French Performers Go On Strike
They've already called off operas and foiled film festivals. On Wednesday, thousands of France's performing artists took their strike on the road, puffing into tubas or waving puppets as they marched through Paris' streets in a demonstration.
Now that spring strikes by transport workers, teachers and trash collectors have ended, a standoff over unemployment benefits for artists is threatening to ruin France's summer artistic season.
Dozens of performances from a staging of "Don Giovanni" at the Paris Opera to a summer dance festival in southern Montpellier have been canceled. Others are under threat, including a world-renowned theater festival in Avignon.
Actors, musicians, filmmakers and theater technicians are worried about changes to a unique French system that protects performers with an unemployment plan that takes into account their downtime between projects.
"My whole life I've made movies," said film director Jean-Pierre Thorn, one of 5,000 marching in Paris. "Now I'm threatened by extinction."
Thorn and several other moviemakers decided Wednesday to pull their films out of summer film festivals. He is worried the reform shows France is favoring cash over culture.
The filmmaker also believes it signals the end of France's "cultural exception" actively protecting French culture through state support for homegrown art, and countering American pop culture's influence.
"France is conforming to Hollywood," said Thorn, who held a banner reading "Angry Filmmakers."
Demonstrators said the unemployment benefits gave them time and money to work on new ideas.
A puppet troupe marching with African masks on sticks said the benefits let them take a show on AIDS to Burkina Faso. Drummer Nicolas Petit said the funds kept his small brass fanfare alive during the lean early years.
"We have the only system in the world that is this concerned about artists and musicians and technicians," Petit said as his colleagues rehearsed on tubas and trombones.
More than 102,000 people qualified for the artists' unemployment system last year, nearly double a decade ago. In 2002, the government's fund for arts workers was at a shortfall of $950 million.
The powerful French business federation, Medef, believes people are taking advantage of the system and wants to make it harder to qualify.
As things stand, performers have to rack up 507 hours of work in a year to qualify for 12 months of unemployment pay. Under the new proposal, they would have to work 507 hours over 10 1/2 months to win jobless benefits for eight months.
The Communist-backed CGT union worries that 35 percent fewer artists will be covered by the new plan. But not all artists oppose it.
Three minority unions already signed off on the proposal, and French director Patrice Chereau, who headed the Cannes Film Festival jury this year, said it was a step in the right direction.
Chereau also chided protesters.
"Every time we strike, we're striking against ourselves," Chereau told Le Monde newspaper. "We're shooting ourselves in the foot."
Theater-lovers are nervously waiting to see if the Avignon Festival -- France's most celebrated theater venue -- will go smoothly. The festival in the cobblestone-paved Provence town showcases troupes from all over the world and draws hundreds of thousands of visitors.
The huge CGT union has called a general strike to start July 8 -- the day the festival starts. A new round of talks Wednesday with the government failed to unblock the crisis.
Culture Minister Jean-Jacques Aillagon asked strikers to be reasonable and save Avignon.
"Canceling a festival is the worst of all solutions," he told Liberation newspaper.
By Angela Doland