The French Are Continually Surprised By What They Have Just Done -- Raymond Aron, France's Leading Postwar Intellectual

My wife and I came back last weekend from a speech in Paris, where the streets were partially full of... garbage!

Since the days of Jacques Chirac's Prime Ministership in the late 20th Century, when we lived in Paris, little green bug-like vehicles with the designation "Proprete de Paris" ("cleanliness of Paris") plied their way through the city on each morning as efficient cleanup brigades. How could the French not have anticipated the trashing of their "City of Light"?

What happened then, earlier this month?

For years economists have urged on the French a greater flexibility in labor market legislation, which in shorthand means making it easier to hire and fire workers and thus get the economy going. The Germans did this in the closing days of Gerhard Schroeder's presidency, but in an atmosphere of social harmony, with workers and supervisors agreeing to it.

The French couldn't do it. The workers saw the new proposals (the similar "la loi Macron," after the new finance minister and former Rothschild Bank official Emmanuel Macron) as an assault on what they called their "social gains." The French authorities proceeded to ram the new law through the Assembly under the threat of a vote of no-confidence in the government (the so-called 49.3 procedure).

The French Left retaliated by launching a strike by garbagemen ("ebouers") and threatening strikes by Air France and launching massive demonstrations against the new law.