During our years in Paris, I’ve always downplayed France’s frequent strike and demonstrations, especially when I’m asked whether people should cancel their planned trips. No, I say.

That’s still true this time around, even though masses of French people are protesting a hike in the retirement age. Ignore those  context-free TV images of fires in the streets of Paris, of piles of garbage, of cops wielding truncheons and tear gas. The violence is only at night and only in a few parts of the city. Ditto for Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux and elsewhere.  (We’ll get to the garbage in a bit.) As usual, the committers of violence are mostly agitators, not real protesters.

But this round of confrontations does have a different feel to it.

Those on the street represent a big majority of the French people, not a few angry unions. President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to raise the full benefits age from 62 to 64 is opposed by more than 70% of the population, polls say, even though the law has already passed Parliament (it still must be reviewed by the Constitutional Council.). I previously wrote about it here.

The hundreds of thousands who turn out on scheduled strike days – there have been 10 so far – are determined and motivated. Some are union members, others not. They are also polite, mostly. They bring their children, and at times it can feel like a street party.

Photo: Larry Gassan

At night, it’s another story, and not just on strike days. In some parts of town, mostly the east, groups of black-clad, balaclava-wearing people set fires, break shop windows and throw stones at the police, who either tolerate it or beat them up. John Lichfield explains here why the trend is disturbing. It’s worth nothing that sometimes the police get beat up too.

For Macron, it’s been intensely humiliating: Security concerns caused King Charles III to postpone a planned visit that would have included a state dinner at Versailles – not a good look, frankly – a ceremony at the Place de l’Etoile and a trip to Bordeaux. Charles and his queen consort, Camilla, did do the second half of their trip, to Germany, where they are being received with full honors. Macron must be grinding his teeth.

Photo: Larry Gassan

But he brought much of it on himself. His government has behaved as if it is deliberately trying to anger its constituents. The retirement measure, needed as the population ages, was poorly explained. Then, when it looked as if the lower house didn’t have the votes to pass it, Macron had his prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, ram it though by decree. It was legal, but hardly democratic given the opposition.

In a television interview, Macron essentially ignored protesters’ concerns and boasted about increasing the purchasing power of France’s minimum-wage earners. This at a time when inflation is soaring – food prices are up 14.4% over the last 12 months, for instance. He has been relentlessly tone-deaf throughout the three-month crisis, even by the standards of French presidents. “He is many things, but nobody will ever accuse him of being a political savant,” Chris O’Brien wrote in his excellent newsletter, French Crossroads.

And then there’s the garbage.

Some of Paris’s éboueurs, as they are called, have been striking since March 6, and it shows.

They too would have to retire earlier under the new law, though at a younger age. Now, they can take a pension at 57; it would rise to 59. Then again, garbage collectors tend to start working sooner than white-collar employees, and one can see why they would want to leave that kind of work as soon as possible.

Why only some trash collectors? Because only half of the city’s arrondissements, or districts, have their garbage picked up by public-sector workers. The other half have contracts with private companies. Incredibly, there is little sign that Parisians in trash-strewn districts are dumping their waste across the borders. Meanwhile, Le Parisien reports the private collectors are getting restive as well.

For now, the prefect of Paris – who is appointed by the president — has ordered the collectors back to work and some have complied. This is as opposed to the mayor of Paris, who is a Socialist and has done nothing to get the collections going again.

In a perhaps misguided effort to be good citizens, we kept our trash inside for a while.

This didn’t seem to help much with anything.

And as it happens, our building was one of the few the collectors visited recently. I raced outside with our bags when I saw the truck. Since then, our street has been mostly picked up and the strike has been lifted, though it’s unclear how enthusiastic the éboueurs  are about doing the extra work needed to clean up the mess.

The big concern now is that young people, especially students, will take over the demonstrations. A few high schools have been blockaded by students, and in some cases also by their parents, in Paris, and five universities as well. Two to three times as many youth may have participated in the most recent strike day, March 28, as in the previous one, by some estimates.

Young demonstrators care less about retirement than they do about the authoritarian way Macron pushed it through, and about his general reputation as an arrogant elitist. If this becomes a youth movement, it becomes more dangerous for Macron. It’s one thing for police to beat up black-clad anonymous people, it’s another to beat up the children of civil servants and the wealthy.

And it raises memories of May 1968, the beginning of a broad student and union movement that then-President Charles De Gaulle badly underestimated. The crisis was resolved within a year but it indirectly led to De Gaulle’s 1969 resignation – something that Macron must know even though he wasn’t born then.

Many thanks to my visiting friend, Larry Gassan, for the photos! Including the feature image.