"French streets and American sofas."

Those who act and those who don't.

Descendez dans la rue, citoyens! Chambéry, Savoie, 23rd March. (Florian Pépellin, cc by SA 4.0/ Wikimedia Commons.)

29 MARCH—You might be Brazilian or Malian or Singaporean, it is remarkable the world over to watch the French explode into the streets of dozens of cities and towns to protest the imperial president residing in Élysée Palace. It is altogether singular to follow the demonstrations against Emmanuel Macron as an American. The French are still citoyens and take to their streets and public squares. Americans are no longer citizens: They are consumers—and take to their sofas no matter how abusively political elites treat them, no matter how many wars they start, no matter how corrupt the financial system, no matter how many people live in poverty, no matter how grotesque the “defense” budget, no matter how poisoned the environment, no matter… let me not go on. 

Please pass the Fritos and turn on the big game. 

They burned city hall in Bordeaux last week. The Place de la Concorde, where the French protested the monarchy in 1789, is again shoulder-to-shoulder every day and night. Video footage records fires, barricades, appalling confrontations with baton-wielding CRS, the French riot police. Uncollected garbage is everywhere in the capital. The luxury shops along the grand boulevards have boarded up their windows. 

This started, of course, as a protest against Macron’s plan to raise the retirement age in France from 62 to 64 as part of a sweeping reform of the pension system. I have heard many Americans ask, “Two years? What’s the big deal?” 

It is telling enough that Americans would pose this question, missing all the ways what Macron has done is a very big deal. The French work to live, as they like to say, while Americans live to work. Pushing up the retirement age has had a semiotic meaning from the first, signaling the creeping incursion of American neoliberalism into French society.