President Macron of France will have taken heart from yesterday’s Day of Action in which as many as a million public sector workers demonstrated their rejection of his proposed reform of the state pension system.
Billed as a general strike, the day was supposed to show that Macron had taken on the people and the people weren’t standing for it. Instead, in Paris the protest quickly deteriorated into the usual, dreary sequence of running battles between the police and anarchists whose only cause was destruction and the rejection of democratic order.
By mid-afternoon, with groups of helmeted casseurs launching attack after attack on the police, a majority of genuine protesters, including doctors, lawyers and teachers as well as the more obvious city employees, had clearly had enough of it. Whatever sense of purpose they began with was lost amid the clouds of CS gas and the shock of stun grenades. There were no stirring speeches. There was no central rally. Unusually for a Parisian manif, were no martyrs.
