What the French Students are Saying

Suppose you had been watching the French riots on your TV. Which ones, you ask? They do seem to run together.

Let us start with the riots of Fall 2005 when the young folks from the banlieues expressed their rage and frustration.

Many compassionate and sensitive analysts voiced their concern about the “root cause” of the riots. They pointed to the 25 percent youth unemployment that reached, in the banlieues, 50 percent. It was time for the French government to do something about the sclerotic economy and social deprivation that tossed its young people onto the scrap heap.

What then is the meaning of the elite French students’ street protests, in which the students of France’s top university, the Sorbonne, are protesting the proposal of French Prime Minister Villepin to introduce a law to make it easier to fire young people from their jobs?

British essayist Theodore Dalrymple writes in the London Times that we should not overlook the obvious.

We should never forget that to break a shop window for the good of humanity is one of the greatest pleasures known to Man. Trying to topple governments by shouting insults is also great fun.

But we are looking here for meaning, not for sarcasm, even if it is also one of the greatest pleasures known to Man. So Dalrymple gets to the point.

Whether they know it or not, the people on the streets in France were demonstrating to keep the youth of the banlieues... exactly where they are, namely hopeless, unemployed and feeling betrayed.

A little arithmetic makes Dalrymple’s point for him. If the youth unemployment is the banlieues is 50 percent and the youth unemployment in France generally is 25 percent, then

there must be a considerable section of the young population in which unemployment is less than a quarter, actually much less. One would hardly have to be de Tocqueville to guess in which section of the young population the unemployment was less: the section from which the demonstrators, or at least their leaders and agents provocateurs, are drawn.

Yes, those lefty student demonstrators and their union allies are the ones with the jobs, or the ones most likely to get the good jobs as soon as they graduate. They are anxious to preserve their privileges, as any good aristocrat would.

But the facts on the ground aren’t going to change. Talk to a French small businessman or construction worker and they will tell you that

The French labour regulations make employment of untried persons completely uneconomic for them.

And there is nobody more untried or uneconomic than an angry young teenager in an American inner city or a French banlieue.