The Occupy Movement in France

Many observers were surprised that the Occupy Movement attracted very little support in France, while in other neighboring countries, notably Spain, street protests were huge and numerous. The cry of Stéphane Hessel — in his book Indignez-vous! (‘Time for outrage!’) — is said to have been a remarkable bestseller ¹ but had hardly any knock-on effects. Although this observation is accurate, we feel the need to add several comments that mitigate its scope. First, the Occupy movement, as strong as it may be in certain regions of the world, is a phenomenon which remains globally limited. On the European scale, most countries have not witnessed any significant mobilization, as the Italian case shows (cf. Zamponi 2012). From this angle, France does not stand out as an exception and follows the general trend. The astonishment is based largely on the idea that France is traditionally a country with a high level of social and political contention. This belief seems to be borne out by statistical analysis, in any case over the period of 1990–1995, in which France was the European country that experienced the most protest events, far more than Germany or Spain (Nam 2007: 108). At the same time, this capacity for mobilization was not linear and often led to extremely intensive peaks, such as in the 1995 strikes in the public sector or the 2006 protest against the reform of the labor law (Contrat de première embauche, CPE) (Lindvall 2011). It is possible, therefore, that mobilization has undergone a momentary slump or is following a temporality of its own, without this prefiguring its future development. One may add that the density of civil society in France, especially its associative and trade union sectors (Béroud et al. 2008), is notably weak (Balme and Chabanet 2008: 48), which may partly explain the somewhat eruptive and unpredictable nature of social protest. Thus, the situation is at once complex and relatively paradoxical, combining a high level of social and political agitation with a decline in the structures which were for a long time the main channel of expression of popular discontent (Fillieule 1997).