Is France Our Future?

Ravi Gupta (0:00)

Welcome to the Lost Debate, a show for political eclectics. I'm Ravi Gupta, and today, I'm going to empty my notebook and talk about what is happening over in France.

Before I get there, just shout out to everybody who voted for Where the Schools Went, our podcast, about the 20 year effort to rebuild the New Orleans school system. That podcast won six Signal Awards. So three gold medals, one silver medal and two bronze. It's definitely one of the most successful podcasts in the history of that awards, which is like the Oscars for podcasting. There really is no such thing as having that kind of prestige, but it is quite an honor. Nonetheless, I want to thank everybody in the audience who voted and supported that work. If you haven't listened to Where the Schools Went yet, go check it out wherever you get your podcasts. It's five or six episodes all about what made the transformation of the New Orleans school system so important.

But I've been following closely what's been happening over in France, and I feel like it's super relevant to us. And so I wanted to do a bit of a medium dive. Not necessarily deep enough yet, but I want to get to the level of depth that I think would do it full justice. But given how fast changing the events are over there, I wanted to give you a sense of just the basic facts on the ground and some preliminary takeaways. So let's start with just what's happened recently. So on Saturday, at least a half million protestors, the organizers claim over 800,000. So somewhere between a half a million to 800,000 protestors marched across the country against rising costs and underfunded schools. And so that was during the day. Those protests by most accounts were peaceful for the most part, but then at night, things changed. And rioters, looters, and maybe even some of those protestors, who knows, took over and committed a lot of destruction that I'll talk about. This was called the National Day of Action. That was part of a movement that started with disaffected students, and then eventually became joined by left-wing activists. And then this group called the Yellow Vest Group, which was born out of the 2018 mass protests over fuel tax increases in France. And they're called Yellow Vests, the Yellow Vests, because French drivers are required to keep a fluorescent yellow vest in their car. If their car breaks down, they put the vest on. It's actually not a bad lie. Actually, if you've ever been stuck on the side of a road, especially when it's raining or dark, actually having a vest like that could come in handy. By Sunday night, though, because of what was happening during the night, and in some cases now was spilling over to the daytime violence, over 2,400 people had been arrested, and over 3,000 businesses were destroyed, according to the Associated Press. Nearly 1,000 police officers and military were injured during Saturday's violence.

Some of them were injured seriously. This is according to the French Interior Ministry. And actually, there had been protests going on for quite some time. I'll give you a little bit of that timeline in a second. Government figures say that 937 additional police officers and military and 248 students and 149 teaching staff had been injured before the weekend's unrest. So almost, you know, basically double all those numbers. And these looters and rioters torched a 19th century city hall building and tourist office. They breached the Marseille city hall.

Thousands of shops were looted and destroyed. You could see these videos on Twitter. They're horrible. I'll play a couple of them in a second.

This whole recent spat started in September 21st at a high school in the suburbs outside of Paris. Students protested things within the school, like teachers who weren't being replaced when absent, classes of 35 students or more, poor facilities, some scheduling issues, and anxiety about the university admission system. Within about 10 days, those protests had spread across the Paris region and then nationally and by October 1st, roughly a thousand high schools, which is about one in four in France, had been affected. By October 6th, the Interior Ministry estimated that 266,000 people were demonstrating nationally, and organizers said this was about 450,000. Police and demonstrators were increasingly starting to clash. Violence was starting to increase. The government argued that parts of the movement at this point had turned into what they call urban violence, while critics accused the authorities of responding with riot control tactics that they felt were overbearing. By October 13th, another nationwide mobilization drew about 150 plus thousand by government estimates. And again, the protesters and unions say more. Students by then had been joined by some of these other groups. So trade unionists, CLOS, all those. Then came this past Saturday. And so this is when the movement merged into this sort of broader, what they call, convergence of struggles, unions, workers concerned about wages and pensions, people protesting the cost of living, veterans of the Yellow Vest Movement, university students, pro-Palestinian activists. And the government counted, again, about a half a million organizers at 800,000 plus. You had over 100,000 in Paris alone. Now, in the wake of the protests plus the riots and the looting, many urban areas in the country are affected by a curfew there. As I was examining it today, there's a sense maybe that some of these folks are ignoring the curfew, and that's something to keep an eye on. I'm recording this at 139 Eastern, which means that we're now under the curfew in a lot of these places in Paris and some of the other cities in Europe.