Problems at the Sorbonne
 

Rioting in France,around their universities and in Paris around the Sorbonne is becoming a daily occurance. The violence is increasing as students set fires, damage property and injure police. We enjoyed our time around the Sorbonne in January, but will stay away next month when we are back in France.

Does anyone have any first hand experience with this right now?

several of our posters are there now but there are plenty of updates if you google.

Thanks Mimi. I see the stories daily on the French news. It's just so sad. The students at the university are so fortunate to be there. I have a hard time understanding their methods right now. I'd love a first hand report from anyone from the board when they return.

We will be in Brittney first for a week so hope things will be over by the time we arrive in Paris. We aren't planning on going into Rennes, where there are also problems.

well, the thing is , students can be fired at whim, it gives them no leaverage.

From what I've read, the students are rioting because Mr. DeVillepin has proposed amending the First Employment Contract. For those under 26 years old, employers would now be able fire them within the first two years if they don't do their work satisfactorily or if the employer can no longer afford to pay them. This is a marked change from current policy, which basically requires employers to provide lifetime job security from the first day they hire someone.

There's another twist, too. Upon graduation from such elite schools, students somehow have accumulated "unemployment benefits" and often take almost an entire year off before looking for a job. That would apparently be abolished under the new proposal.

That's what I've read. Doesn't exactly sound like "riot" material, does it?

My hotel says that that area is closed off to the public anyway.

Demonstrating is NOT rioting...
Yes the students, and their professors are on strike due to the new labour law which allows employers to fire anyone under 26 after 2 years of employment. Jobs for life have not existed here for several years; the students et al are demonstrating against age-specific labour penalties...

The only disruptions are slow or cancelled buses...

Students at the Sorbonne have been in disagreement with the French government on a variety of topics since the 1300's.

As with any society - it is often the students - who are not yet locked into family responsibilites and don;t need to compromose their consciences who lead the way in social change (remember the VietNam war - who forced the government to finally do the right thing - although not after the unnecessary loss of how many thousands of lives?)

And don;t mistake demonstrations for riots. And don;t assume it is the students that are attacking the police. (A friend of mine - a peaceful protester - was arrested in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention for assaulting a police officer's knee with his face - which endangered his later admittance to medical school. He ended up having to go to medical school in Canada - which recognized the arrest as a political ploy - and today is a well-respected physician - still with his heart in the right place I must say.)

NYTraveler -
The students are 'demonstrating' not to force some social change, they are doing this to preserve the status quo of a very privileged class. This is a reactionary demonstration, hardly something progressive or motivated by anything more noble than trying to keep as big a slice of the pie as they feel they are entitled to. It is not 1968 any more.

Obviously it was never 1968 for you GR...
They are demonstrating for equality...

your typical student at the presigious and very elite Sorbonne is much more equal than the typical frenchman.
I hope they get their 'equality'.

"your typical student at the presigious and very elite Sorbonne is much more equal than the typical frenchman."

Actually, any French high school graduate can enrol to study at the Sorbonne, as is the case for all the Parisian (and French) universities. The only requirement is that they have the baccalaur&eacute;at. I'd hardly call that &quot;&eacute;lite&quot;!! There are many &eacute;lite schools (<i>grandes &eacute;coles</i> and <i>&eacute;coles d'ing&eacute;nieur</i> which are quite separate from the French university system) in Paris but the Sorbonne isn't one of them.

Here's an opinion column by William Pfaff in the International Herald Tribune that may add a bit of perspective, though Pfaff perhaps falls short on a point or two:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/15/news/edpfaff.php

Students about to set out as workers don't relish the idea of less in the way of job protection than others, just because they're young. More broadly, the new legislation is seen as a wedge that will lead to further changes in the labor law. That's why a large majority of the French population supports these protests, which have been overwhelmingly peaceful. Who is right about causes and cures for unemployment is a whole other matter. Oddly, French employers haven't greeted this economically liberal legislation with much enthusiasm.

The French want to have their cake and eat it, too; the students are simply parroting the opinions of their elders, even as they shoot themselves in the feet with their pointless protests.

The new law would make it possible to fire someone without any special paperwork within the first two years of employment for employees under 26. The current situation provides lifetime job security (almost). Since employers are extremely reluctant to hire young and inexperienced workers when it is so difficult to fire them if things don't go well, the rate of unemployment among people in their early 20s is very high. Allowing employers to fire employees would reduce lifetime job security but would probably create jobs where there are none now.

It's a very complex situation but overall the French want to preserve a comfortable status quo even if it means very high unemployment. More specifically, though, those profiting from the system wish to continue doing so, no matter what the effects for others; whereas those who suffer from the system (the unemployed, for example) want change, but they are a minority (albeit a large one).

Eventually economic realities will force the French to change, no matter how much they demonstrate. The current PM apparently sees this and is pretty much standing firm on the current law, but we shall see.

As for &quot;rioting,&quot; a few minor incidents coincidentally recorded by TV cameras do not a riot make. Some people know that breaking a window looks a lot better on TV than holding a sign. And some people with no particular opinions at all but a desire to make trouble tend to work their way into any large demonstration&mdash;there are always a few angry young males to make trouble, even though they may not even understand what the demonstration is about.

1. The students are not rioting. Other young people are attaching themselves to the demonstrations and rioting.
2. There are already several court cases about the new law. For example it was found that in a company where several young people were working, they fired the ones who requested legal payment of their overtime and kept the ones who accepted to be exploited illegally.

For those who say &quot; No rioting&quot;

Please refer to Sky News in the UK-latest reports today.

They term the situation &quot;rioting.&quot; With 200 arrests by police - 40 police injured - people throwing molotov cocktails, rocks , metal barriers etc.
I would use the same term.

According to the article in today's &quot;Washington Post&quot; entitled, &quot;French Students Hit Streets To Protest New Labor Law&quot; about 250,000 students took to the streets across the country.

It continues to say, &quot;the demonstrations were mostly peaceful&quot; but in Paris students on bicycles blocked streets surrounding the Louvre and piggybacked onto the main demostration in order to protest cuts in school sports coaching staffs.

Apparently about 250 youths &quot;threw rocks at police and set fire to a newspaper kiosk between the Bon Marche department store and the hotel Lutetia. Police fired tear gas to break up the group.&quot;

Well I don't know what is going on to day, but I certainly know that what we observed last week when we were in Paris was not what I'd call a riot. First of all, it seemed to us that the French police really get a bang of riding around in their vans with all the sirens blaring and tons of police storming out, and sometimes for no reason at all. We were in the park in front of the Bon Marche department store on as Sunday afternoon and saw an example of this. Have no idea why in the world they were doing this.

One day in the middle of last week we ran into one of these student demonstrations. We were near Place de la Concorde and could see the students approaching, peacefully carrying a few signs. There were tons of police vans carrying the police who were all arrayed with full sized plexiglass riot shields and wearing full leg protection etc. The police formed a human barricade at the bridge so that students could not cross it to get to the National Assembly area. The students thwarted them by moving on down to the next bridge, so all the walkie-talkies were going and the sirens were blaring and the troops were running down to where the students had gone. What we saw was more Keystone Cops than anything else.

We actually stumbled across a demonstration in France four years ago, while in Nice.

We did not stand there debating whether the participants were going to demonstrate their proficiency with rock throwing or merely with how loudly they could yell. We simply demonstrated our own view that for a tourist, discretion is always the better part of valour, and left the scene at once. Other than that, we didn't batt an eyelid for the remainder of our sojourn in Nice, nor would we have even had we known about the protest in advance.

It really isn't hard to find out where demonstrations/riots are for the purpose of avoiding them. If you should encounter people marching along the street who are unconcerned about being run down by the local motorists, that is a sure sign that they are not ordinary pedestrians like the rest of us. :)

Enjoy your trip.

The era of the cell phone and the SMS has completely changed tactics on both sides. The police used to be able to seal off a neighborhood and clear it out. Now, information circulates instantly about which escape routes remain open or methods of diversion that can force the police to run in the wrong direction.

The situation is still developing with another big demonstration planned for Saturday March 18th. This could end in rioting as well, as the &quot;uncontrolled elements&quot; and various anarchists love this sort of event, especially since university and high school students do not have the professional discipline that keeps demonstrations by workers from degenerating.

The prime minister has a chance today to avoid a worsening of the crisis, as he is meeting with the university presidents who are requesting the cancellation of this law (along with 68% of the population) -- if he withdraws the law, things will calm down. If not, there are going to be a few interesting days in the coming weeks.

Tourists should not worry but should watch the (French) news if they are in Paris, Rennes, Poitiers and a few other cities. In Paris, it is good to know that metro stations are automatically closed in troubled areas, so it is unlikely that anyone will pop out of the metro in the middle of a riot.

An addendum: The Financial Times of London sent a reporter, or reporters, to the disadvantaged Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, which saw some of the worst social unrest last autumn. What was found among youth there, whom the new legislation is intended to help with greater access to jobs, was nearly universal opposition to it. Among the sentiments expressed was that it would merely provide a cover for ethnic discrimination in firing and (true when I reflect on it) that it would be impossible to find lodging as a renter with a work contract that provided nothing in the way of assurance of employment in the short term, or at best beyond two years out. For sure, this wasn't a scientific study, and the youth of Clichy-sous-Bois could be wrong, but this casts some doubt on the hypothesis of privileged university students versus desperate, disadvantaged young people.

Oh, come ON, people, where's your sense of adventure? Go hang out in the 5th and watch a demonstration or two...perhaps even participate. Get a whiff of a bit of tear gas. This is history in the making, and you'd miss it? Besides, it'll be FUN. Maybe a LITTLE risky, but fun!

Afraid of getting hurt? Remember, this is FRANCE, where the gendarmes and the CRS didn't even kill anyone in last year's far more serious and destructive rioting. (That never would have happened in the US...there would have been at least a dozen deaths.). Think they're going to fire into the crowds a la Kent State 1970? Nope, never happen.

And if you happen to get yourself arrested, so what? You can plead that you're an innocent tourist with questionable judgement...what judge will throw the book at you?

C'mon, folks, show some courage, some spunk and some thirst for adventure!

I read something interesting about this.
It is apparently common for the graduates of these fine schools to not even look for a job for a year after graduating. They accrue unemployment benefits while studying, so the taxpayers take a further hit by paying benefits to these student 'workers' who haven't even had a job. A subsidized, year long vacation.
What a racket.

just returned from rue des ecoles , and although the streets were totally blocked durng most of our trip (in the adjoining sorbonne/pantheon area), we must have gotten up a lot earlier and gone to bed a lot later than the rioters.

the police were out all day in full force and anti-riot gear.. tons of vans.. horses.. you name it..

but we can't believe we saw NONE of it. we did see a group of students going up a street that we decided not to go on.. but we only realized there was a big problem tuesday night when a certain bus just never came and we taxied quickly to our restaurant reservation.

we would watch the news and wonder what time all this happened and how long it lasted.

it seems pretty serious though.
this weekend they are expecting more thousands from around the country.

It can look serious if you come from a place where demonstrations are not common, but it's pretty routine for Paris. The police presence is nothing special; they are always out in force for demonstrations, depending mostly on the number of demonstrators expected.

There's another side to this: the Prime Minister introduced the law and wants to run for president in the next election &hellip; and so does the Interior Minister (which is the ministry that controls the police). So the latter has a special interest in making it look like protests are huge and unruly, although he has to take care to avoid any actual violence (which might reflect badly on him).

Anyway, it will all be water under the bridge soon enough. I admit that I get tired of French people demonstrating for every little thing; if they'd just elect people who felt as they do to begin with this wouldn't happen. But they like to elect people based on their family backgrounds and schooling, not based on their policies&mdash;that gives the French an excuse to man the barricades when they want things changed. I'm pretty sure it's all deliberate, just so that people can go to a demonstration now and then and get the day off from school or work.

&quot;But they like to elect people based on their family backgrounds and schooling, not based on their policies.&quot;

Examples?

I don't understand why so many people are so fascinated by this on this board, and yet post or comment about protests, riots, etc., in virtually any other place.

I do live in a city where there are lots of protests (Wash DC), although most of them are pretty mild, but even here, it isn't that unusual to have some arrests and troubles when they are protesting outside the World Bank, or on WTO issues or things like that. I've also been in places that had them in the US back in the Vietnam War era when there was teargas and other things (I did go to Ohio State where they burned the ROTC building down, but I was not involved), and curfews. I've been in Paris at least a couple times when they've had protests (the Jose Bove thing was one), and it's true that they always have the police out and often block streets.

I just don't get why people on this board are so obsessed with protests in Paris and France.

Maybe I should go take down my Sorbonne diplome which I have framed and hanging on my wall to impress people ha ha. It does impress those if you can't read French and don't realize it's just for summer school, but they like to hand out diplomes a lot at that school.

They do strike and protest a lot in France, and sometimes it does get tiring, and doesn't always seem to accomplish anything. They still have some unusual hiring and firing practices in France, in my terms, though and things that in the US would be discriminatory. I don't think you could pass a law discriminating against a particular age group's benefits like that in the US. If you want to say people can be let go easier on some short time frame of hiring, it seems it should apply to anyone at that time frame, not just to people of a certain age. Of course, in the US, most places don't have any protections at all (unless they are in a union), and anyone could be fired for any reason if the boss didn't want to keep them.

I'm all for workers' rights, but I think some of this is not reasonable -- like one young woman they quoted in an article I just read yesterday on this issue, who was a French student, and said something like, this way we would have to do whatever the boss wanted us to do or we'd get fired. uh, yeah, isn't that what most people are supposed to do, what their boss wants.

We just returned from Paris last night and stayed at the Hotel St. Jacques in the Latin Quarter. Daily, we saw police in riot gear on the street corners. Our last night, we saw a crowd of students (probably 50-100?) marching down the street from the Parthenon, chanting in French. At NO time did we ever feel in danger and we would definitely stay in the hotel again.

To Galavanting

In France people under 25 do not get any social benefit if they have never held a job.
Being a student does not accrue unemployment benefits.
So if the graduates of those &quot;fine schools&quot; want to take a year before looking for a job, it's at their expense and it's not a burden on the tax payers. Rather on their family, I suppose !
The CPE (contrat de premi&egrave;re embauche i.e. 1st job contract) isn't really meant for them as they should not have trouble finding a permanent job (assuming jobs are permanent nowadays, which is another story). It's meant for the young people who are not qualified and have no other choice.

PS. I am French

Cristina, personally what called my attention was the enormous amount of burnt cars, and buildings during the protests in Paris early this yer. How many cars? and buidings?...I do not if I read correctly but I think :
10.000 cars,if this is true I find it extraordinary. That the rioters can destroy property just like that....frankly in as much as I love Paris it is like a warning signal to avoid Paris in our next trip.
Regarding this one you are right it does not seem so much out of hand, I would not comment regarding this one. One of many in the world, I agree.

Pvoyage -
this is what I read, posted over at NRO.
&lt;&lt;&lt;
From a reader:
Dear Mr. Goldberg,
I enjoyed your column on the French attitude toward work with gritted teeth. I have observed the behavior up close myself.
I spent a year living in France as a post-doc in engineering at a Grande Ecole, in the early nineties. One of my office mates was in the final year of his doctoral studies in acoustics, and not many graduates of the program (a top
one) were gainfully employed. Recalling the scramble that was the final year
of my own studies -- the birth of my son, finshing collecting and analyzing
data, finishing and defending the dissertation, and LOOKING FOR EMPLOYMENT, I asked my office mate how his job search was going.
Oh, uh...., he replied, somewhat puzzled, I'm not looking. I asked him to
repeat himself, not certain I'd heard correctly. Yes, he continued, I'll be
taking the follwing year off. How are you going to live, I asked, not yet
appreciating the all-encompassing beneficence of the French system. Oh, I have a year of unemployment benefits accumulated, so I probably won't even think about looking for a job until, oh, maybe nine months after I finish. Everybody does it....
I didn't hear much more. Hearing a &quot;top student&quot; consider, without a hint of shame, that unemployment benefits are essentially a year's paid vacation made
my head spin. de Villepin's new law required that kids would have to prove
themselves *after* they walk in the door of their employer.... And they
responded by rioting. I mean, wouldn't you? It would have been the first crack
in the dam! Who knows -- would our paid year off then be in danger?
I should of course make some disclaimers: not everyone I met in France has this sort of attitude. There are many hard-working people there, etc., etc. But the students who went through the Grandes Ecoles (the tip-top, elite track -- so much for egalite) seemed to be the ones most likely to think like my office-mate.
There are many other anecdotes I could recount, but I can hear my boss in the hall ...
Take care!
&gt;&gt;&gt;

Maybe this guy had benefits built from working before/during school, I don't know. But to use these benefits to layabout for year, just because 'he can' is the problem.
In the US, this attitude is not unheard of, but there is a stigma attached to it, and it would never even occur to most of us to use our benefits this way.
PS - I am not french.

Galavanting


Maybe it's a Rube Goldberg story?

I've never heard of people being able to accumulate unemployment benefits over the years.

What you get if you have worked a given number of months during the year is a percentage of your previous salary. And you get it for a given amount of time - not necessarily a year.
This is why the story of the post-graduate sounds rather strange.

Villepin's CPE only apply to people under 25 who have never held a job and are not entitled to any unemployment benefit.

&gt;...that gives the French an excuse to man the barricades when they want things changed. I'm pretty sure it's all deliberate,... &lt;

I think you are correct.

The French do have a tendency to create very rational, elaborate and elegant social and legal systems, and then do their best to subvert them.

((I))

And while it may be only a very small number of people doing the actual car burnings and other destruction, I saw with my own eyes on TV a crowd of easily 1000 all cheering wildly as one car went up in flames. Those others may not have lit the match, but they were sure enjoying the &quot;carnage&quot;.

About a quarter of a million people demonstrated against their free rides today, and only about 150 tried to cause any trouble.

The French have an unshakable sense of entitlement. They don't understand that the money they take from the government without any hint of conscience is money that came from their own wallets. They are their own worst enemies, and if they don't wise up, they're going to learn the hard way as the rest of the world passes them by.

The French look weak and afraid to compete based on merit and hard work. Why should a company have to support an unproductive worker for life? What prevents a clever fella from getting hired based on some fancy degree and then turning into a lazy slug who just wants to coast until vacation time?

Throughout this string, the most sensible comment and pertinent comment was this:

&quot;We did not stand there debating whether the participants were going to demonstrate their proficiency with rock throwing ... We simply demonstrated our own view that for a tourist, discretion is always the better part of valour, and left the scene at once.''

As for the rest, why not leave it to the French to sort out?

Agree with Dave in Paris. The US has plenty of problems of their own to deal with.

Yes, and as we all know the French would never sit and discuss OUR politics!

I am leaving for Paris Wednesday and staying at the College de France on Rue Thenard one block from the Sorbonne. I have no intension of changing my plans or even my hotel at this time as long as I can sleep at night, come and go without major inconveniences and enjoy all that Paris has to offer. After today's demonstrations, I think Saturday may be the worst day of demonstrations if it is still going on a week from today.

I appreciate the info from the poster who stayed at the St. Jacques. I stayed there in November and that is around the corner from where I am staying this week!! I will try to report back after my return with any updates on the unrest as well as comments on my trip in general!