When Mr Lionel Jospin attended the UN General Assembly two weeks ago, American journalists asked him why French people were always going on strike and demonstrating.
With a hint of irritation, the French Prime Minister compared his compatriots' proclivity for street protest to the American attachment to guns. "Americans like guns," Mr Jospin said in English. "The French like strikes. The French don't like things imposed."
Mr Jospin claimed that under his government France has achieved a 50-year low in the number of working days lost to strikes. Yet soon after he returned to Paris the marching season started. For surely as leaves turn red and the temperature drops every autumn, tens of thousands of French people can be counted on to descend into the streets.
The riot police who watch over protesters are especially busy this week. Yesterday French lorry-drivers formed the biggest contingent of a Europe-wide demonstration intended to influence a meeting of EU transport ministers today.
Twenty barricades held up traffic on France's borders with Spain and Germany and within the country. The truckers want a ceiling on working hours across the EU, and they oppose the legalisation of heavy lorry traffic on Sundays.
Also yesterday the French National Assembly began its stormy, two-week debate on the second draft law on the 35-hour working week. The previous day the employers' federation, MEDEF, and the communist trade union, CGT, held rival demonstrations on opposite sides of Paris; the former to oppose the law, the latter to support it. Symbolically, the MEDEF gathered at the Porte de Versailles, the communists at the Place de la Republique.
To maximise attendance at their march, the communists added the grievances of electricity and gas company workers, postal and telecom employees, dockers and newspaper distributors to their own demand that the 35hour week law be strengthened.
Not since the former socialist prime minister, Mr Pierre Mauroy, dismissed the business sector as "castle people" in the early 1980s has France seen such open class warfare. On Monday communists chanted slogans about foie gras-eating bosses and blocked trains carrying businessmen from Lyons and Montbeliard to Paris for more than an hour. In Montbeliard,
a businessman hit a trade unionist so hard that he had to be taken to hospital.
Mr Ernest-Antoine Seilliere, the aristocratic president of MEDEF, says France "is not far from state socialism" and accuses the government of "infringing freedom to carry on business" by keeping its promise to reduce the working week. But he may actually be helping Mr Jospin by providing him with an alibi visa-vis those who find him too liberal.
With the splintered French right unwilling to oppose the popular law on the 35-hour week, the MEDEF is increasingly playing the role of the opposition. Mr Seilliere even calls his group "the entrepreneurs' party".
Although they are in the ruling coalition, communists and Greens are scheduled to march - against Mr Jospin's wishes - in an anti-unemployment demonstration on October 16th. Tomorrow French lycee students will resume protests against crowded classrooms and a shortage of teachers. Autumn has truly returned to Paris.
AFP reports from Brussels:
The European Commission has given France until October 13th to lift its ban on British beef or face legal action.
"If there is no movement before then, I will have to inform the European Commissioners who will meet that day, and I imagine we would begin legal action against France," said the Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection, Mr David Byrne.
