My  roommate and I finally had a chance to pendre la crémaillère on Saturday night, which is franglais for we had a housewarming party to celebrate her arrival on the scene this past January.

It was, by all accounts, a raging success. Her friends mixed and mingled with my friends, and several of my friends found they knew each other independently of any association with yours truly.

One of the joys of blending your friends with someone else’s is that you get to see them all try to hook up with each other. More than one young man was smitten with Gill (who isn’t??), and one French fellow, in desperate need of her approval, confided that he knew the English terminology for several sex acts which are too naughty for me to refer to explicitly.

This self-same fellow earned my personal ire when he eavesdropped on my conversation with a fellow Anglophone. I was explaining, in English, that two of my friends had so kindly brought me some strawberry-flavored vodka in a tube that they had procured at the Bon Marché. Apparently the way I pronounced the name of that hallowed hall of commerce was "just too cute" and said Frog went on to prance merrily about the room speaking French with a pronounced American accent. I gritted my teeth and tried not to tell him what I thought of his English skills.

Several bloggers were in attendance, some meeting each other for the first time, and some non-bloggers had to be informed gently that the girls referred to as “coquette” and “petite” in their midst were actually minor celebrities. The Brits banded together and hunkered down til four in the morning, the actors traded shop stories, and at some point in the night my friend Joel decreed me the Gertrude Stein of my generation, “only without the dykey stuff."

To that charming distinction I humbly qualify that I cannot hope to rival Stein in terms of her girth, her modernist art collection, and her healthy disdain for punctuation.

So there I was, innocently taking the RER B to Port Royal from St Michel yesterday, when I found myself surrounded by screaming twentysomethings, all banging on whatever they could get their hands on– the sides of the escalator, the metro turnstiles, each others’ backs, their own heads, drums, and pots and pans clearly brought along for the express purpose of giving me a headache. Their voices resonated all around me, their shrill yelps bouncing off the tiled walls in the tight corridors. I gritted my teeth and turned up my iPod.

When I arrived at Port Royal I had to fight to get out of the station, and when I emerged into the daylight this is what I saw:

and this:

and this on the side of a bus stop:

(so scary!)

I also saw this:

and this

and I laughed at these people

and as I passed the police, who were standing around with nothing to do, one of them played with his shield and said to his partner gleefully "Je vais me déguiser!"


But my favorite was this:

This was sent to me by my colleague Dan, who was apparently part of the crowd of protesters who got tear-gassed at the Sorbonne.

Makes me yearn for my tenure at that fine university, when tears ran down my face not from a chemical defense weapon but out of sheer and utter boredom in my cours de méthodologie…

And the counter-protestors are stepping up their actions as well. Apparently there’s a big counter-protest scheduled for Sunday and we lecteurs are supposed to attend. According to their site:

"Pour le moment, nous organisons un sitting (sit-in) Dimanche 19 Mars à 13h et jusqu’à 15h sur le parvis de l’Hotel de Ville de Paris."

I love the way they use the English verb, to sit, but in a way that English speakers wouldn’t use it in this context ("a sitting"). Then they give the correct English form so everyone’s clear that the Franglais for "sit-in" is "un sitting."

Further down on the site they ask that anyone who attends on sunday come wearing a white t-shirt, to emphasize that they are not protesting in the name of any ideology or political (pseudo)philosophy.

Unfortunately, I may be on a plane for Seville that day to go cover this.  Oh well.  Protestors in Paris or Imams in Spain? I think my choice is clear.

I was jubilant to find upon arriving at Nanterre yesterday that classes were suspended all day.  But I learned very quickly how serious things have turned… A referendum scheduled for today in order for the students to vote whether or not to continue the strike was abruptly cancelled by the president of the University, apparently out of fear that violence similar to what happened at the Sorbonne would occur at Nanterre. I’m off to catch up with some of the ATERS in the English dept to find out if anyone has heard anything about when this will blow over.  Not that I mind a little time off from those 8 am classes I’ve been blessed with this semester.

According to the Nouvel Observateur, the president has closed the university until security can be assured. The president told the paper that there are a number of students who wish to take back the university, and for classes, disrupted for the past three weeks, to resume. these students, he said, "are sometimes more numerous than the protesters." Last Thursday, security forces were called in over fifty times to curb physical aggressions which had kindled up between students.

This whole debacle makes more sense if you recall that the riots in May 1968 actually started at Nanterre.  For weeks I’ve been saying "But this is not 1968, this is not Vietnam!" but it’s true that there has been something boiling in France over the past year and I would argue that this has more to do with an underlying sense that thigns need to be shaken up than it has to do with the actual CPE. It’s been a fascinating time to be in France, and I’m doing my best to keep track of the major issues that keep polarizing the country and which get frenetic media coverage what with the rejection of the referendum last May 29th, the riots in the suburbs last fall, the controversy over the cartoons of Mohammed, the anti-Semitic murder of 23 year-old Parisian Jew Ilan Halimi, and now this… am I leaving anything out?

In the meantime, I’ve located a number of Internet resources for information direct from the strikers.  To wit:

Stop CPE 92, a blog where Nanterrians argue about the strike and some students propose that Sarkozy is worse than Hitler (I know, I know, but it’s worth reading just for the comments) FR

Another blog on the strikes at Nanterre, with some nice photos

More photos

This morning as I got off the RER at Nanterre-Université, my heart was pounding. I had heard, via the Nouvel Obs and some of my colleagues and students, that there was a university-wide strike planned for today. In other words, there was a possibility that I might get to turn right back around and go home!

As I climbed the stairs, two students were posted at the exit, handing out flyers: "1500 pour la greve!" they announced. "Ce qui prouve une chose: la mobilisation est effective, elle continue et s’accroit au sein de l’Université Paris X Nanterre." I dared to hope.  "Come on kids, make me proud," I muttered under my breath as I neared F building.

Then I saw a sight to see. My colleague Dan walking in the opposite direction, away from F building, with a smile on his face, making a little turnaround gesture with his pointer finger. "Turn yourself right back around, Miss!" he announced. "No classes for you today!"

I callooed and callayed and thrust a fist into the air. "en greve! en greve! americans for the greve!" I cried, feeling like mounting a barricade for the first time in weeks.

Let freedom ring!

On a side note, look how freaking cute my genius boyfriend is.   But don’t leave him any embarrassing comments.

The universities continue to strike, at the Sorbonne , Nanterre (as I learned this morning by email from a fellow lecteur), Jussieu, and I’m told Tolbiac, Censier, and up to over thirty others around France.

The strikes are in response to the fact that the Assemblée Nationale voted in the loi sur l’égalité des chances yesterday, the law that (thanks, Amy) makes possible the CPE, but which also aims to "mettre le pied à l’étrier à des jeunes qui ne se voient rien offrir," according to the Prime Minister ["put the foot into the stirrup of young people (read: non-white people) who see no future for themselves"].

Yet again, the strikes at Nanterre occur on a day when I’m not teaching. Drat. I taught yesterday, however, and my students clamored to tell me about their experiences at the big manifestation on Tuesday. Apparently the protest took place calmly and peacefully, marching from Republique to Nation, with the only conflicts taking place between the police and the unions over how many people had been there (in Paris my students said the number was in the hundreds of thousands).

When I expressed my surprise that it went off so uneventfully, one student disagreed: "My friend had to go to the bathroom, and so she had to leave [the area cordoned off for] the protest, and before she could leave, the police made her take off all of her stickers," she reported with some annoyance.

"God forbid the protest should spread to the bathrooms of Paris," I replied, mock-seriously. "All hell would have broken loose."

Really, though, I wonder about all this protesting at the universities. It makes sense, because these are the kids the law will most directly affect, those who will graduate and seek their first jobs in the next few years. But we don’t really hear so much about protests at the grands écoles, do we? Because those kids ostensibly will be on the job market around the same time as my students at the fac, so shouldn’t they be equally worried about the threat of précarité, or precariousness, that comes with a contract that permits the employee in question to be–gasp–fired?

I tried to get some sense of the response to the CPE on the part of the elite French students by asking my boyfriend his opinion. N, a graduate of one of the grands écoles whose name I can never remember, as it’s a melodious amalgam of French vowel sounds, hasn’t articulated his opinion of the CPE; when I bring it up he just mocks the whole system. I get the feeling he’s one of those Lawrentian revolutionaries who don’t think it’s any use modifies the system, better to blow it all up and start over– or quit France and move to Denmark.

From what I can tell, the students at the grands écoles are reacting in the following way: at the Ecole Normale Supérieure they’re striking because of inroads the government wants to make in allocations de recherche, at HEC they’re making polls of the striking universities, at INSEE/ENSAE or whatever (I think that’s where N went) they’re studying the statistics of the strikes, at EHESS they’re studying the sociology of the CPE. But none of these students is actually taking part: they’re too busy studying.

It kind of reminds me of what my dad told me about his experience during May 1968. At a time when students at Berkeley and Columbia were chaining themselves to buildings, my father was studying architecture at Penn. Apparently some kids from Columbia went down to Philly to recruit their Ivy brethren to the cause. The architecture kids reportedly told the Columbia kids to hit the road: they were too busy working on their final projects to protest.

I always liked that story.