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Americans are in an uproar again about France because the French treat themselves too well. Nothing throws the Americans into a frenzy like the five week vacations and 35-hour work week, the free medical care, the S.M.I.C. (minimum guaranteed living wage) and subsidized housing that the French insist upon. When the French workers hit the streets yet again and forced their right-wing government to retreat on the youth contract, the American press launched into yet another vitriolic tirade, calling them lazy, selfish and myopic for not permitting themselves to be legislated into the same kind of mean,nasty servitude that we in this country consider to be our God-given right.
The element of envy in our complaint was too readily apparent. One editorial cartoon, which captured both the reality of the situation and our national seething resentment of it, showed a mob of well-dressed demonstrators marching under a banner which read, "Let Us Eat Cake." Indeed, the French are fighting for nice cake, and not freakin' Twinkies!
The Americans, who are long on hot air and short on historical perspective, are bewildered about how the French came to live so well. Everything the French have, they had to organize and fight for it tooth-and-nail against the most voracious blood-suckers in history, the bourgeoisie, who took the maxim of "never give a sucker an even break" and enshrined it as their Eleventh Commandment. The misery of the French workers was historically so dire that they threw themselves into the arms of the only people who could protect them from the entrepreneurial class, the royalty, and for centuries the only miserable protections the people had came in the form of edicts and regulations handed down by enlightened rulers like Louis XIV and the robust bureaucracy that was established by the French kings.
When the French Revolution, which was essentially a bourgeois revolution, overthrew the aristocracy and put the power in the hands of the industrial capitalists, even the meager protections of the royalty were removed, and the working people were thrown into the bottomless "oubliette," or black hole, of relentless exploitation, heartless misery and degradation, magnified by forced industrial uprooting and collectivization characteristic of nineteenth century social Darwinism.
Out of this morass of despondancy and humiliation sprang up, like a flower growing out of a pile of manure, the humanist school of nineteenth century Frency literature, characterized by such "monstres sacres" as Victor Hugo, a magnificent, towering triumph of human civilization, and the no less formidable Emile Zola, who gave a voice to the human suffering and really set the standard for contemporary civilized society.
The U.S., with no literary society to speak of, and a craven, self-seeking, social climbing, puny excuse for an intellectual class, has no equivalent to the intellectual monoliths of nineteenth century France. The intellectual and humanistic fervor inspired by these men, along with the concomitant explosion in art, music and architecture made possible, paradoxically, by the wealth created by capitalism, stimulated the creation of an intellectual movement for social evolution characterized by labor unions and, ultimately, the French Socialist Party.
The first Socialist prime minister, a Jewish intellectual named Leon Blum, created an uproar by forcing through legislation that guaranted one week paid vacation for all French workers. At the time, this was a revolution. This Blum government got the ball rolling for following governments and social reforms. The accompanying evolution in social thought culminated in the election of Francois Mitterand, France's first Socialist president, and he spent fourteen years concretizing the French welfare state.
The impetus for French socialism comes from the grassroots, not imposed from above like Russia, so when Americans attack French society, they are attacking not an establishment but normal men and women who are outwardly like themselves (though better dressed) but who have a vastly richer cultural patrimony to draw from. The idea that the French public can be browbeaten and bereated by people like Donald Rumsfield or Rupert Murdoch into denuding themselves before the onslaught of savage capitalism is laughable on its face, and delusional.
For The New York Post to suddenly take up the cause fo the young Arab and African "banlieusards" who would ostensibly be helped in finding employment if the French would only abandon their hard-fought rights, rights that were won over more than a century by mass protests and bloody strikes and riots, is not demonstrated and is only self-serving. The great fear among the American ruling class is that Americans will learn from the French example and start demanding equivalent rights, though that is not likely, given the vast cultural and historical differences between the two societies.
Nevertheless. the French were right to go into the streets to defend their rights. Let the politicians devise a more reasonable solution that leaves in place the rights of French workers. 200motels
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Posted on 4/15/2006
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