But not thinking ahead:
French students intensified blockades of high schools and universities Thursday, as a third straight day of nationwide strikes over the government's retirement reform snarled train travel and shuttered oil refineries.
While the striking students won't reach retirement age for decades, the government is keeping a close eye on how their protests play out. Students have brought down major government reforms in the past and student actions have degenerated into violence.
The country's main university and high school student unions called for nationwide protests Thursday, including in front of France's main employers' lobby, Medef, hoping to carry the momentum of the movement against President Nicolas Sarkozy's push to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. The students and labor unions see the pension reform as an attack on hard-earned social protections.
A Britisher, Thomas Carlyle, is supposed to have coined the term "mobocracy." The French, however, are its leading modern practitioners. For the better part of the last two centuries, successive French governments have alternately put down, or caved into, the Parisian mob.
The advent of modern communication allowed the mob mentality to spread out from the arrondissements, and into the provincial towns and cities. The modern French welfare state's absurdly generous provisions encouraged the sense of militant entitlement to creep up, from the lower rungs of society and well into the middle class.
It is one of the gravest ironies of French history that the Revolution, that great watershed of modern European history, in time transformed the people into an aristocracy. While they lack the manners and elegance of the ancien regime - certainly Talleyrand would not have envied living in these times - they have acquired the same feckless decadence. France bankrupted herself in the 1780s. Nearly two and quarter centuries later, France seems intent on bankrupting herself again.
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