A man, married with a four-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son, in steady employment, in his mid-forties, from the conservative south of the country, going slightly bald, who likes to complain about how his children wake him up in the night and about the transport problems he faces getting home to Ealing.
No radical, then, or so you might think: pretty much a pillar of the suburban London establishment.
But as he watched the crowds chanting and ranting and waving arms and wobbly banners, Frederic’s eyes filled with pure, revolutionary joy.
“On a toujours raison de se revolter (you’re always right if you revolt),” he hissed triumphantly, giving his cappuccino a vicious stir as if he were about to take his spoon and run out into the street, brandishing it and yelling slogans. I suppose 200-odd years of revolutionary history must have some effect even on the most placid of individual French people. The tricoteuses watching executions at the foot of the guillotine probably clicked their needles and broke off their wool at the end of each sock with the same emphatic empathy – because they too belonged to the nation that de Tocqueville once called “the most brilliant and dangerous in Europe”.
Yet I was intrigued. Until then I’d felt no great enthusiasm for the French strikers, just written them off as idiots refusing to accept necessary economic change. If it comes to that, I’d felt no more than a twinge of sympathy for the very polite English members of the Unison union, who downed tools on Tuesday because their pension perks are to be stopped - when I found out that the “preferential” pension they get now is on average just £31 a week, and stands to fall by a third under the reform. (Even then my sympathy was counterbalanced by irritation at having to work out what to do with my children, whose school was shut for the day). Why on earth was sensible Frederic so keen on the French strikers?
To recap, the French strikes (plural because there may be another one next Tuesday) are intended to stop the Government introducing a first tiny element of flexibility into France’s sclerotic employment system. At present it is almost impossible to fire anyone under French law without a long process of complaints, warnings, claims, counter-claims, and hearings at the prud’hommes, a kind of employment tribunal which can go on for months or until one party or the other, ready to die of boredom, gives in. This means that no employer in his right mind wants to take on a new employee with no experience, in case he turns out to be a dud and then the employer is lumbered with him for keeps. And that in turn means that the young, fresh out of university or school, live with 25 per cent unemployment – and worse in many of the banlieues where young people spent last autumn rioting. The bright idea of Dominique de Villepin’s Government is to make it easier to fire people under 26 – thereby encouraging employers to take more of them on in the first place. But French voters, especially the young ones who might actually benefit from the change, are dead against any change to the cosy, statist jobs-for-life system they’re used to.
This is grim for the French, but it makes London more fun. Our capital is packed with more French people than ever before, trying their luck in the land of liberalisme sauvage, the free-market system that the French hate so passionately, in search of jobs which might be less stable than those at home but at least they exist - and of giving a young French adult some experience and a first step up the employment ladder. The Lycee Francais in South Kensington is packed to the rafters with French children, and they’re no longer just the posh-banker type but a diverse crowd from up and down the social ladder. Teachers at the Lycee say there’s a ferment of internal discussion about how to accommodate all the pupils who want a place, and whether to open new branches of the school in another part of London – Wimbledon, say – to ease the pressure. You hear French on every bus and in every pub.
Frederic is one of these over-the-water refugees from French statism, hoping, like so many others, to do better out of Britain’s free-market flexibility than he might at home. But he was as incensed as any of the protesters at the idea that the French Government should do anything to change the system that had prised him away from his homeland. “Why,” he asked rhetorically, waving his foamy spoon, “should the young be penalised? Why should their jobs and security be sacrificed?”
Because you have to start somewhere? I ventured, feeling uncomfortably like Norman Tebbit. Because the young will live with more insecurity all their lives, will have to get used to it sometime and might as well start now, while they have families to help cushion the shock? Because if France can’t sort out its crushing mass unemployment what will happen to the economy? Because the aim isn’t to deprive young people of jobs but to provide more of them?
Frederic put down the coffee spoon. He’s become English enough that this sort of argument doesn’t put him in quite the quivering, frothing rage it might provoke in his compatriots. For a moment, he looked mildly intrigued.
“Yes,” he riposted, “but you can’t expect anyone French to agree with any of that.” And then he laughed, and delivered the message I had completely failed to grasp – the spirit that gets up to three million French youths mobilised and on the streets.
“Soyez realiste – demandez l’impossible,” he said cheerily, (be realistic – demand the impossible).
Of course. That attitude was so much more fun than anything I’d been saying - a proper studenty head-rush of a slogan, insisting that, in a properly constructed world, everything you want should somehow be possible. A bit of ooh-la-la crept into my soul. And for just one heady moment I found my own hand grasping my cappuccino spoon too, ready to wave it furiously above my head and rush out on the street to defend my right to liberte, egalite et fraternite and a job for life.
