[Le point de vue étranger]

       Voici quelques extraits d’un article écrit par Claire Berlinski et publié dans le Washington Post du dimanche 26 mars. Finalement cette journaliste arrive aux mêmes conclusions que ma petite personne : les étudiants ne sont qu’une bande de réactionnaires, originaires d’un milieu aisé, et cherchant à couler une réforme qui aurait pu profiter aux djeuns des cités. Car aux dernières nouvelles, ce sont bien ces derniers qui vivent dans la précarité. Etrange que l’on soit obligé d’aller faire un tour à l’étranger pour entendre la vérité quant aux événements vécus in situ. Voilà la définition de la précarité en France aujourd’hui : la possibilité d’être viré dans l’instant. La possibilité, seulement. C’est-à-dire que l’on est dans le domaine de la pure virtualité. De la pure spéculation. Ainsi, Claire Berlinski écrit que les émeutes de novembre et les manifestations actuelles sont opposées. Cela me semble être tout à fait vrai, mais si l’on accepte l’idée que ces deux événements sont les deux faces d’une même crise. Une crise structurelle. La France est partagée entre deux réalités qui se côtoient sans jamais se toucher réellement. Entre elles, la ligne de frictions ne demande qu’à s’actualiser pour de bon…
       
       Last Saturday morning, needing help to move several heavy cartons of books from my apartment in central Paris to a storage room, I hired two movers and a van from the want ads. Students were in the streets protesting the Contrat de Premier Embauche (CPE) -- a law proposed to combat unemployment by giving employers more flexibility to fire young employees -- and the barricades and traffic diversions made our four-block drive into a half-hour ordeal. As we turned down one obstructed street after another, the movers -- both Arab immigrants -- became more and more incensed.”They're idiots,” said the driver, gesturing toward the ecstatic protesters. “Puppets for the socialists and the communists.” He pantomimed pulling the strings of a marionette.
       "It's us they hurt," added the second man. By this he meant immigrants and their children, particularly the residents of France's suburban ghettos, where unemployment runs as high as 50 percent. And, of course, he was right, as everyone with even a rudimentary grasp of economics appreciates: If employers are unable to fire workers, they will be less likely to hire them. It is now almost impossible to fire an employee in France, a circumstance that disproportionately penalizes groups seen by employers as risky: minorities, inexperienced workers and those without elite educations, like the outraged man sitting beside me.
       This is the second time in four months that France has been seized with violent protests. And in an important sense, these are counter-riots, since the goals of the privileged students conflict with those of the suburban rioters who took to the streets last November. The message of the suburban rioters: Things must change. The message of the students: Things must stay the same. In other words: Screw the immigrants.
       (…)
       The same question is now being raised in France: Who rules? This is the second time in 11 years that a popularly elected government here faces dismissal not from the voters, but from the streets. If this does not represent a direct challenge to the government's power, it is hard to know what would. Should the government fall, the question will have been answered.
       And the answer will be the mob. As usual.