The Global Justice Movement in France

Seattle is presented as the birth date of the global justice movement (GJM). ¹ But, as many authors have emphasized, the GJM has taken very specific national trajectories and developed at a different pace, in a different way, and with different actors, depending on the particular context in each country. In France, its dynamic was made possible by the reorganization of the protest movement, which had begun by the end of the 1980s (Sommier 2003). It expanded with the 1995 strikes against the retirement reform plan; new organizations and new activist characteristics emerged at that time. These circumstances gave the French GJM several specific features, especially its social aspect and its particular relation to politics.