La greve

It was like a scene from a fifties horror movie: the man, clearly not French but perhaps from a sunnier part of the European Union, was pressed up firmly against the woman who had been breathing on me for a few minutes. His gut rested on all three people surrounding him, keeping the man from being able to reach either the center pole or the side poles for balance. His last hope was to place his splayed fingers on the brightly lit panel showing the metro stops. Sadly the laws of physics would not let his girth be supported by five pudgy fingers and as the train sped up his fingers slowly slid down the plastic, as if it’s crisp lines and the neatly ordered structure of the Parisian metro, which was now as reliable as a Polish Submarine, was smacking this modern day Daedulus back down to the masses of aggravated and squished passengers.

Yes, there was a strike in Paris. It just ended on Friday, but it was an essentially French experience. “La grève” as it is known to even the Anglophone community, has been going on for a week and seems to be testing the length of my sanity. I know it’s not food, but this blog is about my life in France, and no French life is complete without running in fear from the Parisian equivalent of Godzilla: The French Railroad Workers Unions. As any good liberal, I secretly long to be a communist, and as a boy while others (republicans, mostly) imagined themselves winning the world series or fighting the terminator, I imagined myself growing a pointy goatee, getting small wire rimmed glasses and shooting dissidents while fulminating over the excesses of the capitalist state (~sigh~). It is this exact sentiment, the fascination with the scary aspect of people power that seems to be deeply entrenched in the French mind. They LOVE a good populist protest. 1789. 1848. 1968. Think about it; if your country hadn’t won a war since Napoleon (at least one against an army who fought using guns and tanks rather than fish balls and banana leaves), then any dramatic show of nationalist might would be thrilling. The other day I was having a conversation with Gisele, my lovely French host mother, and she was telling me about the excitement in1968 during the student riots and all the violence she saw. When I asked Gisele, who was born in 1954, what exactly she was doing rioting at the age of 14, she just sort of looked off into the distance and said to herself “I was there…I was there”. Since the revolution, the French, for better or worse, have clearly considered themselves as revolutionaries. That’s why they couch the terms of their grèves in these lofty and ridiculous republican terms. That is why French strikes last so long, and frankly, suck so much.

A proper French strike is somewhat like a good, stinky French cheese: It smells repulsive (winter coats and a tightly packed train in fucking FRANCE do not mix), it may have come from the garbage (every bum in Paris loves that the metro is free during the strike) but some how you just keep eating it and experiencing it (I have to take the metro to get anywhere). So yesterday I walked to the metro from school, expecting only the mildest of Comptés or Brébis and got the most rotten and runny of all Camembert’s (okay it’s a food blog, I have to use that analogy).

Theoretically, to take the 4 line 8 stops through the heart of the Left Bank should take 15 minutes; just long enough for me to put on some pretentious indie music, tire of it, and switch to something produced by Timbaland. But as I knew going in to it, this ride would be anything but typical. The train became insanely crowded (we’re talking 150 people in a space designed for maybe 80) almost instantly. I was sandwiched in between three middle aged French woman, which is always preferable to a sweaty Pakistani and a guy with a skull you only notice is truly bizarrely shaped from twenty minutes of intense study at a distance of 2 inches. The women surrounding me began to joke and laugh, and as we pulled into various stations, the attempts of others to get on board the dangerously packed train only made these woman laugh harder. One turned to me and said, “You’re too young to ride the metro, how about you walk somewhere?” I told them this was my first real French “grève” and each one happily told me horror stories of the 1995 or 1968 grèves “There was only one train an hour, and you weren’t even allowed to smoke on it!” “No there were no trains, but the French were so much thinner and prettier then so no one cared” “In ’68 I walked 18 kilometers in the snow to see Johnny Hallyday perform at the Stade De France. I would go anywhere for that Belgian!” And so on.

Then we had our Kursk moment (what, too soon?). The train, in between the last stations, stopped in a tunnel under the Seine. All but two lights went out and almost instantly the crowd began loudly cursing in French. I know it doesn’t sound too scary, but when I realized that if anything went wrong Sylvester Stallone was not going to come rescue us, I got a little freaked out. As the train sat for a few minutes, the nervous laughter began to die down. Finally, the large African woman to my right asked, “How long do you think we can survive down here?” That killed the party. People were quieter than Strom Thurmond at the Apollo Theater; I mean dead silent. Finally, the conductor announced we would start moving, and the train lurched forward much to my relief.

We pulled in to Chatêlet station, and as I got off the train I heard a scream. About 15 feet from me a woman had fainted. Her friend was screaming as people, either unaware of the woman on the floor or because they didn’t care, tried to step over unconscious woman. The cops directing people’s movement ran over. One put his hand on my back and pushed me in the opposite direction of where I wanted to go, but I basically decided it wasn’t worth fighting. Finally, as I walked to the stairs, I saw a man forcing his way on to the train with his unmuzzled German Sheppard (large dogs are required to be muzzled on the subway).

This to me was the icing on the cake: this man who was too selfish and dumb to think maybe he was putting people in danger by bringing his guard dog to a huge metro station, was forced to take the most crowded train in town. Someone was going to get mauled, and the unions wouldn’t think they were culpable because they are the populists, fighting for the people’s rights. Except do you know what they are trying to protect? The right to retire at 55, when the government wants to move the age to 60 because France is aging and retiring at 55 is unrealistic. In Germany the age of retirement for rail workers is 68, and they are complaining about 60? The grève may be over for now, but they are threatening to bring it back any day.

So like I said, this whole experience has been somewhat like a horror movie. But I am just one little tourist. The real horror story is for the French government and the French working population: it’s called “The Invasion of the Old People”. It’s the story about a continent where people live so long that maybe, if the state funded medical system keeps you alive until you are 85, maybe you should not retire at 55 and leach off the state for three decades.

Here’s hoping I get out of the country before they start the strike again…