The French Strikes of 1995 and their Political Aftermath

Abstract

LIKE MANY OF HIS APHORISMS, MARX'S DESIGNATION OF THE FRENCH as the model political nation (leaving the economy to the English and philosophy for the Germans) contained enough of a grain of truth to remain relevant for over a century. Since 1989, the idea of politics based on the revolutionary experience begun in 1789 and pursued by a unified and international working-class subject has lost its utility for understanding the political choices facing modern industrial democracies. Nowhere is the need for a new understanding of the political more clear than in France itself, as illustrated by the strikes that paralysed the country for more than three weeks in November and December of 1995 and forced the government to retreat. While some saw the birth of a ‘social movement’, cheered the victory of society against the state, or imagined that class struggle had begun anew, the more pessimistic argued that the French had once again proven themselves incapable of political reform. The former presuppose a model of politics from the nineteenth century, the latter look forward to a globalized twenty-first century. For those of us still living in the twentieth, analysis of the French strikes can help us to understand how politics can make the shape of the twentyfirst century less inevitable.