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Paris Demonstration Diary

This story was written by CBS News correspondent Sheila MacVicar.



To get to grips with what's happening on the streets of Paris — and, now, every other major French city — the first piece of equipment required is a helmet. Preferably a motorcycle helmet but, in a pinch, a bike helmet will do. Anything to protect from flying projectiles, bat-wielding demonstrators and baton-equipped riot police.

Even better: find a balcony. High enough to be above the fray, something that offers perspective over the scene and permits observation of the charge and counter-charge, formation, dispersal and re-formation taking place below but, most important, also puts you out of range of the missile throwers, and most of the drifts of tear gas.

Thus on Tuesday, with a CBS news crew, I found myself on the fifth floor balcony of an elegant apartment overlooking the Place de la Republique, the finish point for the 3-mile march through Paris that began across town, on the other side of the Seine, at Place d'Italie. Watching with us was our host, Jerome Godefroy, a journalist with the French radio station RTL, who spent most of the last decade living and reporting in Washington and New York.

At the bottom of the square, marchers continued to arrive. Student organizers put the figure at 700,000. The police called it at 92,000, laughably low. (There is a very political and long battle for demonstration numbers in France. An example: in Marseille, also on Tuesday, police said 25,000 were on the streets. The students and unions said 250,000. As Godefroy said, "someone can't count").

However many, most of the marchers dispersed quickly and peacefully. Their numbers included students from some of France's most elite universities, now on strike for more than five weeks. Joining them were their older supporters; the grown ups, members of France's unions, a diverse lot including everyone from train drivers to archaeologists, and the rainbow colored factions of the French left. There were high school students too, some marching with their parents behind the banners of their Lycees.

Most of the march had a carnival atmosphere, led by rappers and be-bop artists, the signature tune "Generation Non Non," blasting out along the route. Godefroy laughed as we watched the red and orange flags of the Trotskyists parade along the perimeter. "Look, now you don't have to go to North Korea," he said.

Place de la Republique is a long rectangle. On the north side are the chateau-like living quarters for an elite police unit that provides diplomatic and presidential security. A treed park, with sandy boules courts dominates the center, bisected by an unfortunate statue representing the ideals of the Republic. Below us, the local MacDonald's had taken the precaution of boarding its windows and closing.

To our left, and at every point of entry to the square were lines of riot police, the CRS. They have quite a reputation for head-banging violence, but last night had been put on notice by Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy, who told them the protests would be a test for them, asked them to remember that some of the demonstrators were very young, and ordered them to restrict their violence to the "casseurs" (literally, "the breakers," the widely-used French slang term for those protesters who resort to violence and vandalism. The French like to think that most of them come from the same immigrant-dominated suburbs swept by riots last fall).

From our vantage point on the fifth floor, it was clear that the police had a plan. Unlike the end of the demonstration last Thursday, which resulted in sustained and ferocious battles on the open Esplanade des Invalides that went on for hours, on Tuesday the police moved to divide groups of protesters, dispersing them from the square. No critical mass that could effectively confront the police built up.

Groups would gather, a chant would go up, bottles and stones would fly, the police would charge, everyone would scatter and, moments later, drift back together again, some of the action lost under the canopy of trees.

Firecrackers banged. A group that brought along concealed incendiary bombs arrived. Two or three Molotov cocktails exploded at the feet of the riot police. Tear gas canisters were fired. There were more charges, and in one of those skirmishes, a police officer was seriously hurt.

The police have several new tools: cameras to help them recognize known trouble-makers, enabling them to better plan how to seize them, and a kind of paint-ball gun, which fires indelible ink, indelibly marking brawlers. Surprisingly, they don't use helicopters to monitor the crowd and help identify flash points and organizers as police in many other major cities do.

Union stewards, wielding their own batons, patrolled the edge of the square, at one point beating back a gang of youths who tried to pull down the iron grill in front of a lingerie shop. The sound of the plate glass front of a phone shop smashing brought the crowd together — hooligans, stewards and police scuffling over the shards of broken glass.

Plainclothes police, dressed like students in hooded sweatshirts, camouflage pants and converse sneakers darted in and out of the crowd, grabbing the most militant, handcuffing them, and leading them away. We watched as the number of "casseurs" slowly eroded, in spite of the continued arrival of marchers at the other end.

The issue is a controversial law, presented and passed without consultation with students or the unions by the conservative French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. France has never had its Margaret Thatcher moment. Workplace reforms that took place in Britain, elsewhere in Europe and, to a certain extent, in the United States in the 1980s have completely passed France by.

The result, says Godefroy, is a once-great system that is collapsing. For the students, he says "It's difficult to understand that the system has to change. This country is afraid of itself, afraid of the world, afraid of any kind of change. So they want to keep the system as it is, even if the system doesn't work any more."

He had an amazing statistic. "Between the age of 18 and 25, two-thirds of the people want to be a public servant. Meaning that they want to have a job for life. One job until you die." Having spent so much time in the United States, he understood how surprising that would be to an American audience, grown used to the notion of skill mobility, and changing economies.

Not all of France is stuck in the cocooning nanny state of the 1980s. But French workers do enjoy some of the greatest protections of any western work force.

Employers say those protections make it hard to hire people because it is so difficult and costly to let them go, and thus contribute to France's staggeringly high unemployment rate.

Before the demonstration, I talked to that rarest of French creatures, an entrepreneur. With two partners, Stephane Pineau founded a software company, producing human resources training material four years ago. Everyone, from his bankers to his friends, was skeptical.

"Training Orchestra" now has 20 employees, and a market expanding into Italy and Spain, he told me.

His business could grow faster, he said, and he could probably double his work force. What was holding him back was fear.

"It is impossible to make a mistake," he said. "In France today, no one can afford to hire the wrong person. It costs too much, takes too much time. If you hire someone, after two months they are yours for life."

The new law is intended to make it easier for employers to take a chance, to bet that their business will grow, or that the young, inexperienced 22-year-old graduate will prove to be the perfect fit. De Villepin has said he is willing to discuss some of the ways in which the law is implemented, but refuses to withdraw what others describe as a modest reform. The students and unions, demanding the law be repealed, are refusing any discussion.

Away from the streets, on the balcony five floors up, Jerome Godefroy talked about the need for a French Thatcher. That's a name, and a theme often repeated here these days.

"If we don't do this now," he said, "the chance will be lost for another 10 years."

The French may not want to hear the message of the global age, but it is a message that they are being told they cannot escape.

On the street below, the police moved up water cannon. One group of protesters was now quietly sitting on the cold pavement. Another, smaller group was still harassing the police in another corner of the square. It was getting dark. The police, under orders to quickly finish off the remnants of the protest, turned the water cannon, blasting across the square, sending some on their feet and still taunting police, tumbling.

Minutes later, the interior minister arrived. He congratulated the police on a job well done, and then invited some of them back to a reception. Two hundred, some still in their riot gear, attended, sipping wine and munching on hors d'oeuvres. This is France, and some things never change.

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