Word: movements
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...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 to rise. We're caught in the middle of all that, so we had to find a more efficient...
...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...
...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 collectives - only with much larger bases...
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...
...opportunities for young graduates, hiring incentives - which French politicians have been unwilling or unable to tackle for decades. But Sarkozy's reforms have rarely delivered all they promised, and continue to ignore some problems. With young French so frustrated and angry, it's little wonder that the new protest movement is growing in popularity. "We had little choice but to step into that void and get something done ourselves, because it was clear we were going to be left to rot as these older forces focused on their usual agendas," Bayou says. While unions are the movement's natural allies...