PARIS, March 23 (UPI) -- The student revolt that has rocked France seems at first glance like a return to an old tradition of marches and street fights and barricades in the Latin Quarter of Paris that dates back to May 1968, and before that to similar and classically French revolutions in 1871 and 1848 and 1830.
But there is something distinctly modern about this latest spasm of angry youth. There are few leaders, no central organization, and no dominant role for the small and dedicated parties of the far left. Instead, there are cell phones and the internet.
To understand the student revolt of 2006, log on to stopcpe.net, the blog and website and information center that has become the organizing system of the movement that has occupied the universities, rallied the labor unions into a general strike and put French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin on the ropes.
The CPE it wants to stop is the Contrat Premiere Embauche -- the new and intensely controversial first job contract. It is this blog that has made this student rising so thoroughly decentralized and so independent on the traditional leadership role of Paris. The students of Nantes in Brittany or Dijon in Burgundy or Nanterre outside Paris or Toulouse in the South can rally local support, link it to national efforts and pick and choose among other marches and events they want to attend or support.
"Traditionally, the labor unions or political parties and organizations acted as relay systems with the powers that be, and they became the mechanisms for negotiating a way out of the crisis," says Benoit Hamon, one of the youngest members of the European Parliament. "But this time, nobody is acting as the interface."
Hamon is a Socialist with close ties to UNEF, the National Union of French Students, the nearest thing to an umbrella organization for the students, although it has in the past been less involved in politics than in helping students get cheap travel and accommodation. For Hamon, the violent student reaction against the government's labor market reform is all the more dramatic because it is not organized in classic political forms, and he finds parallels with the wave of riots by young immigrants that swept France last fall.
"There is no clear frontier between the suburbs that exploded and the student youth," he notes. "The violence of those who feel themselves rejected is not limited to the ghettos."
But while the young Arabs and blacks who lit last year's October nights with burning cars used mobile phones to stay ahead of the police, they did not have the internet, or the stopcpe.net website.
Through the blog, any would-be demonstrator can find buses and free rides, other student apartments and dormitories to stay in, cell phone numbers for the latest news, or tap in his or her own mobile phone number to be put on the list to receive the mass messages that tell everyone what is happening where. At last count, there were over 300,000 phones connected.
"This is all I need," grins Thierry Brunet, 23, a history student at the Sorbonne in central Paris, presenting his cell phone. "That was how we heard of the police attack on the Sorbonne; how we heard that the unions were calling a strike to support us."
That helps explain something strikingly different from the student revolt of May 1968, the strange lack of litter. Anyone who was in Paris then remembers the student newspapers and broadsheets and leaflets and posters, read and tossed aside to join the accumulating litter on the streets. The nerve center of the Sorbonne in 1968 was the basement room with the duplicating machines and the silk screen machines that made the posters. These days the cell phone and internet have replaced them.
They also have google.fr, the French version of Google, with its own constantly updated news service that reports the latest statements by politicians, or the latest university president -- like Francois Resche of Nantes -- who has decided to join the students in demanding that the government back down and drop its plan to change the job laws.
The key word in the French crisis is 'precarite,' which is close to the English word precarious, but in France these days it means insecurity. The students are protesting a modest reform in the labor market that is intended to cut the high level of youth unemployment by tackling the reluctance of employers to hire young people on permanent staff contracts when it then becomes almost impossible to sack them. So the new law allows employers to give people under the age of 26 a 2-year contract, and then to fire them at any time in that period without giving a reason.
Laurence Parisot, the cheerful and fiercely intelligent young woman who runs Medef, the employers' federation, supports the law, which she thinks will create jobs in the long run. And besides, she says, breaking the logjam of France's rigid labor laws is essential because "we are in the process of a cultural revolution in our labor market."
But for Francois Chereque, who runs the CFDT labor union, this misses the problem of "precarite," of the deep insecurity that the wider French workforce feels after twenty years of double-digit unemployment, with low-wage competition coming from new European Union countries like Poland, while even tougher competition from China and India lies in wait.
Students and young people feel the insecurity more than most. The average age at which a French worker gets a full-time staff contract is 33. Until that age, most young French people are on short-term contracts or government-run training schemes or work experience courses.
But the person feeling the "precarite" most acutely this week is Prime Minister Villepin, whose government colleagues are discreetly distancing themselves from him and his determination to face down the protesters. His approval ratings have plunged from 50 percent last month to 35 percent now, with next week's general strike against his new law yet to come.
