Guest post by Martha Careful
We’ve all seen reports about the riots in France. I live in
Paris, not far from the town where all this started. Yesterday, I walked by two
of the best high schools in the country, and the kids were blocking the doors
with trash cans (but you could walk around them). Everyone was smiling and
laughing; it was more like a tailgate party than a protest—but these places are
in the heart of Paris.
Next week, I have to go down south for a few days to be with
family, and we stay in one of those banlieue neighborhoods. It’s funny—the
building is where my wife grew up. I’ve been going there for 25 years. It used
to be 100% French, like a French version of a nice American suburb.
Today... not so much. In the last five years, it’s changed
completely. I’ve watched the neighborhood go from bucolic to ghetto in a
relatively short period of time. On the one hand, it doesn’t look like the
Bronx or East LA, with drug dealers and hookers on the corners and gunshots
every day—yet—but, on the other, the signs are right there, like the car that
was immolated in the building parking lot, rocks through lobby windows, and
ever-increasing trash everywhere. The city’s not quite Marseilles yet, but it’s
not far from it either.
As for the protests themselves, the funny, or not-so-funny,
thing is that the kids have a valid point. A friend of mine who lives in one of
the nicest areas of Paris has kids in elementary school and says that one of
them (along with the other 35 kids in the class) spends probably one day a week
or more sitting in the library for eight hours a day because the teacher never
showed up and they have no substitutes. Add to that a shortage of books and
basic supplies, plus behaviorally challenged students, and things are less than
optimal.
One of the key issues is actually HVAC, or the lack thereof.
Stone and brick buildings often have minimal, or sometimes no, heat in the
winter, forcing students to dress like Eskimos IN class. Similarly, most have
no AC, and many have no ventilation, which can make years like this one, with
90+ degrees in early May, simply unbearable.
Nor does that mean the left isn’t trying to take advantage;
they are—they’re calling for a third wave this week—but thus far, they have not
had much luck widening the protests/violence in terms of getting other groups
to join, although there was a general strike last Monday that included trash
pickup but not transportation. And now the teachers have joined the fray.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the left and likely
presidential candidate, posted on X that members of his party “call for
non-violence in methods of struggle” so he can pretend he’s calling for peace,
knowing his followers do just the opposite. Just the day before, he stated,
“violence can be legitimate,” though he qualified this statement by saying it
was “better to avoid it.”
There have been calls for the government to crack down on...
the police for being too rough on the protesters! What’s more, the mayor of St.
Denis, one of the most important suburbs in France, has been accused by the
police of “incitement to commit a crime” after joining arms with and
encouraging the protests, as well as presenting the protests as legitimate.
The government is having a hard time responding. I’m not
suggesting there’s going to be a giant cataclysm right around the corner,
although there might be, but the reality is that the economic struggle is real.
I see it every day as I walk around my neighborhood and see homeless people and
closed stores—and again, I’m in the center of Paris, one of the nicest places
in the city, if not the country.
Much of the problem, I would suggest, aside from the
immigration problem, is the fact that 60% of the GDP comes from government
spending, and more than half of the remaining 40% is made up of big companies.
Entrepreneurship, the magic elixir that created so much prosperity in the
world, is almost anathema in France.
It honestly breaks my heart every time I walk by one of the
many, many boarded-up buildings in so many places in the city, including many
tourist spots. Every one of them is someone’s broken dream. Sure, some of them
were bad ideas, bad operators, or bad timing, but just as many, if not more,
are the result of government regulations that choke the life out of that
entrepreneurial spark.
How do we know this? Because if it were just the necessity
of entrepreneurial spark, we’d see those boarded-up storefronts going through a
series of stores until one sticks. But that’s not what’s happening.
Storefronts on main boulevards and on heavily trafficked
tourist paths—despite having plenty of people living in the neighborhoods—find
themselves boarded up for years on end. In any given month, one new shop will
open just to see two more close.
Even in the area of government spending, things aren’t
working. In areas that are arguably the most important in a person’s life,
education and healthcare, failure is setting in. Results in the vaunted
education system are rapidly declining, and getting appointments can take
months in Paris and far longer in many other places. They can’t find enough
teachers or doctors, as both professions are bleeding practitioners.
Unfortunately for France, all of that spells a fiscal train
wreck heading their way. While these “protests” may have taken a violent
leftist turn, the reality is that the problems that sparked them are completely
valid. As the fiscal challenges that bedevil education spread to other parts of
the economy and the demographics change, such violent “protests” will likely
become more frequent.
I don’t see that the government has an answer for this, and,
from what I can tell, most of the French people don’t either. Sadly, it doesn’t
seem as if many people recognize that the problem is the government—and I don’t
mean the left or right in this case—I mean the government writ large. Too big.
Too inefficient. Too much inertia. Too much cowardice to tackle the problems of
immigration and benefits.
We can only hope that one of these days, these tinderboxes
that keep catching fire alert the French that it’s just not possible to wait
out the problems. Because they’re not going anywhere on their own. It will take
a leader of courage and vision to do what needs to be done, and an army of
French patriots to put him or her into the Élysée (the French White House).
Say what you will of Napoleon, he brought an end to a decade
of upheaval, chaos, and violence and brought order to a nation very much in
need of it. France in the 21st century certainly doesn’t need someone to lead
it on invasions across the continent, but it does need someone with the
willingness to take on the entrenched bureaucrats, politicians, and activists
who suckle at the teat of the state while French citizens watch their country
collapse around them... metaphorically, at least for now.
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