How French Strikers are Like The Tea Party
Mark Lilla reports:
“Président des Riches” was scrawled on a great number of the signs I saw at the Lyon demonstrations, accompanied sometimes by a cartoon of the diminutive Sarkozy, dubbed Nicolas le Premier, in royal garb a few sizes too big. The biggest sensation along at the parade route was a rotund, rosy-cheeked working-class woman who had dressed herself up in a crudely sewn red-white-and-blue costume to look like Marianne, the mythical symbol of the French Revolution, complete with Phrygian cap. The woman had even made a little cap and robe for her black dachshund, who shivered and looked like he wished he could be anywhere else. She climbed up a lamppost to lead chants and show off her signs, one referring to the Bettencourt scandal, smiling for the cameras when asked to.
Watching her I wondered what really distinguished her from an American Tea Party activist in his Colonial Williamsburg faux-revolutionary outfit and three-cornered hat. After his rally at the Washington Mall our musket-bearing friend probably knelt down in prayer with fellow demonstrators, while she, I imagine, bellied up to the bar for a Pernod. But otherwise? They both feel cut out, distrust their leaders, want things to change, and don’t want anything to change. Above all they want to speak, and what comes to their lips is drawn straight from the national Id. Don’t tread on me! and On va gagner! turn out to mean exactly the same thing: we will be heard. Whether they have anything to say is another matter.
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