Police Brutality Always Backfires
As the French police amp up their violence and brutality against peaceful demonstrators, the protests have begun spiraling out of control and are now directed against Emmanuel Macron himself, rather than just his hated retirement “reforms.” In France, Macron is forcing through an unpopular rise in the retirement age from 62 to 64. In the U.S., Republicans and some right-of-center Democratic allies are trying to craft a fake “compromise” that will force an increase to 70!
This morning, the NY Times reported that the huge protests have shifted in character over the past week. They have become angrier and, in some cities, more violent— especially after nightfall. They have been less about the fury felt over the raising of the retirement age to 64 from 62, and more about Macron and the way he rammed the law through Parliament without a full vote. Finally, they have broadened into something approaching a constitutional crisis. ‘We have moved from a social crisis on the subject of retirement to the beginnings of democratic crisis,’ Laurent Berger, the leader of the French Democratic Confederation of Labor, the largest and most moderate labor union in France, said in an interview. ‘Anger is rising, and before us we have a president who does not see that reality.’”
Graffiti is targeting Macron now— and reminding him about the guillotine. Charles III just cancelled his state visit to Paris.
France likes to dream of revolution, ever re-enacting the popular uprising of 1789 that led to the guillotining of the king and queen and the abolition of the monarchy three years later. The country is almost certainly not on the brink of some new transformative convulsion.
But the French seem to feel Macron crossed a red line.
He imposed his will to secure a law that never got voted on by the lower house of Parliament, at a time when polls showed two-thirds of the people opposed the measure. His support has plunged to 28 percent, according to polls, the lowest since the start of the Yellow Vest social uprising in 2018.
Article 2 of the French Constitution says that the principle of the Republic is “government of the people, by the people and for the people.” Article 3 says that “national sovereignty belongs to the people, who exercise it through their representatives and by means of a referendum.”
But Article 49.3, now used 100 times since the foundation of the Fifth Republic in 1958 and 11 times by the government of Élisabeth Borne, the prime minister chosen by Macron last summer, allows the government to push through a bill without a vote as long as it puts its own survival on the line in a parliamentary vote.
The government narrowly survived this no-confidence vote earlier this week.
Of course, a vote on a bill and a vote on the survival of a government are two different things. They carry different weight.
Indeed, it is precisely because Macron judged that his bill raising the retirement age might not survive a vote, but his government stood a better chance of doing so, that he opted to use the top-down 49.3, viewed by his critics as anti-democratic.
It was a risky gamble, and the blowback has been intense.
A blog hosted by Mediapart, an online investigative website, suggested that a more accurate version of Article 3 of the Constitution would be: “National sovereignty belongs to the people, who exercise it through their representatives and by means of a referendum, except in exceptional cases where the wish of the sovereign people is judged inappropriate by the president.”
The growing rejection of the all-powerful presidency conceived by Charles de Gaulle for the Fifth Republic, after the parliamentary chaos of the Fourth Republic, was fanned by Macron’s intransigent television interview this week.
In it, he said he would “not accept either insurrectionists or factions” at a time when “the United States lived what it lived at the Capitol.”
Many people found Macron’s analogy between the French protests against an unpopular law, which only lurched into violence over the past 10 days, and the 2021 mob storming of the Capitol in Washington provocative.
“What we have seen is the extreme verticality of Mr. Macron’s power,” said Berger, the union leader. “Our union would like to engage in negotiation and reach compromise, but for that you need two.”
Since January, he said, he and his union had not been received by Macron, Borne or Olivier Dussopt, the labor minister.
In the television interview, Macron also said he felt a solemn sense of responsibility to ensure that the French pension system remained viable, arguing that this was impossible with active workers being asked to support ever more retirees living longer.
This is the exact argument American conservatives— from Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Nancy Mace and Angus King to Republican Study Committee budget authors Jim Banks (IN), Kevin Hern (OK), Roger Williams (TX), Trent Kelly (MS), Ralph Norman (SC), Ron Estes (KS), Michael Cloud (TX), Ben Cline (VA), Fred Keller (PA), Tom Tiffany (WI), Ronny Jackson (TX), Troy Nehls (TX), August Pfluger (TX) and Beth Van Duyne (TX)— make as they plot raising the retirement age in our country. The American conservatives, like Macon, insist that it is “essential for a stable and dynamic economy. Earlier economic reforms during his presidency have led to a sharp drop in unemployment. Job creation and foreign investment have surged. The French tech sector has grown exponentially. But much of France is now too angry to listen to Mr. Macron’s economic lessons. ‘More people are at a point of combat, and they don’t want to listen to the language of moderation,’ said Guy Groux, a specialist on French unions at Sciences Po in Paris. ‘Protesters are splitting off from the unions and going into the streets all night.’”
I could see this issue here in America unite groups as diverse as MAGA and Antifa in their hatred of the smug conservative establishment. Who remembers Madame Defarge, one of the most compelling characters from Charles Dickens’ 1859 classic masterpiece, A Tale Of Two Cities (banned in Florida yet?)?
In some ways, Madame Defarge was my favorite character in the book (if not Dickens'). “Possessing a remorseless bloodlust, Madame Defarge embodies the chaos of the French Revolution. The initial chapters of the novel find her sitting quietly and knitting in the wine shop. However, her apparent passivity belies her relentless thirst for vengeance. With her stitches, she secretly knits a register of the names of the revolution’s intended victims. As the revolution breaks into full force, Madame Defarge reveals her true viciousness… Dickens notes that Madame Defarge’s hatefulness does not reflect any inherent flaw, but rather results from the oppression and personal tragedy that she has suffered at the hands of the aristocracy, specifically the Evrémondes, who raped her sister and killed her brother when she was a child.”
If I were an American Thérèse Defarge I’d be knitting names like Ted Cruz (R-TX), Josh Hawley (R-MO), Kirsten Sinema (I-AZ), Tom Cotton (R-AR), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Ron Johnson (R-WI), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Rand Paul (R-KY), Mike Lee (R-UT), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Rick Scott (R-FL), Tom Carper (D-DE), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Marjorie Traitor Greene (Q-GA), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Lauren Boebert (Q-CO), Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Gym Jordan (R-OH), Jared Golden (D-ME), Scott Peters (D-CA), Henry Cuellar (D-TX), Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Scott Perry (R-PA), Chip Roy (R-TX), Dan Bishop (R-NC), Bob Good (R-VA), Matt Rosendale (R-MT)… into my scarf.