France Is Not a Postcard (Also a Barricade)
The country of Chanel and Dior is also the country of the barricade. Its political and economic history cannot be understood merely through the castles, monuments and pageantry admired by outsiders.
By Lualhati Madlangawa-Guererro
There is something curious, if not altogether amusing, about the expressions of concern accompanying the latest disturbances in France. As demonstrators gather in the streets of Paris and other French cities, protesting deteriorating public services, educational conditions and the rising cost of living, a certain class of observers has found particular offense in the apparent absence of French national flags. Photographs showing red banners, trade-union insignia and the emblems of left-wing organizations have encouraged the familiar complaint that France is somehow losing its identity. The conclusion, presumably, is that French patriotism can be measured by the frequency with which the tricolour appears in a crowd, rather than by the political convictions or material interests of the people composing it.
One might wonder what these concerned observers have actually learned about France beyond what they have seen in travel advertisements, historical dramas and illustrated volumes on European royalty. Their conception of the country seems rooted in the picturesque: the Palace of Versailles, the gardens of the Tuileries, the old châteaux of the Loire Valley, the magnificent gowns and elaborate ceremonies of the Bourbon court. France, in this imagination, is a country of refinement, hereditary dignity and well-ordered public occasions. Its citizens are expected to preserve the atmosphere, maintain the scenery and conduct their disagreements without interfering with the visitor’s appreciation of the monuments.
It is an attractive picture, certainly, and one that France itself has cultivated with considerable commercial success. The French tourism industry has long understood the value of selling history, fashion and culture as components of a distinctive national product. Yet the trouble begins when the commercial representation of a country is mistaken for the country itself. France has never been merely a collection of architectural treasures, nor has its political development consisted of an uninterrupted succession of dignified ceremonies presided over by benevolent rulers. Much of what the world now recognizes as modern France was produced through precisely the kind of social conflict that some of its contemporary admirers regard as an embarrassing departure from national tradition.
Indeed, whether a demonstration comes from an industrial worker, a farmer, a university student, a pensioner or a public employee, the French have repeatedly shown a willingness to bring their grievances into the streets when ordinary political arrangements seem insufficient. The causes are seldom identical, and the participants may belong to movements whose economic and political objectives are incompatible. A farmer protesting agricultural imports may have little in common with a socialist student demanding greater public expenditure, while a pensioner opposing retirement reforms may reject the methods of militant trade unionists. Yet all participate in a political culture in which the public demonstration has remained an established means of asserting demands upon government.
Sometimes such demonstrations are peaceful, disciplined and conducted through recognized organizations. At other times they become incendiary, literally as well as politically, particularly when confrontations with police or the intervention of violent factions transform a public assembly into an occasion for destruction. There is no reason to romanticize the burning of shops, the assault of public officials or the devastation of private property. The immediate victims of such violence are often ordinary workers and small proprietors who have little influence over the policies being contested. Nevertheless, it would be equally mistaken to interpret every outbreak of disorder as proof that the political tradition from which the original demonstration emerged was itself illegitimate.
The distinction matters because the present unrest has brought together grievances extending well beyond a single ideological organization. The demonstrations of October 17 followed weeks of student protests over shortages of teachers, deteriorating classrooms and educational conditions, eventually attracting trade unions, public employees, Yellow Vest activists and others concerned with wages, pensions and household purchasing power. Although hundreds of thousands demonstrated peacefully, serious rioting, looting and attacks on public buildings occurred in several cities. The government is obliged to protect public safety and commercial property, but the origins of the movement cannot be adequately explained by treating the entire body of demonstrators as participants in criminal disorder.
One might imagine a young Frenchwoman named Chloé, a student of left-wing convictions who joins a demonstration demanding better schools and more affordable living conditions. She may carry a red banner rather than the tricolour, and her political opinions may be thoroughly objectionable to a conservative admirer of French grandeur. Yet her nationality does not become less authentic because she chooses the pavement rather than the salon as the venue for expressing them.
The France of Chanel and Dior is also the France of this leftist Chloé. There is no contradiction in recognizing both as parts of the same national society, except to those who have come to believe that a country’s commercial elegance must somehow exclude its political discontent. The boutiques, fashion houses and grand avenues of Paris are not inhabited by an entirely separate civilization from the people who clean them, staff them, transport their merchandise or attend the public schools and universities that sustain the city’s workforce.
To suggest otherwise is to confuse a picturesque image of France with the social and economic relationships that make the image possible.
The historical difficulty with this selective understanding of France is considerable. The Revolution of 1789 was hardly the conclusion of French political development. It inaugurated a prolonged struggle over sovereignty, property, representation and the organization of society that repeatedly brought the population into confrontation with governments of almost every description. The July Revolution of 1830 overthrew Charles X. Another revolution in 1848 removed Louis-Philippe. The Paris Commune of 1871 challenged the established political order under the red flag. In 1936, factory occupations and strikes accompanied the Popular Front’s introduction of landmark labor reforms. Then came May 1968, when students and workers occupied universities and factories while challenging the political and social assumptions of postwar France.
These movements were by no means identical, nor should their differences be dissolved into a sentimental account of one continuous revolution. The constitutional monarchists of 1830 did not necessarily share the objectives of the social republicans of 1848, while the Communards of 1871 advanced arrangements that many moderate republicans vigorously opposed. What they did share was an understanding that the relationship between the people and the state remained open to political contestation. Governments could claim legitimacy through constitutional forms, historical inheritance, military authority or electoral victory, but none could expect the French public to accept that political argument had been permanently settled.
The history of the national flag itself makes the present complaint particularly peculiar. The tricolour emerged from the Revolution, was displaced by the royal white flag during the Bourbon Restoration and returned following the upheaval of 1830. In 1848, revolutionaries debated whether the national emblem should be entirely red before Alphonse de Lamartine successfully defended the retention of the blue, white and red. The argument was not between Frenchmen and foreigners but between Frenchmen holding different conceptions of their country. To describe the red flags of the Commune or May 1968 as evidence of an alien political influence would therefore require one to dismiss substantial portions of France’s own political inheritance.
Even Napoleon Bonaparte, whose military achievements and imperial ceremonies are frequently admired by enthusiasts of European grandeur, complicates the nostalgic picture. Napoleon was a product of the Revolution and owed his extraordinary advancement to the collapse of the old system of hereditary privilege. His rise through the revolutionary armies would have been inconceivable under the social arrangements of the earlier Bourbon monarchy. Although he eventually established an empire, surrounded himself with elaborate ceremonies and created a new imperial nobility, he did not simply restore the institutional foundations of the Ancien Régime. His Civil Code consolidated important revolutionary achievements, including uniform civil law, legal equality for male citizens and the protection of private property.
Napoleon was certainly no advocate of unrestricted popular demonstrations. His government suppressed political opposition, censored newspapers and reinforced authoritarian rule, while also restoring slavery in French colonies where it had been abolished. His purpose was to contain the Revolution politically while preserving those elements of its social and legal settlement that could strengthen the state. Yet therein lies the historical contradiction for those who imagine that French greatness consists primarily of hereditary privilege and royal ceremony. Even the emperor understood that the institutions of pre-revolutionary France could not simply be reconstructed by restoring the costumes and symbols of an earlier age.
The more extreme expressions of contemporary nostalgia occasionally suggest that France requires the return of its monarchy. As a constitutional proposition, monarchism is a historical and political position that can be debated on its merits. But the mere restoration of royal titles would provide no obvious answer to the grievances of contemporary France. The Bourbons returned after Napoleon, only for Charles X to be overthrown in 1830. Louis-Philippe then became king, only to be removed in 1848. The French monarchy itself was not a single, politically unchanging institution but a succession of competing settlements over sovereignty, privilege and the distribution of political power.
Perhaps what some of these observers really desire is not monarchy as a functioning political institution but monarchy as spectacle: the château, the glittering chandeliers, the handsome uniforms, the gowns and the carefully arranged ceremonies. It is a France in which the public may admire the palace but should preferably refrain from troubling its occupants. The familiar suggestion that demonstrators ought to confine their grievances to their proper places and venues has an especially telling resemblance to the hierarchical assumptions associated with the old regime, under which public order was conceived in terms of social stations and established obligations.
The October 1789 march on Versailles offers an instructive historical comparison. Thousands of people, led by Parisian women protesting the scarcity and price of bread, marched directly to the residence of the king because it was there that political authority was concentrated. They did not consider the inconvenience to royal ceremony a sufficient reason to demonstrate somewhere less conspicuous. Modern democratic institutions ought to provide alternatives to insurrection and coercion, but the episode illustrates why the public visibility of grievances has always been central to political mobilization. A system that permits dissent only when it cannot inconvenience authority risks preserving the appearance of harmony without addressing the conditions producing discontent.
One might also wonder what such guardians of French respectability intend to do with the country’s intellectual inheritance. If the political traditions of dissent are to be disowned as an unfortunate source of disorder, perhaps Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire would eventually become unsuitable representatives of French civilization. Rousseau’s arguments concerning popular sovereignty questioned the foundations of political legitimacy, while Voltaire challenged religious intolerance, arbitrary injustice and abuses of established power. Neither participated in the Revolution of 1789, having died in 1778, and their intellectual differences were considerable. Nevertheless, their writings helped establish the climate of philosophical criticism in which inherited institutions could be subjected to rational examination rather than accepted as permanent facts of nature.
It would be a strange reading of French civilization to admire these figures as ornaments of its literary greatness while objecting to the unsettling consequences of their ideas. The Enlightenment was not merely an agreeable conversation among educated gentlemen in aristocratic salons. It was a sustained argument over authority, liberty, religion, reason and the claims of government upon society. By the twentieth century, the relationship between intellectual life and political mobilization had become more direct. During May 1968, Jean-Paul Sartre publicly supported the protesting students, addressed an occupied Sorbonne and associated himself with their challenge to established authority. One need not agree with Sartre’s politics to recognize that his participation represented an established French tradition in which intellectual criticism could extend into public political action.
Yet the current unrest deserves examination beyond the familiar historical arguments about flags, revolutions and national identity. An observer might suggest that the demonstrations also invite a much larger question concerning the direction of the French economy, particularly the gradual movement away from the state-directed developmental arrangements that contributed to the country’s extraordinary postwar transformation. The loss of confidence expressed in the streets may have several immediate causes, but it is difficult to separate these grievances from the longer history of economic restructuring, industrial decline in certain regions, fiscal restraint and the increasingly uneven distribution of prosperity.
There was a period when France presented itself not merely as a center of European elegance but as a major industrial power capable of combining technical advancement, national planning and social modernization. The decades between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1970s became known as Les Trente Glorieuses, the Thirty Glorious Years, a period of rapid growth, rising productivity, reconstruction and improvements in living standards. France developed industries, expanded infrastructure, modernized agriculture and built institutions through which the state sought to direct national resources toward defined economic priorities.
The French model was neither Soviet central planning nor a completely unrestricted capitalist market. The state exercised substantial influence through the Commissariat général du Plan, established in 1946 under Jean Monnet, and through public enterprises, financial institutions and sectoral policies that coordinated investment and modernization. Private enterprise continued to operate, but it did so within a framework in which the government regarded industrial capacity, energy, transportation and technological development as matters of national concern. The economy was expected to serve a conception of French development extending beyond the immediate profitability of individual enterprises.
Electricity generation, telecommunications, transportation and heavy industry received particular attention. Électricité de France became an instrument of national electrification, while the railway system and associated engineering industries benefited from public coordination and long-term investment. The aerospace and nuclear sectors subsequently demonstrated how the state could bring together scientific research, industrial production and national strategy. France eventually acquired internationally competitive capabilities in high-speed rail, civil aviation, energy technology, defense manufacturing and sophisticated consumer industries. These achievements did not arise from government spending alone, but from the interaction of public direction, private initiative, engineering expertise, skilled labor and sustained investment.
The significance of this arrangement was that France did not regard industrial development as merely the accumulation of profits by separate corporations. The state’s responsibility, at least in principle, was to act as steward of national productive capacity. The factory, the laboratory, the technical school, the transport network and the research institution were understood as related elements of a national economic system. Industrialization was expected to improve living standards, supply employment, strengthen national independence and support the public institutions upon which social cohesion depended.
There were important shortcomings. The benefits were not distributed equally among all communities, and migrant workers often endured appalling living conditions despite contributing to the expansion of French industry. Some sectors benefited excessively from protection, and bureaucratic coordination could become inflexible or expensive. Nevertheless, the central achievement was substantial: France demonstrated that a modern capitalist economy could develop advanced technological and industrial capabilities under strong public direction without eliminating the role of markets and private ownership.
The subsequent transformation of economic policy was not an overnight abandonment of that model. The oil shocks of the 1970s, inflation, the international monetary environment and intensified competition exposed weaknesses that the earlier growth period had partly concealed. The decisive political symbolism came in 1983, when François Mitterrand’s Socialist government, confronted by financial pressures and the constraints of maintaining the franc within the European Monetary System, adopted the tournant de la rigueur, or turn toward austerity. The change involved restraints on expenditure and consumption, measures to contain inflation and a greater emphasis on external competitiveness.
It would be inaccurate to describe this decision as the complete conversion of France into a neoliberal state. France retained substantial public ownership, a significant welfare system and extensive state involvement in economic affairs. Nevertheless, the shift reflected a broader alteration in the priorities of economic management. In the following decades, privatization, financial liberalization, European market integration and competition policy gradually reduced some of the instruments through which the French state had previously directed industry. Successive governments increasingly measured national economic performance through the language of market confidence, fiscal discipline, competitiveness and international capital flows.
Supporters of these changes argue that France could not indefinitely shelter its industries from global competition or sustain public expenditure without regard to inflation, debt and productivity. Their argument cannot be dismissed lightly. A national industrial strategy that ignores costs and commercial viability eventually becomes a burden upon the taxpayers it is supposed to benefit. But critics of the neoliberal turn raise another question: whether the pursuit of market efficiency has progressively weakened the productive and social foundations that made French competitiveness possible in the first place.
Industrial enterprises are not interchangeable entries in a national balance sheet. When a plant closes, the damage extends to suppliers, skilled workers, technical schools, small businesses and the community that has developed around it. A factory cannot always be replaced by a financial service or a tourist establishment without fundamentally changing the opportunities available to the local population. Likewise, the privatization of an enterprise may improve certain measures of financial performance while reducing the state’s capacity to coordinate investment in sectors requiring long periods of development and substantial initial capital.
The problem becomes particularly serious when an economy increasingly depends upon the profitable circulation of goods, services and financial assets while neglecting the domestic productive capacity necessary to sustain incomes. France remains a major industrial and technological economy, and it would be absurd to suggest that the country has been reduced entirely to hotels, fashion houses and monuments. Its aerospace, defense, energy, pharmaceutical, agricultural and luxury-goods industries retain considerable international importance. Yet the broader concern is whether the distribution of investment, employment and opportunity has become sufficiently uneven that the spectacle of continued national prosperity conceals significant social deterioration.
The tourist who visits Paris sees the Eiffel Tower, the Champs-Élysées, the Louvre and the boutiques of the great fashion houses. The visitor sees a country whose civilization remains commercially valuable, a Paris that continues to sell its history and elegance to the world. But the same metropolitan region contains overcrowded housing, precarious employment, neglected neighborhoods and people living in temporary encampments. It is not necessary to equate every suburb with a slum or to deny the vitality of working-class communities to recognize the considerable inequalities separating different portions of metropolitan Paris.
Indeed, the contrast between the postcard and the shantytown is not entirely a recent invention. During the very decades celebrated as the Thirty Glorious Years, migrant workers and their families lived in the bidonvilles of Nanterre and other parts of the Paris region, often without adequate water, sanitation or electricity. French industrial prosperity therefore contained exclusions of its own. The postwar developmental state achieved impressive advances, but it did not always distribute the resulting prosperity according to the universal claims of the Republic. Its successes should be remembered without transforming the period into another imaginary golden age.
The distinction today lies partly in the expectations produced by several decades of economic liberalization. France was promised that greater exposure to international competition, the free movement of capital and the discipline of markets would preserve prosperity by making its enterprises more efficient and adaptable. Some industries benefited, and consumers gained access to wider markets and products. Yet the social costs of restructuring did not disappear merely because they were transferred away from corporate accounts. They appeared in employment insecurity, regional disparities, pressures upon public services and a growing sense that the institutions charged with protecting national welfare were increasingly responsive to financial constraints imposed elsewhere.
The figures published by the national statistics institute provide some indication of the problem. In 2023, the monetary poverty rate in metropolitan France reached 15.4 percent, affecting approximately 9.8 million people living in ordinary housing. This was the highest rate recorded since the beginning of the comparable series in 1996. These statistics do not establish that neoliberal policies caused the deterioration, much less explain every grievance expressed during October 2026. But they provide grounds for examining whether the gains of the national economy have been distributed sufficiently broadly to support the social confidence upon which stable government ultimately depends.
There is another consequence of the changing economic order that cannot be ignored: the relationship between France and the countries once governed by its colonial empire. It has become common in some quarters to blame immigrants for the difficulties of the French economy, as though the movement of people from poorer countries toward wealthier ones were an entirely spontaneous phenomenon unrelated to earlier systems of labor recruitment, colonial administration, trade dependency and unequal opportunities for development.
The history is considerably more complicated. France recruited or admitted workers from abroad to meet the demands of reconstruction, industry, agriculture and construction. Its former colonies, particularly in North and West Africa, were connected to the metropolitan economy through language, administration, financial institutions, commercial networks and historical relationships that did not simply vanish with political independence. Migration was influenced by these ties, but also by personal ambitions, family networks, demographic changes, insecurity and the demand for labor within France itself.
During the postwar boom, migrant labor contributed to the construction of the very France now celebrated for its industrial achievements and modern infrastructure. Workers from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and other countries helped sustain factories, building sites and public services, even as many encountered discrimination and inadequate accommodation. The irony becomes especially pronounced when immigrants are accused of threatening national prosperity while their predecessors are omitted from the history of how that prosperity was produced.
This is not to deny that migration creates genuine administrative, economic and social challenges. Housing, language education, labor-market integration and the provision of public services require planning and resources. An effective immigration policy must consider the capacity of institutions and the rights and obligations of residents, citizens and newcomers. But it is intellectually unsatisfactory to assign responsibility for structural unemployment, housing shortages or underinvestment to immigrants without examining the policies governing land, capital, industry and public expenditure. To do so is to substitute a visible population for the less visible institutions that determine economic outcomes.
The colonial inheritance is equally relevant to the countries from which people depart. Political independence does not automatically produce economic independence when a country continues to export largely unprocessed commodities, import manufactured goods and depend upon foreign finance, technical services and markets. Such arrangements can persist through commercial structures that are entirely legal and ostensibly voluntary. Yet where domestic industrial capacity remains weak, governments possess limited means of expanding employment and raising wages beyond the constraints imposed by commodity prices and external demand.
It is in this context that the experiment now being undertaken in Burkina Faso becomes worth examining. Its military leader, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, frequently appears in camouflage and presents his administration as a campaign to recover economic sovereignty. Since coming to power through a coup in 2022, his government has emphasized local production, control over mineral resources, agricultural development and the processing of raw materials within the country. Recent initiatives in mineral refining and agricultural processing have been promoted as expressions of this policy, alongside greater state participation in mining.
There is an understandable developmental argument behind these measures, independent of any observer’s judgment of the government itself. A country that exports gold or agricultural commodities without developing the capacity to process, refine and manufacture domestically may surrender important opportunities for skilled employment, industrial learning and the accumulation of national capital. If a developing economy wishes to reduce the pressure on its population to seek livelihoods elsewhere, it must eventually create those livelihoods at home. Schools must lead to productive employment, infrastructure must serve domestic enterprises, and resource revenues must be translated into capabilities that remain after individual deposits have been exhausted.
Burkina Faso also illustrates why self-reliance should not be mistaken for a simple formula or an accomplished success. Most Burkinabé migration abroad has historically been directed toward neighboring West African countries, particularly Côte d’Ivoire, rather than principally toward France. The country continues to confront severe insecurity, internal displacement, poverty and difficulties in mobilizing capital and technical resources. Traoré’s government has also been criticized for repression of political opponents, restrictions upon journalists and serious human-rights abuses. An industrial program cannot be judged solely by the number of factories inaugurated or the nationalist language employed at official ceremonies. Its lasting value will depend upon actual production, employment, agricultural security, institutional competence and the extent to which its benefits reach ordinary citizens.
Nevertheless, the underlying question posed by such programs deserves attention far beyond Burkina Faso. Why should developing countries be expected to supply commodities and labor indefinitely while the higher-value stages of production remain concentrated elsewhere? Why should migration be treated as the principal problem when the absence of productive opportunities in countries of origin is rarely accorded comparable urgency? The international economy cannot reasonably expect poorer countries to remain dependent upon external markets and capital while simultaneously condemning their citizens for seeking better opportunities abroad.
It is here that the immigration anxieties expressed in France acquire a deeper political-economic dimension. Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints imagined the arrival of an enormous fleet of impoverished migrants and the resulting collapse of Western civilization. The novel became influential within sections of the European and American far right because it transformed anxieties over immigration, cultural change and national decline into an apocalyptic narrative. Its racialized depiction of migrants has been extensively criticized, and fiction of this kind should not be confused with demographic or economic analysis.
Yet the continued interest in Raspail raises a question that deserves to be pursued beyond the argument over his literary intentions. Why did the prospect of migration from the developing world come to occupy such a prominent position in the imagination of national decline? What conditions produced the disparities in wealth, employment and opportunity upon which such anxieties depended? One can understand how Raspail’s story appealed to readers fearful of social change without accepting its representation of migrants as an invading force, or treating immigration as the principal cause of Western economic difficulties.
The difficulty with the apocalyptic interpretation is that it begins with the movement of people while giving insufficient attention to the international arrangements that precede and shape that movement. It depicts the migrant as the threatening consequence of global inequality while often leaving the institutions responsible for economic dependency, unequal exchange and failed development beyond comparable scrutiny. The person seeking employment becomes the immediate object of public resentment, while the policies that failed to create employment either in the country of origin or in neglected communities within the destination country receive considerably less dramatic attention.
This is not to argue that every migration flow arises from colonialism, or that the interests of migrants and existing citizens are always harmonious. The effects vary according to economic conditions, skills, institutions and the scale of migration. Rather, the argument is that the controversy cannot be understood through cultural fear alone. It is also a question of development, productive capacity and the relationship between the richer and poorer portions of the international economy.
There is considerable irony in the fact that France, once among the most determined practitioners of state-directed national industrial development, now finds itself debating the social consequences of an international economy in which many developing countries have been encouraged to liberalize markets without first acquiring comparable industrial capabilities. The French state helped organize investment, technology and infrastructure during its own postwar transformation. Countries that seek to exercise similar direction today are often required to explain their departures from policies emphasizing unrestricted markets, privatization and international competition.
The historical circumstances are different, and the achievements of the French planning system cannot simply be reproduced through administrative decrees. International trade, foreign investment and technological exchange remain indispensable to industrial development. Yet they need not exclude national strategy. A country may welcome foreign enterprises while insisting upon local training, infrastructure development and domestic industrial participation. It may cooperate with international financial institutions without abandoning the right to determine its productive priorities. Economic sovereignty, properly understood, is not the refusal to trade with the world but the capacity to participate in that trade without becoming permanently confined to its least rewarding activities.
The same principle deserves reconsideration within France itself. The country cannot recover its social confidence merely by preserving the attractiveness of Paris or the profitability of its most internationally recognized corporations. Its future depends also upon the ability of public institutions and private enterprises to provide productive employment, affordable housing, effective education and opportunities for technical advancement throughout the national territory. The economic achievements of the earlier dirigiste period suggest that industrial development and social welfare need not be treated as unrelated objectives, even if the instruments appropriate to the twenty-first century will necessarily differ from those employed after 1945.
For the business community, these considerations cannot be reduced to a romantic preference for planning over markets. Enterprises require the capacity to compete, innovate and earn returns sufficient to sustain further investment. Governments require credible finances, administrative competence and the ability to distinguish useful public expenditure from political patronage. But the market also requires workers who can afford its products, transport systems that permit goods and people to move, schools capable of producing technical competence and a society sufficiently confident in its institutions to support long-term economic commitments.
A government that concentrates upon financial indicators while neglecting these foundations may eventually discover that the appearance of stability has concealed the accumulation of discontent. Inflation may be contained while household insecurity increases. Capital markets may remain open while particular industries and communities experience prolonged decline. Tourism revenues may improve while residents encounter mounting difficulties obtaining adequate housing or public services. None of these outcomes is inevitable, and the relationships between them require careful examination. But neither can they be dismissed simply because aggregate indicators continue to suggest that the national economy remains functional.
This may also explain why the tradition of protest extends so widely across French society. The worker may perceive industrial decline in the disappearance of employment from his community, while the farmer may see his economic security threatened by prices, imported products or environmental regulations that alter production costs. The student experiences the condition of public institutions through overcrowded classrooms and uncertain prospects for employment. The pensioner measures economic policy through purchasing power, retirement provisions and the cost of essential services. Their political demands are not necessarily compatible, and no government can satisfy all of them without confronting difficult trade-offs. Nevertheless, their willingness to demonstrate arises from a common institutional fact: government decisions and economic arrangements have consequences extending into ordinary life.
The left does not possess a monopoly over this tradition, nor does the right stand outside it. French farmers have protested governments of different political orientations. The Yellow Vest movement brought together participants whose views ranged across the established political spectrum and whose grievances concerned taxation, fuel costs, purchasing power and the distance between governing institutions and the provinces. Trade unions have likewise mobilized under governments identified with both the left and the right. Students and pensioners may march together on one occasion and disagree fundamentally on another. Their demonstrations cannot be understood as expressions of a uniform ideological identity merely because they employ the same public space.
In this respect, the young leftist Chloé standing beneath a red banner is no more an invention alien to France than the farmer driving his tractor into a departmental capital or the pensioner carrying a placard against changes to retirement provisions. All may express themselves in ways that disturb the predictable rhythms of commerce and administration. Some may adopt methods that other citizens reasonably condemn. Yet their appearance in the streets belongs to a continuing political practice rather than an inexplicable departure from the national character.
The country of Chanel and Dior, therefore, is not separated by an invisible frontier from the country of the leftist Chloé. Its fashion houses depend upon designers, textile specialists, skilled workers, sales personnel, transport systems, international trade and the purchasing power of consumers. Its celebrated restaurants depend upon agriculture, food processing and service labor. Its monuments require public expenditure, maintenance and the revenues generated by productive activity. The economic system that sustains the picturesque France admired by visitors is inseparable from the people whose grievances periodically become visible upon its streets.
This is not an argument that every participant in a demonstration possesses a superior understanding of national interest, or that violence should be excused as an inevitable expression of economic dissatisfaction. The farmer demanding protection may advance policies that burden consumers, just as the worker seeking higher wages may propose arrangements that an employer considers unsustainable. The student demanding additional expenditure must ultimately confront the question of how that expenditure is to be financed. Responsible government consists in reconciling such claims through institutions that command sufficient confidence to make compromise possible.
The events in France should therefore be approached neither as a romantic reenactment of 1789 nor as proof that the country has surrendered to revolutionary disorder. They are an occasion to examine the connection between economic policy and political legitimacy. The business owner whose property has been damaged possesses an immediate and legitimate grievance against those responsible. But the demonstrator who believes that deteriorating public services have deprived him of economic opportunity also raises a question that deserves political consideration. The protection of property and the legitimacy of peaceful dissent are not mutually exclusive principles; indeed, a functioning republic requires both.
This is why the traditional distinction between public order and social justice remains important. France cannot permit criminal violence to become an accepted method of bargaining with government, since the immediate victims are frequently ordinary people whose economic security is already fragile. But an exclusive preoccupation with policing cannot supply an industrial strategy, improve deteriorating schools, restore household purchasing power or resolve the difficult allocation of public resources. Restoring calm is an important responsibility of government; securing the economic conditions under which that calm can endure is another.
The defenders of a picturesque France may reasonably desire that its museums, monuments, commercial districts and historic buildings remain protected. Such preservation is both a cultural obligation and an economic necessity. What cannot reasonably follow is that French citizens should be expected to behave as though their country’s history had ended at the most aesthetically pleasing moment of the eighteenth century. The people whose work sustains the modern economy are not merely custodians of an inherited national exhibition. They are participants in a political society whose institutions, industries and public policies continue to be contested.
Nor should the country be imagined as a civilization brought into existence exclusively by its monarchs, generals, financiers and prominent industrialists. The French nation was also formed by workers, farmers, engineers, teachers, philosophers, journalists and ordinary citizens whose demands helped alter the distribution of power and opportunity. Its commercial and technological achievements were produced through investment and enterprise, but also through public infrastructure, scientific education, organized labor and state direction. Its present difficulties cannot be examined adequately if one remembers only the palaces and the financial districts while disregarding the institutions and people upon which their continued prosperity depends.
The Revolution may indeed belong to history, as the concerned observers insist. So do the monarchy, the empire, the Paris Commune, the Popular Front and the student uprisings of 1968. Yet history does not become irrelevant merely because the events themselves have passed. The decisions taken during these periods established institutions, traditions and expectations that continue to influence the country’s political economy. Indeed, it would be particularly strange to demand that the French move beyond the Revolution while simultaneously proposing that they return to a monarchy that preceded it.
The more serious question is whether France can reconcile its traditions of national development and republican citizenship with the demands of an increasingly competitive international economy. The country that once demonstrated the value of state stewardship need not regard public planning as an obsolete doctrine, any more than it must reject private enterprise or international trade. The challenge is to determine how the benefits of productive development can be made sufficiently broad and durable to sustain the consent of the population.
As for those who look upon the latest disturbances and see only the disappearance of the tricolour or the disturbance of an elegant national landscape, they might consider that the Paris of the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Élysées has always existed alongside another Paris whose residents do not necessarily share in the prosperity advertised to visitors. The old bidonvilles of Nanterre were already an uncomfortable presence during the celebrated years of French industrial expansion; contemporary poverty and precarious housing demonstrate that prosperity remains an uneven experience. It is not unreasonable for citizens to demand that the economic achievements of their country be reflected in their own conditions of life.
The castles, gowns, monuments and ceremonies will remain an important part of France’s inheritance, and there is every reason to preserve them. But they cannot substitute for productive industry, functioning public institutions and a population that believes its welfare matters to the state. France did not become a modern nation by remaining permanently within the social arrangements of Versailles, and it will not resolve its present difficulties by presenting itself merely as a magnificent collection of historical attractions.
The château and the barricade both belong to French history. The country’s industrial achievements belong there as well, particularly those decades when national economic development was understood as a responsibility of government and an undertaking involving society as a whole. If the latest demonstrations reveal anything beyond their immediate political grievances, it is the continuing difficulty of maintaining an appearance of national stability when a substantial portion of the population questions the economic arrangements beneath it.
For the admirer of French elegance, Chanel and Dior will remain familiar expressions of the country’s creative achievements. For the politically engaged Chloé, France may represent the unfinished business of republican citizenship and economic justice. Both belong to the same society, though neither can claim to represent it entirely. The France that produces international luxury goods is also the France that has repeatedly brought workers, farmers, students and pensioners into its streets to dispute the direction of national policy.
The historical relationship between these different Frances is not always harmonious, and it would be irresponsible to pretend otherwise. Yet their coexistence reflects the realities of a modern nation whose economic development has never eliminated conflicts over the distribution of its benefits. The task of government is not to turn the country into a placid historical exhibition, but to preserve public order while providing institutions through which those conflicts can be addressed.
France may be admired for its elegance, but it must ultimately be governed for the people who live and work within it. The postcard can preserve the appearance of a civilization. It cannot, by itself, preserve the economic and social foundations upon which that civilization depends.