Les lycéens s’ennuyient…loudly

Lurking not-so-quietly on a closed off street, a lycéen leans down with a tiny cigarette lighter and begins to set fire to a piece of paper in an overturned bin in front of his school.

Less than a minute later, much smoke and no flames follow.  A crowd of 50 or so students stand across the street, admiring the line of bins they’ve constructed to barricade the street.  Most are laughing, smoking, and phoning friends.  By 2pm, only a handful remain, drumming on the bins which close off the entrance to the school.

A regular Monday morning in Montpellier– shops are shut (le lundi matin is frequently quiet), the bus is running slowly, and a pile of wood is being carried into a patisserie with a wood-fired oven.   Nearly everyone is at work, or at least on their way, save for a crowd of port workers down the coast in Marseille and a couple of pesky lorry-drivers up north.

Most of the unions may have the day off, but for the students there is no cash incentive to get back to work.  Rather, they are drawn by the prospect of prolonging their school blockade until the end of the week, when autumn vacation officially begins.  You have to question, in these circumstances, whether the lycéens really are ‘la voix de la verité’ as Ségolène Royal has claimed for several days now.

It would be a gross misnomer to describe the student-attitude towards the fight against la retraite as fervent, or even worthy of a crowd-pleasing chant.   Certainly a few are genuinely motivated towards the cause, but for all of the noise made by the lycéens last week, blowing of whistles, parading through the cafe lined streets of centre ville, and beating of bins, the blocking of schools this week seems half-hearted at most.  With only a few students vocalising a passionate affinity with la retraite à 60, most of the students I spoke to today were wondering how they would catch up on chemistry lab work.

“I’m bored,” one lycéenne told me this afternoon, “I spent all of last week at home, and that was fine, but now I’m wondering how I will achieve a good mark in bio-chemistry.”

Later in the conversation she adds, “Ah, but today I did bake a cake!”

What’s more the argument of the anti-reform lycéens seems circuitous.  One of the students I spoke to today argued that raising the age of retirement would prevent others lower down the food chain from being promoted, thereby decreasing their ability to enter into the workforce at all.  Yet the kinds of jobs graduates are likely to take up are not currently held by seniors or mid-level managers.  Surely, even if their argument were true, it calls for a loosening of laws around retaining older employees and the creation of programmes which retrain older employees in new, less stressful jobs.  Nonetheless, it seems the youth have also forgotten that the responsibility to pay for all of these 60 year-old retirees will fall to them, chopping ever more money off their pay checks as the number of seniors multiplies.

Where do these students fall in comparison with the car-burning violence of Nimes?  Perhaps Is France descending into chaos?  Pas de tout. On the ground, it seems that while there is a feeling of injustice in the air, people’s reactions up and down the country cannot be easily generalised.  Support for the strikers and disagreement with the new law is evident throughout;  however, the strength of these feelings varies greatly from place-to-place and person-to-person.

One thing is for sure:  there is certainly a sense that an even bigger showdown looms with the strikes tomorrow.  The strike on Tuesday promises to be a spectacularly loud message to Sarkozy.  Perhaps slightly more noticeable than a smoking bin.