Translator's note: Since the end of March France has been roiled by protests over the Socialist government's proposals to loosen France's famously rigid labor laws. The Nuit Debout movement, modeled on Occupy Wall Street and anti-austerity movements in Spain and elsewhere, began with nightly assemblies in the Place de la République in Paris. With some of France's labor unions joining in, the protests have since spread around the country and increased in intensity. Blockades of oil refineries have caused fuel shortages. On May 26, the secretary-general of one France's largest labor federations, the CGT, called a flash strike against the country's daily newspapers for refusing to print a communiqué from him. Did Philippe Martinez overstep? Popular sentiment in France appears to have turned against him and the protesters. Will he soon be as unpopular as France's president, François Hollande? On June 10, the Euro 2015 soccer tournament begins in France, floods permitting. Three days later, the French senate takes up the labor reform bill passed by the lower house in May. On June 14, protesters have promised another day of protests.
* * *
Philippe Martinez is the French syndicalist with the hang-dog look, the expression of infinite sadness that belligerent pronouncements and caustic talking points enliven not one bit.
He has a way, a way both macho and a little pathetic, of overplaying his hand with the government, declaring that he will never back down, that he will go to the brink, that he will make France yield and, if necessary, bring the country "to its knees."
Over and over we hear from the sidelines of marches in which fires, tear gas and warning shots have replaced the chants and slogans of the workers of yesteryear, Martinez's defiant words about "police brutality," about "employers' violence," and about his own intent to alter, unassisted, and like one of the greats, the "balance of power" between the CGT and a treacherous left that supposedly has turned betrayal into a tool of government and of survival.
The most striking aspect of all this is the spectacle that the CGT, once so powerful and so self-possessed, is making of itself.
The spectacle of this organization, whose security units, which were the pride of the militant world, prevented any and all deviations from the script during demonstrations, suddenly no longer having either the authority or the will to contain a new generation of wreckers.
The sad realization that this anemic body hooked up to a glucose drip moans and groans so loudly because it no longer has a hold on anything; that it would be not near so radical in word and symbol if it were not aware of having lost in the only realm that really counts: that of the world of work. Far away indeed are the ghosts of Georges Séguy and Henri Krasucki! Long gone the glory days of the battle over Renault and the concessions wrenched from Pierre Dreyfus! Dim, nearly erased, the extraordinary emanations of civilized intelligence that were the great labor negotiations of the last century.
The most striking thing, and the saddest, is the soulless pack led by its CGT boss, a pack that is now only the shadow of the rallies, the mass assemblies, the intermingling of revolutionary groups, the Sartrian fraternities, and the Mallarmean crowds spreading like wings taking flight--the shadow, in short, of The People, who instilled passion in the young minds of the 1960s before just as suddenly quenching them.
For people there were.
Forged in the crucibles of the blast-furnaces, on the assembly lines, in the groans of the industrial machine, and in the struggles to break free from it, there was that which became known as The People.
There was, from Dickens to Tolstoy, from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin to How Green Was My Valley -- there was, in France, from Robespierre to Michelet, from Lamartine to Hugo, that fragile yet colossal being: The People was neither the Latin throng (turba) nor the Athenian beast. It was not that gaping mass, dehumanized by the machine, in which human beings drowned. Still less was it the protest that became a pack running riot along Paris's Boulevard Diderot, a pack aping the proletarian act against a backdrop of mindless slogans and to the sounds of destruction of the urban landscape.
That People stumbled.
It went astray; lost its way.
It abandoned itself to immense and terrible idols: to the political idol, when it saw itself as a nation; to the communist idol, when it imagined itself internationally, as a human race without borders; and to the religious idol, of course, under the name and in the guise of churches.
But it once existed.
And occasionally it achieved greatness.
There was greatness, there was power of mind and thought, in the mystery of the communion of men and women around a language, around a task or quest, and even around a piece of territory that some of them decided to occupy together, drawing inspiration from lovely phrases full of the general will and democratic yearning.
Unfortunately, all that seems dead. That is the meaning of the fifteen minutes of Warholian fame that Mr. Martinez is now enjoying.
Nothing in that seeming death, nothing about the anemic CGT and its hollow show of strength, nothing about this leftist front caricatured by a playground tribune, nothing about a leftism become synonymous with nihilism (though not the nihilism of the philosophers or even that of Nechayev; the nihilism instead of three-time losers and repeat offenders trying to cheat not death but boredom and the awareness of their own insignificance -- none of this is cause for exultation.
The disappearance of a people is never good news.
Today, indeed, it is probably one of the worst pieces of news that we face.
And it is not an occasion on which we can ask the band to strike up some new "Multinationale" (the lyrics remain unwritten) in place of the old "Internationale," which is now defunct and, worse, has been travestied -- because the ongoing travesty of The People that has convened on the periphery of the great contemporary spectacle signifies nothing other than an admission that meaning has been lost, dissolved in the wasteland of ignorance, in the swelling of that half-dead, half-living matter that proliferates when bodies decompose, which Polybius, the greatest of the Greek historians, could not decide whether to burn or to drown.
How does one revive a people?
I do not know, but one thing is sure: the silence of minds and the subjugation of consciences will certainly have the opposite effect.
Translated from French by Steven B. Kennedy