Retraite

I went out and walked through several of the passages today, the early-nineteenth-century enclosed shopping areas. A brilliant concept to escape the weather, let alone the mud and open sewers of the streets, they declined after department stores came into being. Only a couple of dozen now survive of about 150 in their heyday; some are gritty, some workaday, some full of ethnic restaurants . . . and a few have been fully restored to their previous splendor. And then there are the Palais Royal arcades, which were their precursors, which I think I may like even better. The Passage Colbert is now part of the Sorbonne (on the Right Bank), and the only one where there was someone checking people's purses and bags as they entered.

But all of this is idle chit-chat as more and more of the lycées across the country empty into the streets (the headline in Le Monde referred to them as political nitroglycerin). One student was injured yesterday in the face by a “flash ball,” a sort of rubber bullet, and underwent surgery. There are reports in a live feed of other injuries occurring here and there: http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2010/10/15/suivez-les-manifestations-lyceennes-en-direct_1426624_3224.html#ens_id=1426310 . University students had already been taking part in demonstrations; the addition of the younger students is big news, as is that of a full, ongoing strike of refineries, and of truckers going out as of today in sympathy.

The number three “trending topic” in French on Twitter is “retraîtes,” the word for “retirement,” the whole big flash point here: the raising of the national retirement age from 60 to 62 years. Which, of course, seems no big deal to Americans, for whom it had been 65 for years already, with a gradual push to raise even that. And it seems—especially considering that the change has passed the National Assembly AND been approved in the Senate already, to be much ado—period. And there is a “baby boom” bulge coming of retirement age currently that the country is hard pressed to afford. Yet this gets into, I think, a whole question of social contracts, priorities, and for whose benefit governments operate, as well. One of the lycée students was quoted as saying the government wants to make the age of retirement so late that after an entire life spent working, a person would be too old, would wind up not being able ever to have a non-working chapter in his or her life.

So I’ll go to conversational group tomorrow morning, and maybe or maybe not be able to make it out to Bercy to the Cinémathèque Française to see a film, and I really hope trains in and out of Montparnasse will not be being affected by next Thursday (there are already demonstrations being called for next Tuesday: http://www.ouest-france.fr/actu/actuDet_-Retraites-les-manifestations-de-samedi-et-mardi_42366-1550409_actu.Htm?xtor=EPR-3001-[push%20DMA%20thematique]-20101015-[Retraites-les-manifestations-de-samedi-et-mardi] ). I never could find out exactly what was going on yesterday afternoon, why there was so much security in Gare du Nord, blocking connection to the RER line A, but think I can guess, now seeing in that feed that the RER lines were and are being occupied during the demonstrations.

The leader of the “New Anti-capitalist” party has already said maybe it will be another May 1968. Which may be just self-aggrandizing blather. But I actually have a framed poster in my bedroom in the U.S., for a retrospective exhibition two years ago in London (you know whereof I speak, R.) of the street posters during that watershed period in my own youth—and. Well. Times are interesting. A pain in the butt personally, but certainly interesting. It’s not Iran, nor China; people are fighting for quality of life, not life itself; to be heard, not literally to be permitted to speak. They won’t be massacred in the streets. Still, the process is an event to behold.