Mitchell Abidor

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Marine Le Pen delivering a speech at the French far-right Rassemblement National party’s La Fête de la Nation, on May Day in Le Havre, France. Lou Benoist/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

For three months, France has been in revolt: Demonstrators have marched; railroad workers have blocked tracks; barricades and buildings have been set aflame; protesters have done battle in the street with police. The most recent innovation has been tamer: People have banged pots whenever the president has appeared. The cause? President Emmanuel Macron’s measure raising the retirement age from 62 to 64.

This might at first glance appear to be the work of a vibrant political left wing, fighting pro-business, anti-worker policies from a center-right technocratic government. Indeed, France’s labor unions — though representing a smaller share of the work force than elsewhere in Western Europe — have been united in their opposition, making them a redoubtable force.…  Seguir leyendo »

France’s Old Bigotry Finds a New Face

France is the home of “Liberté, Égalité et Fraternité” and the birthplace of the Rights of Man. But running simultaneously through the country’s political traditions is a much darker strain of racism and antisemitism. It looks as if a new, more virulent chapter in that history of French bigotry may now be opening — with a seemingly unlikely champion.

Éric Zemmour, a far-right polemicist who officially declared on Tuesday that he is running in next April’s presidential election, is the loudest and most extreme voice of French racism today. While his poll numbers have started to slide from their highs earlier this fall, Mr.…  Seguir leyendo »

Paris, 1968: Protesters honoring the memory of Gilles Tautin, a high school student who drowned while fleeing the police during the civil uprising that year. Credit Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

For those of us in the United States who were young and politically progressive in 1968, the protests, strikes and other forms of civil unrest that overtook France in May of that year offered hope. The uprising was not simply a fight against something, like our fight against the Vietnam War. It was a fight for something — for a new way of arranging society, for new forms of economic and social and class relations.

The images of May ’68, which changed my life when I was a teenager watching them on TV, are still burned in my memory: the enormous marches through the streets of France’s major cities; the overflowing crowds of people speechifying and debating in the amphitheater of the Sorbonne; workers occupying factories and flying red flags over the gates; students occupying universities and being beaten by the police.…  Seguir leyendo »

A young Parisian photographing barricades the morning after riots in May 1968. Alain Dejean/Sygma via Getty Images

For fifty years, the events of May–June 1968 in France have had a collective hero: the striking students and workers who occupied their factories and universities and high schools. They’ve also had a collective villain, one within the same camp: the French Communist Party (PCF) and its allied labor union organization, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), which together did all they could to put a brake on a potential revolution, blocking the students and workers from uniting or even fraternizing.

This reading of the events is often found in histories, most recently Ludivine Bantigny’s 1968. De Grands soirs en petits matins.…  Seguir leyendo »