Is Paris Burning? Yep--for All the Wrong Reasons
Springtime in Paris, and a young man's thoughts turn to ... torching Citroens. Oh sure, the young lovers will be back in another week or so, strolling hand in hand before the Hotel des Invalides, home to Napoleon's tomb, or idling beneath the golden statues standing watch at the Invalides Bridge over the Seine. Last week, however, the signature French aroma of Gauloises and tear gas wafted lazily over the 7th Arrondissement and the storied Sorbonne, and the young lovers were nowhere to be seen.
Listen to the kids in the streets, and there were brave comparisons between their hooliganism and the May 1968 protests that toppled de Gaulle. But take a second look, and it's plain as the sign on the corner tabac that the rioters not only have nothing in common with the soixante-huitards but are their philosophical and intellectual opposites. Their forebears of '68 wanted to upend a stagnant and sclerotic France. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose? The young men and women in 1968 wanted real change. Today, the young running roughshod over Paris want only stasis. They have gone aux barricades in defense of the status quo.
The issue, of course, is jobs, and with nearly 1 in 5 young people unable to find work in France, it's hard not to be sympathetic. And yet for all the alleged erudition they have acquired at elite places of learning like the Sorbonne, it's also hard to fathom their inability to grasp the profundity of the problems afflicting France and its antiquarian economic underpinnings. They call themselves "the Kleenex generation," used and tossed aside. One understands the sentiment. But one must also understand that the 35-hour workweek, the six weeks of paid annual leave, the jobs for life are as endangered a species as the dodo bird. None of the kids outside Napoleon's tomb want to hear it, of course, but change happens. Just ask the folks at GM.
This story appears in the April 3, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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