Paris bulletin 3 2008

                                                                   Canal St Martin

The schools were closed on Thursday last week and will be again this Thursday - the teachers are beginning systematic industrial action against the 'reforms' (for which read cuts of course), being brought in by Super-Sarko and his enforcer, the Ministre de l'Education Nationale, Xavier Darcos. There will be a massive shedding of posts in the primary sector - up to 13,000 posts will go. Other changes with a similar impact are contained in the same Bill. There was a demo about all this at République yesterday with what the media said was a 'respectable turnout' - 80,000 by the organisers' count, (32,000 according to the police, so probably around 60,000 in reality).

If you or I think there's a certain inconsistency between on the one hand holding up universal education as the tool par excellence of the 'knowledge economy' and cutting back on teaching posts on the other, believe you me it doesn't look like that to Sarko. This after all is the man who in March announced that France's coffers are empty but in October found he had hundred of millions of public money he could pass onto the banks to keep them going.

I've been doing a course of training to teach French as a foreign language this month with the intention of working with immigrants who need to take the 'DILF' (diplôme initial de la langue française) or with French natives who are 'peu ou pas scolarisés' (with little or no formal education). We've been a group of seven students, two men and five women, plus our tutor, a young woman, Leila, who runs a small voluntary agency 'les paroles voyageuses' and whose weekday job is teaching deaf adults how to read and write.

I've been struck by the conversations round the lunch table, (this being France you go out for a proper lunch in the local resto). Not once have I heard anyone enquire 'what are you doing for Christmas?' or even 'what are you doing at the half-term holiday?' This is both because the French are less inclined to share family news in the way we do in the UK, among relative strangers, and because they are much, much more interested in how things are, or more often aren't, progressing in the world around them. 

'Socialists', (the term is still quite current here), and communists, (there are still a ghood number of those), are regularly interviewed on the main radio channels. The daily public phone-in I listen to where a senior politician or other public figure is in the hot-seat has ordinary folk from all over France calling in with usually extraordinarily well-informed remarks and questions. There is a 'volonté de savoir, de débattre et de discuter' that is almost completely absent from conversation in the UK.

The 104, a new artistic and cultural space in the 19th arrondissement opened its doors last weekend - mobbed - while the salon de l'Automobile closed its this weekend - also mobbed, (1.4 million visitors this year). Along the road, in the jardin I see that the little flottilas of fish in the mini-canal at the jardin are multiplying into veritable shoals - no sign of any fishing rods yet though. Which reminds me of the conversation I had recently with a park warden in London’s St James's Park. He told me that they have to keep a close watch on the lake because the homeless go fishing for their supper there. Hunting the king's deer, fishing the queen's ponds - plus ça change...