Yet again, France is locked in an explosive contest of wills with uncertain consequences, writes Lara Marlowe in Paris
It was a turning point in my understanding of this country. For the umpteenth time, a dinner with "my" French family - with whom I lived as a student long ago - turned into a shouting match over some fine point of politics, economics or culture.
Why did they always argue? I finally asked.
Pierre, the older of the family's two children, looked at me with a sardonic smile: "Because we're French!" Disputatious French? For years I found it more diplomatic to keep the observation to myself. But in the present crisis over prime minister Dominique de Villepin's First Job Contract (CPE), it has become politically acceptable to say so.
The UMP deputy Georges Tron says "a culture of conflict" and "the absence of dialogue" are part of "the French specificity". In a one-page interview with Le Monde this week, Jacques Marseille, a professor at the Sorbonne, explains that "rupture is a basic part of our history". Marseille dragged a fine-tooth comb through the centuries, looking for an example of quiet reform by consensus, but couldn't find one.
Tron explains the habitual wars of attrition between French unions and government by the weakness of the unions, who represent only 8 per cent of salaried employees. Jacques Marseille shares that analysis, but adds other factors.
Politicians hang on to power too long here, Marseille says: Valéry Giscard d'Estaing has been in politics for 50 years; Jacques Chirac for 43. Like the trade unions, the French parliament has little real power. As a result, the populace express themselves in the street.
An opinion poll this month found that 69 per cent of the French believe their politicians care "very little or practically not" about what they think, up from 58 per cent in 1998. Fifty-three per cent said French democracy functions "not very well or not well at all," compared to 35 per cent in 2000.
This disillusionment, compounded with Villepin's ill-conceived CPE, put some two million demonstrators on the streets on Tuesday, allegedly the largest demonstration in the history of France.
The CPE illustrates another French foible: the apparently irresistible temptation to add complexity to complexity.
France already had an alphabet soup of job contracts: the long-term CDI, which is tantamount to paradise; the short-term CDD, which eventually forces employers to choose between firing or awarding a permanent CDI, and the CNE, invented last summer to give small companies more flexibility.
Under Villepin's CPE, young people under the age of 26 can be fired without justification during a two-year trial period. One obvious likely result will be a surge in unemployment among 27 year-olds. The youth of France were galled by the way the contract was portrayed; as a gift that would lower their 23 per cent jobless rate. Instead, they view it as an attempt to institutionalise their precarious status.
Mr de Villepin reportedly thought up the CPE over the Christmas holiday in the hope of stealing a march on Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister and would-be reformer who is his chief rival for next year's right-wing presidential nomination.
Unfortunately for Villepin, Sarkozy has turned the crisis to his own advantage, meeting publicly with police before and after Tuesday's marches, and proposing the suspension of the deeply unpopular CPE pending negotiations.
And Sarkozy has a better idea: a single job contract for all French people, under which time accumulated on various jobs would increase one's social protection. Sarkozy has obviously studied the Scandinavian model of greater mobility combined with permanent access to training.
The experience of other developed countries shows that flexibility in hiring and firing reduces unemployment. French opponents of liberal economics respond, with some justification, that too much leeway creates "Mc Jobs," where workers are exploited for long hours at low wages.
"We're not asking to be CEOs," a plaintive 23-year-old from the immigrant suburbs, already on his fifth short-term contract, told me. "All we want is to conserve the rights our parents fought for."
Anna Le Coz, a retired teacher, evaded my question about the correlation between France's low flexibility and high jobless rate. "France has always provided an example to other European countries," she said, adding she was sure the majority of Europeans will come round to the idea that "the economy must serve man, and not the contrary."
Thibaut Bracq, a 22-year-old cinema student at the Sorbonne and self-described left-wing voter, was interested by the British example. "I have a friend who moved to London," he said. "There's real dynamism there. He sent out five CVs, got five job interviews and was offered three jobs. That just doesn't happen here. In England, they're less afraid of taking chances. People here are worn out."
Like last year's constitutional treaty referendum, the CPE crisis has deepened the chasm between left and right, public and private sector.
It has also re-opened the wound of France's banlieues, hundreds of under-privileged young people who take the train into Paris to steal hand-bags and mobile phones from their bourgeois counterparts and pick fights with riot police during demonstrations.
During three weeks of race riots last November, the sociologist Emmanuel Todd claimed violent protest by the sons and grandsons of immigrants proved they'd understood French tradition.
They adopted another French tradition on Tuesday: young women of African and Arab origin joined teenage boys wearing "hoodies" in clashes with riot police; in November, the girls were absent.
"Les jeunes sont excités grave," Djamel Bouria ( 17), from the suburbs north of Paris, told me. That's banlieue slang for: "The youths are really stirred up." Several demonstrators said they felt the government would pay no attention unless there was violence.
Yet again, France is locked in an explosive contest of wills with wide-ranging, uncertain repercussions. The prime minister is gambling his career on the hope it will blow over with the Easter school holidays, while students and trade unionists clamour for his resignation. There's a sense of deja vu, and a secret longing for a visionary leader who could say convincingly: Let's show the world we French can be sensible too; let's sort this out together.