France Sees Nationwide Strikes and Protests Over Wages and Living Costs

France did what France does. It stopped. Tens of thousands marched — the Interior Ministry counted about 600,000, the CGT claimed 1.6 million — over wages, prices, schools and the condition of a country that feels poorer than its rhetoric. The Eiffel Tower closed. Trains and classrooms stalled. In Lyon a car was set alight and police used tear gas. Sophie Binet called for the demonstrations to continue. Another is already set for Saturday. The sequence has become national etiquette: grievance, shutdown, clash, communiqué, repeat.

The grievance is real. Prices outran pay. Households that survived the energy shock were not comforted by official reassurance. Parents can see the missing teachers and the worn buildings. People who still have to show up in person know that “public service” is often a promise the state no longer keeps. A politics that answers them with patience lectures has already lost them.

It has not lost the plot. This was not a spontaneous revolt of the warehouse and the checkout line. It was organized in large part by unions whose power sits in the protected public sector, demanding that a government which already taxes work at punishing rates and carries debt past 110 percent of GDP simply spend more. That is not a purchasing-power strategy. It is a plan to send the bill back to the same public later — in charges, in inflation, or in services that rot because the money went to payroll instead of repair. France’s cost of labor is already a warning to anyone thinking of hiring. Raising it by fear of the street does not create the output that makes a raise real. It prices marginal jobs out of existence and leaves the insiders free to march for the next round.

The serious objection deserves a straight answer. Inflation did the damage. Some profits recovered faster than wages. Teacher shortages will not be solved by sermons on competitiveness. A center that burned political capital on pension reform while household budgets burned has thin standing to preach restraint. None of that rescues the union arithmetic. You do not repair a classroom by closing the school. You do not defend the modest employee by immobilizing the city she has to cross to earn her pay. And you do not set a car on fire and then pose as the injured party when the Republic answers with tear gas. Most of Thursday was peaceful. The part that was not is not a footnote. It is evidence that a government which treats every mobilization as a negotiation is teaching the country that disorder works.

Sébastien Lecornu’s meeting with the unions is the old gesture: summon the confederations, listen, concede a little, hope Saturday is smaller. It will not fix the model. French living standards rise when work pays more because the state takes less of it, when energy is abundant rather than moralized into scarcity, when schools have authority as well as budgets, and when governments stop mistaking a union press release for the national will. That is a Right argument not because it flatters capital, but because it refuses the superstition that a paralyzed country is a just one.

The French are entitled to their anger. They are not entitled to a veto over arithmetic, enforced by strike and sometimes by arson. A republic that cannot say no to the street will keep performing decline in public — and sending the invoice to people who were only trying to get to work.