Given my background as a former school administrator here in France, my focus is on l'Éducation Nationale:  teachers are protesting cuts in personnel that will create even larger classes.

I am in total sympathy with the teachers, but I have to wonder: what good will this strike do? Who is hurt? Who is moved? I remember the Big One back in 2003, when all four teachers' unions banded together and participation was on the order of 70% or higher, at least for the first several days. As the strike wore on, the public's patience and sympathy wore out. Worse, once it was finally over, the net result was that the Raffarin government hadn't budged. The teachers got nothing for their troubles, except a great deal of personal debt. There were no concessions whatsoever from the government.

--And that strike, to me, seemed to mark a sea change that continues to be in evidence to this day: strikes rarely work. About the only effective strike I've witnessed since moving to France in 2001 was the strike of university and high school students over the CPE (contrat premier embauche). That was a genuine populist movement, not a union-based affair.

Cutting teaching staff is not in France's long-term interests. Huge class sizes are detrimental to effective education, and an educated populace is necessary to a vibrant democracy... [trail off]. Well. What an educated populace isn't vital to is the military-industrial complex, and France, like the U.S. and far too many other countries, spents a wildly disproportionate percentage of its budget on "defense." There are lots of powerful interests who do not care about education, who do not care about anything other than their bottom lines. Strikes don't affect them in the slightest, and yet they are key players in influencing current policy here in France and abroad. What will make a difference to them?

"Sarkozy l'américain" is not going to be any more sympathetic to the philosophy and goals of professional educators than was Raffarin. Today's strike is not going to stop the cutbacks. It will not affect brainless and heartless Education Ministry policies that make teaching less and less attractive as a profession (for example, passing a CAPES or other exam necessary for the equivalent of tenure nearly always means being transfered to a different school in some other part of France).

The CPE was a brainchild of corporate interests, and the populist student movement beat it back. Does this mean that this refrain needs to be sung out again?: Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos bataillons! I hope not, given our species' propensity for violence, but I really have to wonder these days.