‘Rising, Falling, Clinging, Flying’ (1934) by Sophie Taeuber-Arp.
ATs usual, no one saw it coming. It was 1995 and Jacques Chirac had just won the French presidential election by condemning the ‘social divide’. He embodied a rightwing ethic that was, at least, concerned about working-class voters. Unlike the current Macron administration’s plan to reform pensions and the 1995 plan to cut social welfare and align public and private pensions, alongside other reforms, had not been trailed, or the ground prepared through debates.
So that November, it came as a complete surprise, and it took people a little while to understand what was going on. But there was the arrogance of Prime Minister Alain Juppé, the author of the plan, who sounded like someone who thinks he knows best and gives anyone listening to him the humiliating sensation of belonging to the obviously stupid masses. In the beginning, I think it was this arrogance that people objected to, and made them feel they needed to raise themselves up again.
The first big day of strikes against Juppé’s plan, the beginning of a movement involving all state sectors, was 24 November 1995. No trains, no metro, no school. It was very cold. I remember an exhilarating feeling of uncertainty, the feeling that I was experiencing one of those rare moments when history is made, because for once working people were driving the action.
I remember an exhilarating feeling of uncertainty, the feeling that I was experiencing one of those rare moments when history is made, because for once working people were driving the action
During that week, I’m sure I was not alone in thinking that we were living in a pre-revolutionary time. Unlike in May ’68, the entire population supported the strike. Private-sector workers, who were not striking, would say to public-sector workers, ‘You are striking for us, on our behalf.’ We were suddenly coming out of the tunnel of the years after 1983, and the much-touted end of politics. By defending their rights, workers in rail, EDF (Electricité de France) and the postal system opposed the hitherto inescapable economic order; they even defied the world order.
A new awareness
I don’t remember if we heard the slogan ‘Another world is possible’ that was used at the Porto Alegre Forum and in the streets of Seattle and Genoa a bit later. But it was in December 1995 that people in France became aware that the markets, the globalization of trade and the construction of a liberal Europe were governing their lives. They began to connect the construction of Europe with the destruction of social rights, or rather to denounce the reforms as concessions to the European Commission in Brussels. In 1992, along with many others, I had voted ‘no’ in the referendum on the Maastricht Treaty. François Mitterand’s plan for European integration along with everything it entailed in terms of competition and the dismantling of public services, went through by a hair’s breadth.
We had expected that having the Socialists (PS) in power would, as they had promised, change lives. Indeed, 1981 saw many important social measures, such as a fifth week of paid leave and a new retirement age of 60. Then, with the turn of rigor (austerity turn), which was in fact a turn to neoliberalism, we were a long way from a government in the style of the Popular Front in 1936. My own inevitable break with the left came with the Gulf war in 1991, Mitterrand’s glacial pomposity (‘the guns will do the talking’), the involvement of France alongside the Americans, the thousands of deaths from bombing in Baghdad and the media’s enthusiasm for the US-led Operation Desert Storm.
In 1995, disaffected sections of the left, journalists, ‘experts’, all rallied behind Juppé. Even a rightwing faction of the PS led by Michel Rocard, who opposed Mitterrand within the party, supported his plan. Nicole Notat, general secretary of the CFDT trade union, went so far as to ask the government to impose a minimum service level for public transport (at the protest on 24 November, she was heckled by her own members). The mainstream media, including public service media like France Inter, all approved the government’s measures.
At that point, a schism appeared in the intellectual left. One section of it had signed a petition supporting the reforms, including philosopher Paul Ricœur, sociologist Alain Touraine, political scientist Pierre Rosanvallon, and Joël Roman and Olivier Mongin from the editorial board of the then-influential magazine Mind. I had some admiration for Ricœur’s work, and was appalled to read that, basically, there was on one side an elite endowed with ‘a rational understanding of the world’, and on the other a large mass of people who were slaves to their passions , anger and desire. This is what Pierre Bourdieu said to striking rail workers in a wonderful and memorable speech at the Gare de Lyon, which still applies in 2023: ‘This opposition between the long-term vision of the enlightened “elite” and the short-sighted impulses of the people or their representatives is typical of reactionary thinking at any time in any country.’
Pierre Bourdieu’s political commitment to the strike made me see it as my duty as a writer not to remain a passive onlooker in public life
Bourdieu was one of the main figures behind the other petition by intellectuals, which supported the strikers. As I was obviously on that side, I signed it (1). It was an opportunity to get involved alongside someone who had been instrumental in my intellectual emancipation and in my becoming a writer. It was after reading The heirs in 1971 that I felt I had been given permission to write Empty Cabinetspublished in 1974. Since then I have continued to read Bourdieu: The distinction, The State Nobilityand the book which is both a portrait and an analysis of French society (and was published two years before the Juppé plan), The Misery of the World. Bourdieu’s political commitment to the strike made me see it as my duty as a writer not to remain a passive onlooker in public life. To see this internationally recognized sociologist getting involved in social conflicts, and to hear him, was an immense joy, a liberation. He made us raise ourselves up when Juppé and his friends wanted to make us cave in.
An act of memory
Long, hard strikes always break down the usual rhythms of the days. Those of 1995 were distinct because part of the population still had to go to the factory or to the office with no means of transport other than cars. There was a lot of solidarity, a lot of resourcefulness. We organized car-pooling. Bicycle sales went through the roof. I remember that to commute from Paris to the suburbs, my son had to buy a mountain bike and that at the hypermarket he went to, Raymond Poulidor, the professional racing cyclist, was himself promoting that model! But we all walked a lot, in lockstep, on usually empty pavements, such as between the district around La Défense and the Avenue de la Grande-Armée, across Neuilly Bridge. It was freezing cold. There was snow. In The Years, I described these winter marches as an act of memory. When people trudged through cities without buses or the metro, their bodies seemed somehow to contain an obscure mythology, that of the great strikes of old, which we had not necessarily known.
I remember the strange feeling of reading The world, in the evening, as if the newspaper’s account was a pale representation of the events, of the present, which is a feeling any social upheaval provokes. In general, the newspapers and the radio were full of editorials that ugly claim to reason, and of hatred of struggling workers. A few years later I was delighted that PLPL (2) was created, ‘the newspaper that bites and runs away’.
When people trudged through cities without buses or the metro, their bodies seemed somehow to contain an obscure mythology, that of the great strikes of old, which we had not necessarily known
Two union leaders were instrumental in bringing about such a fast and strong protest against the government’s project: Marc Blondel of FO (Force Ouvrière) and Bernard Thibault of the CGT (General Confederation of Labour), as well as the CFDT dissidents who would create the trade union SUD (Solidaires, Unitaires, Démocratiques) – which became a major movement for workers’ struggles after 1995. But it’s hard to understand the protests if you don’t understand the intense shock that the Juppé plan gave to French society. It threatened the social security system, obtained just after the Liberation of France, and pensions – things that were fundamental, even essential.
It did not matter that the reforms targeted civil servants and employees of public enterprises; people realized that, by attacking public service workers, the state was indirectly attacking everyone’s way of life, and today we can see that this is indeed what happened over the next 20 years. The protesters of 1995 understood this well. They sang ‘All together!’ to defend hard-won ‘social advances’ – I believe the expression was coined at that time.
Today we hear it less. Decades of economic neoliberalism have made using it feel almost shameful or guilty. Everything is done to remove the idea from people’s heads and lives, while the gains of the wealthiest are now seen as legitimate. The legal retirement age has become a variable adjustment for economic interests. And that is what is at stake today: the awareness that the state has rights over the lives of citizens and can postpone the moment when they are finally free to enjoy life as they please.
The reform Macron wanted takes aim at our hopes of rest, freedom and pleasure. Hence the opposition it has encountered from all active sections of the population, young and old. On the other hand, the president can certainly count on the support of well-to-do retirees – his electoral base from the start – for a reform that will in no way affect their lives.
What a joy it was that morning to turn on the radio and hear the uninterrupted music of the strike day instead of the disingenuous questions of the morning show hosts, to hear songs rather than reports of disaster
The abiding memory of 1995 is that of the last victorious (or rather, semi-victorious) union mobilisation. While the Juppé government gave up on aligning the pensions of the public sector, it did pass the other part of the law: the measures to take control of social security. Most importantly, we failed to change the future. Despite fights over hospitals, schools, and universities, after 25 years of unbridled neoliberalism we live in a country whose public services (school, university, hospital) have been dismantled.
Everyone sees unprecedented levels of frustration rising in the workforce, which can no longer tolerate the precariousness of contracts or the absurdity of work. No one should despair of a youth who once upon a time blocked high schools and universities against the commodification of education, and who are now fighting against useless flagship projects, and for the climate, everywhere. Since #MeToo in 2017, feminism has regained extraordinary strength. Above all, there has been such contempt for the working class, or what I call ‘my race’ (which I have been vilified for wanting to avenge), that one feels another wave of anger will surely rise again.
Already, there has been the extraordinary mobilization on 19 January. What a joy it was that morning to turn on the radio and hear the uninterrupted music of the strike day instead of the disingenuous questions of the morning show hosts, to hear songs rather than reports of disaster. And I was overwhelmed that evening to discover that two million people across France had taken to the streets to reject the government’s plans.
Despite our defeats, and even if the memory of the winter of 1995 and its cold nights sometimes seems to me to be fading like a distant dream, those demonstrators of January 2023 – so numerous that they struggled to get out of the Place de la République – reminded me once again of Paul Éluard’s lines: ‘They were only a few / On the whole earth / Everyone thought they were alone / They were suddenly a crowd’. I would like to thank them. Let’s stop lowering our heads.