Gavin Mortimer

Stéphane Rozès, the author of a book entitled ‘Chaos’, was on French radio this week receiving congratulations for being a visionary. The chaos which he described in his book, published last November, is now being played out in France, as hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets. Asked to explain its cause, Rozès explained that it has been building since 1992, the year France signed the Maastricht Treaty, the beginning of the European Union.  Rozès is not alone in this view. One of France’s best known philosophers, the left-wing Michel Onfray, has been saying the same thing for years. ‘France died in 1992, the date of the Maastricht Treaty,’ he said in an interview in 2018.

There was a sense of foreboding in France at the start of this week. After the anarchy of last Thursday and the extraordinary violence in western France on Saturday, where radical environmentalists fought a pitched battle with police, what would the next seven days bring?  Much of the media speculated that the 10th day of action organised by unions in protest at the government’s pension reform bill would result in the sort of scenes witnessed across France five days earlier, with city halls torched, shops sacked and police stations attacked. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the left-wing La France Insoumise, was accused by the government on Monday of tacitly encouraging the disorder. Yesterday, he called for protestors to make their point peacefully.

Yesterday was a day of anarchy in France – and the protests overnight have led to King Charles's state visit to France, which was due to start this weekend, being cancelled. The King had been due to visit Paris and Bordeaux, two of the cities hit by the most extreme violence. In Bordeaux, a town hall was sacked. In Lorient, a police station was attacked – and in Nantes a court was vandalised. The worst of the violence was in Paris. Hundreds of thugs clad in black fought running battles with police, 149 of whom were injured, and they also smashed and looted shops, banks and restaurants.

The government of Emmanuel Macron won a vote of no confidence in the National Assembly on Monday by a mere nine votes. The cross-party no-confidence motion, tabled by a Centrist coalition fell just short of the 287 votes it needed to bring down the government.  To succeed the no-confidence motion required the support of the centre-right Republican party, augmenting the votes of the left-wing NUPE coalition and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, both of whom are opposed to the government’s reform bill that was passed last Thursday without a parliamentary vote. Instead, on Macron’s orders, Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne used a controversial clause in the Constitution, Article 49.3, to pass the bill.

France is on the brink of another revolution! The proles are swarming to the barricades and it’s only a matter of time before President Macron is dragged from the Élysée palace.  That is the gist of some of the more excitable reporting about what happened yesterday in France. It was certainly a dramatic day after the government forced through its pension reform bill that will increase the age of retirement from 62 to 64. It did so on the orders of Macron, deploying a controversial clause in the constitution – article 49.3 – which legalises a bill without the need for a parliamentary vote.   Where were the opposition MPs in 2020, raging against a breakdown in democracy? It’s becoming a habit of Macron’s.

They say Spring is a magical time to visit Paris but perhaps not this year. It’s not so much love that is in the air of the French capital but the stench from 7,000 tons of uncollected rubbish.  The city’s refuse collectors have been on strike as part of the nationwide protests against the government’s pension reform. Workers at the three incinerators that dispose of Paris’s garbage have also downed tools and the walkout will last until at least Monday 20 March.   It’s not a strike that affects all the capital. In some of the arrondissements, private firms empty the bins and it is business as usual for them.

America must get tough against the Mexican drug cartels, former US Attorney General, William Barr, declared earlier this month. Likening them to Isis, he backed a joint resolution from two Republican senators, giving the US president authority to deploy the military against the cartels in Mexico. Failure to do so would, he warned, allow the cartels to continue flooding the US with their ‘deadly drugs on an industrial scale’. America’s anti-drug strategy was ineffective because, he said, ‘it leaves the drug supply chain untouched…real progress requires aggressively attacking the drug supply at its source. The head of the snake is in Mexico.’  Europe must apply a similar approach if it’s to solve the migrant crisis.

There was more than a whiff of ‘bromance’ between Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron when they met at the Anglo-French summit in the city of love. The weather in Paris was grey and cold, but there was no denying the warmth of the greeting that Macron extended to Sunak as the PM arrived at the Elysee yesterday. This is hardly a surprise: after Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, the president was just pleased to be hosting a PM who knows how to mind his Ps and Qs.   Sunak said he was ‘fortunate’ and ‘excited’ to have the opportunity to work with Macron, whom he described in French as ‘mon ami’. Macron looked genuinely touched to be addressed in such heartfelt terms.

The editorial in today’s Le Figaro heralds the dawn of a 21st century Entente Cordiale and the newspaper carries an interview with Rishi Sunak. Speaking ahead of today’s Anglo-French summit in Paris, Sunak says he wants to ‘open a new chapter with France’.   Le Figaro pins the blame for the deterioration in relations between the two countries since the last summit in 2018 on the British, specifically Boris Johnson and his ‘anti-French populism’. The French believe that is now a thing of the past with Sunak in No. 10. This conveniently overlooks the fact that if Johnson was the bête noire of the French, Emmanuel Macron hasn’t exactly been the most diplomatic leader.

There is much excitement among western Europe’s chattering classes after Elly Schlein was elected the new leader of Italy’s left-wing Democratic party. It is the first time that a woman has led the Italian left. The Guardian quoted the 37-year-old as saying her party will now be ‘a problem’ for Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s conservative PM.  On the contrary. Schlein’s elevation to party leader is an electoral gift for Meloni, whose sex is the only thing she has in common with her new foe. Schlein has not drawn any lessons from the collapse of the French Socialists Meloni was raised by a single mum in a working-class district of Rome and supported herself working as a bartender and a nanny in her youth.

Emmanuel Macron and Giorgia Meloni are no strangers to having a spat. The first was last autumn, about migrants; this time they have fallen out over Ukraine.  The Italian prime minister made no secret of her irritation with the French president last week on discovering he had invited Volodymyr Zelensky to Paris. It was, declared Meloni, ‘inappropriate’ for Macron to host the Ukraine president for dinner last Wednesday at the Elysee. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz received an invite too, which evidently antagonised Meloni even more.  ‘There were two European leaders, there were 25 missing,’ reflected the Italian PM. ‘When it comes to Ukraine, what interests us above everything else is to give a message of unity.

A notable feature of how the French public view the war in Ukraine is that the strongest support for its continuation is among voters who identify as Centrists and Socialists. Those most in favour of a peace settlement are backers of the left-wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the right-wing Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour. A poll in December revealed that 69 per cent of the former and 77 per cent of the latter would prefer that negotiations take precedence over the delivery of weapons to Ukraine, a number that rose to 88 per cent among Zemmour loyalists. These dropped to 57 per cent for Socialists and 60 per cent for supporters of Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party.