Word: french
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...April when Save the Rich, which denounces a system it says is rigged to keep the wealthy and powerful in their privileged positions, publicized its facetious demand for a minimum wage for rich people by barging in on a swanky Rotary Club lunch honoring Jean Sarkozy - son of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and a rising political star in his own right. With a boom-box blaring the theme music from the series Dallas, Save the Rich members handed Sarkozy fils an award for "Best Daddy's Boy" and congratulated him on his work to protect France's cosseted élite...
That cozy post World War II arrangement, in which the state has regularly arbitrated between big business and unions, may have helped those three groups, but it has too often ignored wider French society. The system has made reform nearly impossible and is now "sclerotic," according to Julien Bayou, 29, one of the half-dozen or so people at the core of France's new protest movement. "Thirteen percent of people in France live in poverty, youth unemployment is above 25%, and the number of people who can't keep up with the price of rent and food continues...
...proved wildly successful. "What you have is a small number of brilliant people taking up problems that may seem marginal compared to the broader socio-economic debates going on, but which it turns out a lot of people are very concerned with," explains Guy Groux, a specialist in French social and labor conflict for the National Center for Scientific Research. "It's a real 2.0 movement in being able to project a far larger image - and produce a much bigger reaction - than such a small initial protest base previously allowed." (Read: "Why the French Love to Strike...
...sounds a lot like France has just discovered the type of protests that have been used in places like the U.S. and Britain for years, that's partly true. It's also true that previous generations of French protesters have taken on single issues. But that has nearly always been as part of a mass movement. "Think of the feminists, the antiracism movement, the defenders of the needy - even the union demos that used to end by marchers helping themselves to whatever they found on supermarket shelves. All these things were earlier manifestations of what we're seeing with these...
Central to the movement is the handful of single-issue collectives Bayou and his fellow activists have founded. Take Black Thursday, which is named - in a wink to the housing crisis faced by thousands of university students and young French workers - for the day France's best-known classified real estate supplement comes out. The group stages high profile squatting campaigns of empty state- and municipal-owned buildings. Last month, for example, 10 Black Thursday squatters theatrically moved out of a disused building for handicapped students they had occupied since January. That's how long it took to get municipal...