"Vive la grève," indeed.

Insupportable: something that is intolerable, unjustifiable, etc. I realize that this word exists in English, but it's simply not used with the same frequency or enthusiasm as it is in French. In Paris, many things are insupportable -- the one-minute delay on the metro, colors that aren't black, the amount of reading for a class, life in general.

La grève: a strike

When something that is especially insupportable happens, the Frenchman's first recourse is to stage a manifestation -- a protest. When things get especially insupportable, however, he must turn to la grève.

I should correct myself: the word "must" implies that the Frenchman hesitates to use -- even dislikes -- la grève. This is not the case. Over the past month or so, professors (and some students) at public universities in France have been staging des grèves over President Sarkozy's proposed privatization of the French university system: Until he drops the proposal, many departments are refusing to hold any classes. Since Sciences Po is private, I have been, sadly, unaffected by the no-school grèves.

Until today. As an American who wasn't even around when President Reagan fired the air traffic control workers, my experience with grèves is limited to a few childhood memories of picket lines at the grocery store. Today, though, the French showed me how it's done. This is France, so la grève necessarily involved emotional highs and lows.

When I left for school, the metro was still running, but it took me an extra fifteen minutes to get to class. "I hate la grève, I hate la grève." When I left school for my lunch break, I was craving a ham and butter sandwich, made with the delicious, delicous ham from the butcher shop near my apartment. I hop back on the metro, go to the butcher, and... the BUTCHER is on grève. "I just took the metro back to the right bank and the butcher is on strike? What the heck is he angry about? WHERE IS MY HAM?" Needless to say, I was very hangry (hungry+angry) at this point, and not at all a fan of la grève.

Not a fan, that is, until I realized why the French are such fans of la grève: it is one huge party. Walking into the Place de la Republique was sensory overload: the entire plaza was blocked off and literally packed with members of different labor unions, all protesting the French government's response to the economic crisis. There was a lot of shouting and sign/flag waving, yes, but there was also live music, dancing, drinking in public, picnics, pamphleteering... and, merciful Mother of God, barbeque. The emotional low of the morning metro rush and the ham failure was more than offset by the fantastic cooked sausage I got for lunch. After enjoying my lunch and watching the grève for a bit (seriously, this is a real activity), it was time to go back to school for my evening class. Worried that I hadn't done the most complete job on the reading, I hustled to my class to find... it was CANCELLED! Turns out there had been threats against Sciences Po, since it's a very bourgeois, political school, and the purpose of the nation-wide grève was to protest France's supposedly (read: not) bourgeois economic policies.

So, instead of a ham sandwich and a two-hour class, I ate barbeque and took a lovely stroll in the sun (!) along the Seine. Vive la grève, indeed.