it more attractive for companies to hire young workers, thereby giving young people a chance to gain work experience,» he replied. Well, isn’t that more or less what George Papandreou promised two years ago when addressing a electoral rally in Rhodes? «Greece like France?» inquired the front-page headline of a major Greek daily some days ago. I wouldn’t say so. Sure enough, Greece and France have a tradition of strong historical and cultural relations and it is also a fact that French companies have been investing in Greece since the 1960s. The long and fruitful collaboration is best demonstrated by the Rio-Antirio bridge, which opened in August 2004, as well as on the cultural side by Greece’s rather surprising adhesion to La Francophonie (an international organization of French-speaking countries). On Saturday, along with thousands of others, we visited the Louvre, Paris’s formidable museum. It is an amazing place to find anything art-related, and also home to the world-renowned Venus of Milo, the Nike of Samothrace, and that great tourist trap, the Mona Lisa (called in French «La Joconde») by Leonardo Da Vinci. Incidentally we met there Ms Marina Lambraki-Plaka, the head of the Greek National Gallery, who is planning, she told us, an exhibition later this year titled «France-Greece» encompassing several centuries of art history. Currently the major event at the Louvre is the Jean August Dominique Ingress (1780-1867) exhibition. This is the first retrospective on a most sensual painter, including more than 80 paintings and 104 drawings. Yet we chose to spend more time in front of the monumental «Destruction of Chios»- by the Turks – by Delacroix, a painter of about the same period, who no doubt was far more innovative – and, at least for my taste, more important – than Ingress. With several big art exhibitions – including Pierre Bonnard, Le Douanier Rousseau, Cezanne and Pissaro at the Musee d’Orsay and Veronese at the Louvre, among others – running at the same time, the city remains not just a magnet for mavens but also an ad hoc study center in the varieties of painting. However, the springtime festival atmosphere is quickly darkened when visitors target the critical day: tomorrow. Wearing full riot protection gear, their plastic shields held aside, the CRS police has been preparing for this day. With one of Europe’s highest youth unemployment rates – more than 20 percent of its 18- to 25-year-olds are unemployed – France is in for real trouble. Paris, the world’s top tourist destination with some 26 million visitors a year, should not be feeling well as it is already considered a potential danger zone. Boulevards and avenues (such as the Champs-Elysees) are far too wide to barricade effectively, and are always full of tourists. French President Chirac is no more the popular leader with a global following, after his – you must remember – criticism of American unilateralism of some years ago. The French head of state, once considered the voice of European resistance against the hegemonic USA, the custodian of international law, can no longer conduct this crusade of ideals as he did at the beginning of the Iraq war. Yet the main problem is that to maintain French, Greek, or whichever country’s international competitiveness against rivals in the US, the Balkans and Asia, wages and conditions must be systematically and dramatically driven down. Therefore, the main point of debate in our case is to discover the way to implement the necessary measures without awakening mass opposition. And this applies to Premier Dominique de Villepin as much as it does to Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis and indeed to opposition PASOK leader George Papandreou. Doubtless, the situation is less revolutionary today than in 1968. In the face of the globalization of production and the worldwide competition for cheap labor, hardly anyone dares call for social revolution, but for plain work. It is undeniable that we are all in a most difficult situation.
