France Follow

It's hard not to look forward to the French presidential elections, whose first round is only two and half months away, with a sense of foreboding.

The year 2006 was a crucial one for social struggles and the radical left in France. Social mobilisations reached a peak when millions of students took to the streets last spring and forced the right wing government to withdraw the CPE, its labour neoliberal reform law.

One argument concerning contemporary fascist movements such as Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front in France claims that they cannot be fascist because they do not deploy stormtroopers against the left, blacks and Muslims.

France is intervening in two African countries, using troops and fighter aircraft to defend the regimes in Chad and the Central African Republic (CAR) from rebel forces. The interventions come without any debate in the French parliament.

In 1968 France was brought to a standstill by a huge movement of students and workers. This movement paralysed the French state and also saw an explosion of experimental street art.

Following on from their French and the Greek colleagues earlier this year, Serbian students have helped roll back the neoliberal offensive on higher education in Europe.

Islamophobia isn’t just taking place in Britain. Authorities in France have withdrawn the security clearances for 40 mainly Muslim workers at the Paris airport of Roissy-Charles de Gaulle, one of Europe’s busiest airports.

Read our monthly supplement, featuring Jim Wolfreys and Jess Hurd returning to France a year after he most prolonged rioting the country had ever seen.

In the autumn of 2005 the suburbs of Paris burned with anger at racism and poverty. Soon that rage spread across France and led to the most prolonged rioting the country had ever seen. Jim Wolfreys returned to Paris to find out if anything has changed.

The socialist Mehdi Ben Barka was a leading figure in the national liberation movement which won Morocco independence from France in 1956. While in exile in the 1960s he continued to play a role in the anti-colonial movement internationally.

Every generation seems to get its own version of the legend of Robin Hood. Most of the recent Robins, such as the one played by Kevin Costner in the 1991 film version, are wronged British noblemen who teach corrupt, often French, officials a lesson before being reconciled with the king and resuming their rightful status.

He who half makes a revolution digs his own grave. Those words from the great French revolutionary Saint-Just don’t appear to have made much of an impression on the well read chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown.