Chapter 24

The Autumn, Winter, and Spring of Their Discontent

IF I HAD TO DO MY TIME in France all over again and I wanted to make a bucketful of euros in the process, there’s little doubt I would go straight into the helium business. I can’t think of another gas in France that is in as much demand as helium, thanks largely to the French propensity to protest. As anyone who monitors international news will attest, a strike or major protest takes place in Paris pretty much every other week, especially during the portion of each year from September to May.

On the other hand, the June-to-August stretch is notoriously quiet on the protest and strike front. When the weather warms up and the sun comes out, the protesters pack up their placards and head south, to take their places on the beach alongside their fellow disgruntled comrades for a well-earned break from the hard work of avoiding work.

But in the prime protest period of autumn, winter, and spring, the mobs are just itching to hit the rues and express their collective discontent—and always, rather bemusingly, under the shadow of a large collection of enormous balloons. Whether they are workers opposed to government labor reform, students opposed to government plans to change unemployment benefits, old people opposed to government plans for pension reform, they all have balloons, and they’re not afraid to inflate them.

Place de la République, in the tenth arrondissement, is the favored kick-off point for two out of every three Paris protests, often attracting crowds by the thousands. In my more entrepreneurial moments, I used to imagine owning a café on the Place de la République and offering a whole host of revolutionary specials. Che Guevara Croque-Monsieurs, Trotsky Tarte Tatins, and Vladimir Illyich Lenin Limonades would be among the fare for which I would charge top dollar, gravely informing my clients that all proceeds were going to “the cause.”

During the morning of every protest or strike, the Place de la République was devoid of traffic yet a hive of activity. With an air of weary familiarity, the police would cordon off all roads leading to the place, letting through only the battered white vans of Communist Party activists and the open-sided trucks of hot-dog vendors. By midday the crowd would have swelled, and the place would have taken on a circuslike atmosphere. Che Guevara T-shirts appeared at every turn, and while Workers’ Party delegates frantically inflated massive balloons, their colleagues unfurled placards of Lenin, raised posters of hammers and sickles, and dusted off well-worn effigies of Karl Marx. Exactly which part of the last fifty years of history these people had slept through, I was never sure. Crusty old Communists—their brittle, nicotine-stained mustaches twirled to stereotypical French man perfection—would mill among the masses, handing out manifestos for long-discredited political causes. Right-on DJ’s would set up massive sound systems atop flatbed trucks to play folksy protest music (think Tracy Chapman, Bob Marley, and anything by Bob Dylan). Protest leaders in bright yellow T-shirts wielded megaphones and did their best to whip the crowd into an indignant frenzy. And if it was a student protest, there would be more Yassir Arafat–inspired black-and-white kaffiyeh headscarves per square yard than on your average day in Ramallah.

Meanwhile on the periphery of the protest mums and dads pushed strollers adorned with flags and banners, the faces of their long-suffering children painted with the battle cry du jour. Parent and child alike appeared blissfully ignorant of the cause they were protesting. For in France the point never seemed to be that you take to the streets to enact political change but rather, that you do so because it’s a great day out. Just as it is an innate French reflex to treat all Americans with contempt, so it is an automatic gesture to join a protest march no matter what the cause. While Australians derive a sense of community by watching sports or speculating about the marriage prospects of Brad and Angelina, French people tap into their essential Frenchness by going on strike or joining a protest march.

As the crowds build on the ground, the sky overhead darkens with a growing armada of massive, multicolored helium balloons. So numerous and so ubiquitous are these bobbing blobs of disgruntlement, I can only assume that there is a whole phalanx of Frenchies who describe their occupation as “balloon wrangler” when filling out their tax returns. Such is the system in France, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if half of them have compensation claims lodged with the government for repetitive strain injuries sustained while opposing its policies.

When Baron Haussmann was drawing up blueprints for the Paris that exists today, his boss, Napoleon III, requested that he create lots of long, wide, straight boulevards. History maintains that Napoleon figured the best way to avoid a repeat of the French Revolution was to create effective sight lines for his troops, when the occasion arose, so they could quell any signs of rebellion from the masses. But such was the civic planner’s foresight, I wouldn’t be surprised if he also anticipated the need for wide boulevards to accommodate the balloons of a thousand protest marches.

Coming as I do from a country of relative political apathy, it is certainly heartening to see a population that firmly believes it can change the minds of its leaders simply by taking to the streets. Drawing for inspiration on that quintessential people’s uprising, the French Revolution of 1789, the French truly believe it is their god-given right to stop traffic, shout slogans, and inflate as many helium balloons as they goddamn please. That would be fine, if they weren’t doing it every other week. Indeed, the protests come with such monotonous regularity, they have started to lose their oomph. It’s all gone a little bit “boy who cried wolf.”

During one memorable period of student protests during my Paris sojourn, the unrest went on for so long there were eventually protests against the protests. Kids who were tired of the month-long stand-off between their peers and the government took to the streets to demand an end to protesting. And I remember with particular fondness a train driver’s strike on the Métro one year. The entire public transportation system in Paris ground to a halt because the city government was threatening to revoke a centuries-old, five percent “coal handling” loading—a throwback to the days of steam trains. But my favorite annual protest was easily the one staged by the Association of French Circus Performers. Each year a motley crew of jugglers, trapeze artists, and dwarves would take to the streets to protest the precarious nature of their industry. Only in France do you find people who have dedicated themselves to the itinerant life of a circus performer demanding job security.

All of it in a country that seems to have more public holidays than any other in the world. Through a clever melding of the Christian and Socialist calendars, the entire month of May is one long public holiday in France. When you are not spending the day off work celebrating the Pentecost or Assumption (whatever they may be), you find yourself kicking back and enjoying the public holiday afforded by the strict observance of May Day. This month-long holiday phenomenon is only compounded by the French propensity to faire le pont, or “make the bridge.” If a public holiday falls on a Thursday, it is widely accepted that everyone will “make a bridge” and take a four-day weekend.

It may just be pure coincidence, but strikes in France have a strange habit of taking place on either the Tuesday following or Thursday prior to a public holiday, thus maximizing the potential for strikers to make an extra-long weekend of their political consciousness-raising exercise. Because after all, it’s important to supplement your industrial action with a bout of reflection by the Brittany seaside.

Not that the French need any more time off work.

A mandatory thirty-five-hour week means the average Frenchie is at work for seven hours a day. Each worker is entitled to a one-hour lunch break, which is itself subsidized by the employer to the tune of eight euros per day. “Ticket restaurants,” as they are known, are the lunch vouchers distributed by all employers to their workers to ensure they get a good boeuf bourgignon at lunchtime.

Even with such cushy working conditions, unemployment was still a highly sought-after state of being in France. And why not? If you got sacked from your job, the state undertook to pay you up to 80 percent of your salary for a period of two years. It was no accident then that thousands of twenty-something French people struck deals with their employers to get sacked, then disappeared overseas on taxpayer-paid two-year travel odysseys. Spend a few weekdays in Paris, and you will be struck by the number of able-bodied young Frenchies who are cluttering up the thousands of cafés in the middle of the day. They are the professionally unemployed—and they work hard at it.

I watched with alarm as the longer I was exposed to the liberté, egalité, fraternité manifesto that is the ideological underpinning of the French republic, the more I began to resemble Attila the Hun. Far from celebrating the workers’ paradise that France was apparently striving to be, I found myself becoming disdainful of a government that point-blank refused to face up to a few very basic realities of the international economy. I was scornful of a generation of young people who preferred a job for life to an economy characterized by entrepreneurship. And in the process I began to feel my long-harbored left leanings shifting inexorably to the right. It scared me. But then I assured myself it was probably just a phase—and certainly nothing that ownership of a balloon wouldn’t have sorted out.