France: why the right is on the

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AFTER another day of street violence on May 24, the wave of mass action led by the right wing in France is likely to subside, for a while at least.

Five separate groups, with separate grievances, have been involved in the action. On May S, for example, there were three distinct anti-government demonstrations on the same day in Paris: one by students, one by farmers, and one by small shopkeepers and businessmen.

The medical students' dispute saw 41,000 students on strike trom February until they suspended their action on May 24 -declaring that they were still not satisfied despite shifts in the government's position. The movement was sparked by proposals to change the exam system.

The number of doctors in France has almost tripled in the last 20 years, and there is now one doctor per every 450 of population, as against one per 750 in Britain..

Instead of a national health service, France has a systém of state health insurance and private medical practice; but now private medical practice is not quite the money-spinner it was.

The junior hospital doctors - who, like their counterparts in Britain, work extremely long hours for not specially high pay -are therefore more and more concerned about their career prospects.

Their strike - which ran March until it was suspended on May 2, and may start again on June 1 - was concerned with increasing the possibilities open to them for careers within the public hospital system, and with a number of pay and conditions issues.

The government made concessions on pay and conditions and promised to create a number of new posts.

Since April students of all sorts, but most prominently law students, have demonstrated against government proposals for the reorganisation of higher education.

Debate on the proposals began on May 24 in the National Assembly, where the right wing opposition have put down over 1,000 amendments, but student protests may diminish now because of approaching exams.

Small shopkeepers and businessmen. have demonstrated on May 5, on May 16, and on other dates against the government's austerity programme, which they claim has crippled them through tax increases. The demonstrations have repeatediy led to street fighting.

Farmers have also demonstrated. Their protest is as much against EEC policies as against the government.

In each dispute there is a mixture of economic concerns, arising from the state of French capitalism and from government austerity policies, and organised right wing exploitation of those concerns.

France has long had a sizeable right wing ready and willing to practise its politics on the streets. Its large class of small shopkeepers and peasant farmers provides the strongest social base for these politics.

The Gaullist movement of the 1940s had a strong paramilitary wing, supposedly to steward its meetings. The Poujadist movement, at its height in 1954-8, again brought right-wing politics onto the streets. In 1958 De Gaulle returned to power through a military coup d'etat, and created the 'Service d'Action Civique? (SAC) squads. Only two years ago, 12 members of the SAC, including its secretary-general, were charged with the murder of a police inspector and five of his family.

The small groupings of the hard right overlap and interrelate with the main right wing parties, the UDF and RPR, and also with the fascist CSL, which functions as a company union in Citroen, Peugeot and elsewhere. The right in general has gained recently from discontent with the Socialist led government, and so has the hard right: Jean-Marie Le Pen of the French National Front gained 11% of the vote in one district of Paris in recent local elections.

The small shopkeepers and farmers have well-established organisations firmly linked to the gy Right. And upper-class family backgrounds can explain the right wing alignment of many of the students who have been demonstrating - particularly the medical students "and law students. But there is more to it.

The most complicated situation ís in the students' protest against reorganisation of higher education.

Chaos committee got only 1500.

France does not have a single student union with more or less automatic membership, like the NUS in Britain. There are a number of student unions, divided politically. The right wing unions are all much smaller than the two left-wing unions, which are roughly level pegging: UNEFsolidarite etudiante, dominted by the Communist Party, and UNEF-ID, in which the strongest force is the PCI, an organisation strong on frotskyist rhetoric but weak on EN compulsory loan by everyone to the state; increase in electricity charges, phone charges, fares, etc; increased health charges, a strict limit on money for foreign holidays.

Since then, while the right wing has taken to the streets again and again, the big union federations, the CGT and the CFDT, have done nothing. The only protest has been by the small, generally right wing and white collar union federation FO, which

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by Martin Thomas