Another Strike Approaches

A new strike has begun and it will last, at the very least, through tomorrow. One of my French friends declares Wednesday “deja mort.” More deaths might happen Thursday and into the next week—until the unions decide to stop. 60% of the French public disapproves of the actions; 60% believes that the strike might last a week.

In America, the TV writers are striking. I’ve heard that TV is all reruns now—I’m a Law & Order addict, so this doesn’t sound that bad—which, while not as much an imposition as the transportation system being totally shut down, is pain enough for many Americans. Yet, according to a poll conducted by the LA Times, Los Angeles at the least supports the TV writers.

It’s an amazing inversion of the stereotypical formula: the French love to strike; Americans not so much. We break strikes—look at the air traffic controllers—the French relent.

The purpose of each strike is the source of the unusual inversion. The French metro workers are striking to preserve an old system, one which is untenable and outdated. On the other hand, the American TV writers are striking to secure the future: DVD and internet revenue have not yet reached maturity, but when they do, they will represent a significant source of income.

Both strikes, though, have this in common: the precariousness of the wage-earner. The too-generous French system is unsustainable; the too-stingy TV writers’ deal could be marginalized by the future. Both situations underscore the necessity, for liberalism, to be nimble: to keep in mind what is needed is a set of goals, not necessarily a checklist of specific policies. The French cannot provide for their metro retirees as generously as the once did—it’s difficult to do so with as much debt as they have—and so they must modify it. The TV writers’ deal was once OK but because the rewards are found in different places, their deal, too, must draw from those different places. These are the reasons why the French strike is unjustified and the American justified. Unfortunately, I suspect that in these times, with the rapid consolidation of power on the parts of malpracticing elites, the proper deal will not be reached, and instead the workers will be swept away, never finding safe purchase.

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“Louis Philippe was transition reigning,” declares Victor Hugo in Les Misérables. The remark is true in more than the narrow political sense—he succeeded a Bourbon and gave way to a Republic—but in the broader cultural sense, for the French Revolution and Napoleon unleashed grand energies that changed Europe. Those grand energies were the life of massive works.

Consider first the art of the period, and its commitment to mass life. La Liberté guidant le peuple is firmly committed to mass politics, in the Enlightenment tradition of universal truths. Liberty, a goddess, is the motivation of all pictured, from the poor boy to the rich bourgeois in his top hat—and we can be sure this fusion is representative of the mass rushing behind them. The mass has decided to embrace liberty, the nation, even the French Revolution—note Liberty’s Phrygian cap. Hugo’s Les Misérables does not make the same universal appeal. Inspector Javert, the iron man of law, is the principal villain, and his position of upholding order at all costs is a plausible counterpoint and embraces the views of some of the populace, meaning that it is not universal. But like La Liberté, Les Misérables is firmly devoted to picturing mass politics. Its gargantuan size, its title referring to an entire class of people, its plot, chronicling the lives of students and the poor alike in their rebellion; all of these things display a firm commitment to the masses that characterized Paris at that time.

It was truly the massive moment, and the support systems of Paris creaked under its weight. The cesspool—truly the first time I’ve heard the term used literally—outside of Paris makes me nauseous after the fact; I can only imagine the damage to public health. The move to a real sewer system, with its burying of unpleasant odors (which I got a good enough whiff of), was obligatory. Similarly, while the rulers of France erected many new monuments and buildings, the infrastructure found it difficult to keep pace with the rapidly expanding population, memorably demonstrated by Chevalier’s housing statistics and the many-times modified apartment building of Rue Bercy in Paris: An Architectural History.

What provoked these changes? We can see a rise in nation-consciousness and mass politics, combined with the Paris’ size metastasizing, and they seem to be related phenomena—after all, the cramped concentration breeds both resentment and cooperation—but why have they appeared on the historical scene together?

The levée en masse during the French Revolution is the best place to start. The policy, mandating mass conscription, meant that the citoyens of the French fought en masse, together, as a nation. Those who did not fight made arms for the warriors. The massive conscription allowed the French to conquer large portions of Europe; with Napoleon, the national idea was planted in the formerly fragmented states of Italy and Germany. These two events, broadly observed, are the ones that implanted the idea of mass politics and mass culture in the French mind. Contemporaneous technological advances—the railroad and telegraph—reinforced this mindset of tasks massively done.

The internal immigration that accompanied this period and filled Paris to the brim and beyond was the result of those higher wages and higher opportunities available in Paris. That was part of the transition to a modern, massive industrial state. A new kind of nation was emerging from metamorphosis, and those revolutionary and riotous spasms were the unfortunate consequence of the change.

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Unlike Amsterdam, Paris is not dirty. I just noticed that today.

I do not mean this in the sense that graffiti defaces every wall and there’s dog shit on every corner in Amsterdam. What I mean is that there is literally quite a lot of dirty ground into the sidewalks in Amsterdam, ground down and mixed with water, forming a brown sludge soup. This is not present in Paris.

Nor, for that matter, is the amount of construction. There is a crane visible from the bathroom at the Fondation des Etats-Unis (it only rarely bestirs itself), but, curiously so for such a big city, there are few public works projects or restoration of potholes or the other inevitable fissures of any big city, churning itself about. The only construction occurring on a regular basis, in fact, is restoration of beautiful old buildings, which is as good a way to describe Paris, culturally, politically and aesthetically as there is.

Not so Amsterdam. I saw at least three houses whose basement had become sites of construction, conveyor belts carting away debris from the houses. The construction workers were invariably not doing much—they seemed more preoccupied with their smokes, their Heinekens and ogling passers-by. But they were there; I don’t know what a Parisian construction worker looks like, and it’s difficult for me to begin to compose a mental image of such a fantastic creature.

This says more about Paris than it does Amsterdam. It’s the rare big, important city that doesn’t have some sort of construction going on. The city is a center of activity, and one of those forms of activity is construction: people want to move in; people are losing and gaining fortunes; power resides there; all these things point to construction. But despite the presence of all of these factors in Paris, the city retains more-or-less the same buildings it was blessed with in the past. If it does need buildings, generally it will reconfigure old ones—the Louvre, before its current incarnation as great museum, played the role as Finance Ministry; the parking lot was under the Richelieu wing (I think one of the best dinner-party sentences to throw in there would be “Yeah, I used to park in the Louvre,” along with “So I quit my lion-taming job because it wasn’t exciting enough and instead started to hunt big game in Africa.”). Paris has looked at itself and said, “You know what? I like what I’ve got,” and it’s tough to blame the city, that cocky abstract apostrophe.