Intense political conflict has consumed France for more than two months now, with President Emanuel Macron pushing an unpopular plan to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. Protests and strikes began in January, when he introduced the plan, and escalated after he used an arcane constitutional tactic to pass a bill on it without any vote in the National Assembly. That move led to two rare no-confidence motions in the legislature, the first of which Macron’s government barely survived.
Meanwhile, the protests and strikes have continued—with more than a million people recently taking to the streets for a day of demonstration—but havoc is now increasingly accompanying them: Dozens of government buildings have been vandalized and burned, and the Council of Europe has condemned excessive force in the response by French police. How has a bill changing the retirement age by just two years led to all of this?
Marc Weitzmann is a French journalist and the author of 12 books, including Hate: The Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism in France (and What It Means for Us). To Weitzmann, the retirement issue and the way Macron’s handled it have brought fundamental tensions to the surface of French political life—tensions within the country’s traditional political culture, and tensions between this culture and Macron’s more contemporary style of governing.
The immediate effects have been intense disarray—in the National Assembly as well as in the streets—along with a major power shift that neither Macron nor many analysts of the French scene expected: a return of labor unions as significant players in French politics. But there’s potentially a bigger shift beyond the chaos of the moment: a strengthening of the far right as champions of order. Soon, France’s highest court will rule on the law—and a possible referendum over it—which could settle the issue at Macron’s expense. Or it could go the other way and “compound the crisis of authority in France.”
Eve Valentine: What do you think these protests say about French life right now—and Macron’s position in it?
Marc Weitzmann: They say a great deal. There’s a deep crisis of authority and power in this country—and you can see different aspects of this crisis converging in the protests.
At the heart of it, France’s power structure isn’t working anymore. France has long been a very centralized country with an enduring nostalgia for absolute power. Its current system of government, the Fifth Republic—which was founded by Charles de Gaulle in 1958—works almost like a secular monarchy, with tremendous power concentrated in the presidency. In some ways, Macron wants to fit the part of a Fifth Republic secular monarch; but in many ways, he just doesn’t fit it—and doesn’t want to fit it—above all, because he’s too much of a technocrat, delegating and deferring to a host of specialist policy experts.
Macron’s style of technocracy is increasingly how power is managed across the West; it’s increasingly in tension with the old tradition of centralized power in France; and Macron has been increasingly caught between the old system he’s inherited and the new system he represents.
Meanwhile, he’s relied deeply—and far too much, frankly—on technocratic polls and surveys to try to understand what the French people think and feel and want. And that’s led to some acute problems.
One is that the companies managing these polls and surveys also serve as advisors to the government. So they’re on both sides of the question, if you will: They’re interpreting their own polling and surveys, and they’re also advising the government on what it should do—meaning there’s no critical distance between the interpretation of the data and the practical recommendations based on it.
A second problem is that the technocratic language of all these polls and surveys is completely alien to how people actually think and feel—and really, there’s no way you can understand the life of a country based on what they say.
When you get these kinds of technocratic dynamics entrenched within a highly centralized power structure, you get a government that’s dangerously isolated from the hearts and minds of the population as a whole.
And the population as a whole is full of confusion about everything their country and world are going through right now. It’s telling that there’s a war in Ukraine, three hours by air from Paris; there’s a world of crises, economic and political; and the thing the people of France are most concerned about right now is their retirement.
Macron’s style of technocracy is increasingly how power is managed across the West; it’s increasingly in tension with the old tradition of centralized power in France; and Macron has been increasingly caught between the old system he’s inherited and the new system he represents.
I would say there’s a certain inability among the French really to grasp the country we live in. We’re concerned about inflation, we’re concerned about the energy crisis, much more than we’re concerned about the transformative state of Europe and the world right now—including what it will ultimately mean for France. So you have a government that’s out of touch with the population, and you have a population that’s out of touch with Europe and the world.
At the same time, you have a traditional attraction to populist outrage in France that’s paradoxically mixed up with the tradition of highly centralized power. You can see this in the way the protesters are both criticizing Macron—for what they see as his will to absolute power in the way he’s trying to pass this law on retirement—and asking for a strong authority to oppose him.
Remember, the French fundamentally invented modern populism in the Revolution of 1789. We’re the masters of the art. Our tradition of collective rebellion is built deep into our national identity now—and tracks with Jacques Lacan’s definition of hysteria: Deep down, we desire a strong power to rebel against.
It’s not for nothing that the party of the far right—formerly the National Front, now the National Rally—is benefiting most from all the drama of the moment.
During the debate on Macron’s retirement law in the National Assembly, the far left went super-crazy, adopting a very theatrical strategy—yelling, and chanting, and insulting ministers, and so on. Meanwhile, the National Rally essentially did nothing. They sat on the bench, trying to look responsible on TV—saying that of course they were concerned, saying that they understood the demonstrators. But they showed none of the love for chaos that the left has demonstrated, so now they appear across France to be the most responsible politicians in the country.
In fact, there was a poll last week indicating that if there were an election tomorrow, the National Rally would come first—meaning Macron would have to form a government with them. Which isn’t an abstract question: If the crisis deepens, Macron really will have to call new parliamentary elections and form a new government.
Valentine: How much are the demonstrations themselves spontaneous responses to Macron’s policy shifts, and how much are they being organized?
Weitzmann: The demonstrations are very much activating powerful latent sentiments in the French population—spontaneous sentiments, you could say—and they’re also very much being organized.
There’s a big difference in this sense between the current protests and the yellow-vest demonstrations from a couple of years ago. The yellow vests were mostly small-business owners in dire straits or contract workers, outcasts who fundamentally represented themselves—whereas today’s protesters are mostly salaried employees, people who’re concerned with retirement and pensions.
You have a traditional attraction to populist outrage in France that’s paradoxically mixed up with the tradition of highly centralized power. You can see this in the way the protesters are both criticizing Macron—for what they see as his will to absolute power in the way he’s trying to pass this law on retirement—and asking for a strong authority to oppose him.
These people—not the anarchic “black bloc” activists who’ve by now joined the demonstrations but the everyday people behind them from the outset—are traditional salaried employees, looking to traditional unions in a way the yellow vests didn’t.
The role of these unions in organizing the protesters has been an enormous surprise, not only for Macron and his government but for many analysts across France. Almost everyone thought the unions were things of the past—of the 20th century. Almost no one expected them to come back, let alone in such strength. One of the supposed lessons of the yellow-vest demonstrations was that people now organize themselves through social networks, making the unions outdated. But here we are, reviving the older tradition of organized labor, with the unions in the front row of the demonstrations.
In Macron’s tremendous technocratic isolation, this is just one of the developments related to the protests that he’s been taken aback by—and one of the reasons why he’s lost control of circumstances.
Macron expected that the right would vote for the retirement law, because they’ve been advocating for one for years now; he didn’t understand that the right’s calculation would be to put him in a bad position by not voting for it—which, surprise, they didn’t. Neither did he expect the workers to react, or for the unions to come back, so forcefully.
In this context, the government’s response to the demonstrations was to say, This is an anti-democratic movement. This is the yellow vests again. This is a Trump-style movement. This is the same thing we saw on January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. This is the same thing we saw earlier this year in Brazil.
That’s Macron’s attitude. But it’s not true. Or it wasn’t true. It may be starting to become true, because the black bloc activists are coming in, and it’s all starting to get quite messy. But it’s in Macron’s interest for things to get messy, because that will give him a reality that matches his analysis.
The fundamental truth of the situation is different, though. The fundamental truth of the situation is that the French never really got over the decades of full employment it experienced in the 20th century. There’s a big nostalgia for that time. There’s a strong current in the population that wants to get back to a moment in its cultural memory when the middle class was the measure of society. So an attack against retirement now—or something these people see as an attack against retirement—is affecting them deeply. It doesn’t really affect the yellow vests, who didn’t belong to the middle class to begin with; it’s affecting the people who’ve maintained their status in the middle class until now.
Macron expected that the right would vote for the retirement law, because they’ve been advocating for one for years now; he didn’t understand that the right’s calculation would be to put him in a bad position by not voting for it—which, surprise, they didn’t. Neither did he expect the workers to react, or for the unions to come back, so forcefully.
Valentine: One of the themes that have come out in U.S. coverage of the protests is the theme of anxiety among the protesters that Macron is trying to reshape France in the image of the United States with this new law. So there’s a middle-class concern about retirement and pensions, but there’s also a broader and deeper fear about losing French identity. To what extent do you see the demonstrations as expressing a distress about culture and identity?
Weitzmann: Pretty much everything now is connected to culture and identity—and to a fear of losing them—not just in France but everywhere in the world.
In France, it’s become part of the country’s identity that it’s supposed to have the best retirement system in the world, the best social-security system in the world, and so on. And so now we have an identity crisis. But it’s an identity crisis based on a pervasive sense that things were “normal” for France back in the 1960s and ’70s.
Virtually all electoral campaigns on the left and the right, since Nicolas Sarkozy was president more than 10 years ago—including electoral campaigns by the National Front—have been based on that nostalgia. We want to go back to “normal”—normal meaning full jobs, full employment, complete social security, a robust retirement system, and so on. Which is really, in historical perspective, anything but normal.
So part of what’s going on right now has to do with a pressing fear of losing retirement and pension benefits, as the world has become more and more uncertain. Part of it has to do with a more diffuse fear of the future. Part of it has to do with cultural fear and nostalgia. And part of it has to do with the fact that Macron and his advisers aren’t able to speak reassuringly to any of these levels of anxiety, because Macron and his advisers speak a technocratic language that no one really understands or relates to in their life. They just aren’t able to connect.
Valentine: As you say, some of the anxieties and fears coming to the surface in France right now are feelings people are going through in different ways around the world. I wonder to what extent you might see the protests as representing another global phenomenon—a broader shift in Western attitudes toward work after the pandemic?
Weitzmann: The protests themselves certainly share in a broader global post-pandemic shift in attitudes toward work. But I honestly think that the more important post-pandemic shift has been in how the government is engaging with the French population.
The pandemic was very uncertain and stressful. But one of the most consequential things the French government, in all its technocratic tendencies, learned from the pandemic was a new idiom of emergency.
Now we have an identity crisis. But it’s an identity crisis based on a pervasive sense that things were “normal” for France back in the 1960s and ’70s—normal meaning full jobs, full employment, complete social security, a robust retirement system, and so on. Which is really, in historical perspective, anything but normal.
This is a government run by people who’re not inclined to engage with the population as it is; it’s run by people who’re inclined to engage with the population as they want it to be. And what they want it to be is a population conditioned by technocratic concepts and technocratic communication. The idiom of emergency very easily, and very quickly, becomes an idiom of manipulation.
The aspiration among Macron’s people is that it will work. But the reality is that it cuts the people running the government off. So they end up talking to themselves. And the tragedy is, they don’t realize it at all.
Valentine: What do you imagine being the most plausible outcome of this crisis?
Weitzmann: It’s very hard to say at this point. The situation is getting more complicated by the day. This past week, for instance, you had a series of demonstrations at Sainte-Soline, about four hours southwest of Paris, organized to stop the construction of reservoirs for the agricultural industry. The black blocs were there, and the police were there, and it all got very violent. The more the protests spread to other issues, the more the black blocs get involved, the messier everything’s likely to get.
At the same time, there’s a real possibility that Macron will have to call new legislative elections in the next few weeks. And if he does, no one knows what will come of it. As I say, the National Rally is now number one in the polls. So there’s a further possibility that Macron may have to form a new government with ministers from the far right.
In any case, the far right is making the most out of what’s going on right now. And the more the left is agitating itself—and the more it’s provoking the population at large with this agitation, rather than leading it to a resolution—the better the far right is doing.
Meanwhile, the law on retirement will be submitted on April 14 to the Constitutional Council—effectively, the French supreme court. This is standard procedure. But a handful of senators and deputies in the National Assembly have also asked the Council for a referendum on the specific question of the retirement age specified in the law. So now the Council has to decide on two things: one, whether or not the retirement law and the way it’s been passed at the parliament is consistent with the constitution; and two, whether or not there’s the need for a referendum on the law.
That leaves the Council with three options, all with heavy political consequences: It could decide that the law is technically irregular, suspend it, and green-light a referendum—which would save Macron, allowing him to start the whole project over again, this time hand-in-hand with union leaders. But which would also present the Council as a “government of judges,” compounding the crisis of political authority in the French system. The Council could declare that the law is anti-constitutional—which would render a referendum useless and humiliate Macron. Or it could validate the law and say no to the referendum—which, although technically in line with Macron’s project, would also compound the crisis of political authority in France, since most members of the Constitutional Council are pro-Macron former politicians. And that could plunge the government and the country into political and institutional trouble of unprecedented magnitude in the contemporary history of France.