France

Racism is never funny

By Joan Trevor French comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala is in the headlines and has had to cut short his latest tour because of remarks he made about the recent Holocaust memorials. The ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz he called “remembrance pornography”. What he means by that is not that many of the politicians lining up to pay their respects — Vladimir Putin, Tony Blair — are hypocritical racists happy to cry crocodile tears over something bad because it happened a long time ago. What he means is what he always means when he talks about Jews and the...

French workers defend 35-hour week

By Colin Foster France’s right wing government plans to weaken and undermine, perhaps eventually repeal, France’s law setting a 35 hour working week, which was passed by the Socialist Party government in 1997. Recent articles by the French Marxist economist Michel Husson* examine the background. France’s right wing claims that the 35 hour week created no new jobs, but only brought extra costs for the employers. In fact, “the shorter working week has created between 350,000 and 500,000 jobs: this range is the outcome of the available research**. The real question is why a shortening of the...

France's Turkey veto

In the end, despite lobbying by the Polish government and others, the EU constitution signed by 25 member states on 29 October did not contain references to Europe’s “Judaeo-Christian roots” in its preamble. But the question whether the EU should in some senses be a club only for Christians rumbles on, including, strongly, in France. To come into effect, the constitution has to be ratified by the 25 states. Nine are committed to holding referenda on the constitution, allowing their populations as a whole to decide whether they accept the constitution. That will not be easy to achieve. In...

Casual workers can organise!

December 2000 saw the first “hamburgrève” in Paris, when the young, mostly casual workers at the McDo (McDonald’s) restaurant on Boulevard Saint-Germain went on strike. The next fast food chain hit by worker unrest was Pizza Hut. A leading figure in these conflicts was Abdel Mabrouki, now aged 31. He went to work at Pizza Hut as a motorcycle delivery boy, but got demoted to washer-up because of his poor eyesight. From his corner of the kitchen Abdel plotted the way management dealt with their staff, hassling them to work faster, the corners they cut in health and safety, and hygiene. He...

France's lost youth?

The latest issue of Critique communiste, magazine of the French Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, has an interview in which researcher Michel Pialoux discusses his findings on the “disorganisation of the working class” being generated by long-term mass unemployment and casualisation in France. “60 years ago, the bac [the French equivalent of A levels] was the passport to the bourgeoisie. Today it still has a symbolic significance even though 80% of an age group get it.” Those who don’t get it suffer worse than working-class kids who left school without qualifications in past decades: “Getting...

Livio Maitan, 1923-2004

Avec Livio Maitan, le mouvement ouvrier italien et européen vient de perdre l'une des figures les plus marquantes de son histoire dans le second vingtième siècle, celui qui commence en 1945 et se termine en 1989. [From the French Marxist bulletin Liaisons .] Vénitien, intellectuel de valeur, amateur de foot, au contact facile et ouvert, Livio Maitan est à la suite de son engagement dans la guerre civile contre les fascistes, un dirigeant des Jeunesses socialistes italiennes. C'est dans ce cadre, alors qu'il représentait les JS italiennes à un congrès de la SFIO, qu'il est "gagné" à la IV°...

Rousseau, Arnold, and Vardy

By Mike Rowley In the context of the debate on the banning of the hijab in French public schools, it is instructive to consider the contrast between the educational systems of France and Britain. In theory at least, the French school system is much more secular. The reasons for this are partly historical. The idea of universal education in France was established by the Revolution. The ideology of the French Revolution being secular, state schools were of course also secular: education, like church lands, was wrested from the hands of the clergy and massively expanded. Of course there were...

Liberté, égalité, fraternité - There is a power in the union

By Vicki Morris On 29 June the French parliament voted a change in the status of the public owned national power company EDF-GDF (Electricité de France-Gaz de France). EDF-GDF became a sort of "société anonyme", a joint-stock company, open to 30% private capital. Private shareholders can in future reap profits from the labour of the EDF-GDF employees. In time, no one doubts, the government's plan is to open the entire company to private capital, until it is wholly privately owned - until it is privatised, in short! The vote in parliament was no surprise: the right-wing government of prime...

French far-left election blow

Les luttes continuent! By Vicki Morris The French far-left suffered a knock in the recent elections for the European parliament. The joint list of the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR)-Lutte Ouvriere (LO) received 432,000 votes, 2.58% of the total. They lost their five MEPs (although because of European enlargement they were always going to struggle to get an MEP this time). The LCR's website reports glumly: "From one constituency to the next, if not from one département to the next, there is no big variation, all the departmental votes were under 3.6%. Let us recall that at the regional...

When French miners took on the Nazis

Readers might know Emile Zola's novel Germinal, based on an early strike by French coal miners in northern France in 1884. Lots of socialists know at least the last lines! "The sap was rising in abundance with whispering voices, the germs of life were opening with a kiss. Men were springing up, a black avenging host was slowly germinating in the furrows, thrusting upward for the harvests of future ages. And very soon their germination would crack the earth asunder." While the sentiment remains true, the toilers getting even with the bosses can no longer be coalminers, not in France anyway. On...

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.