Une grève!

So tomorrow there is supposed to be a "grève." For English speakers, that's a strike or a walk-out. The French love to go on strike, generally without much of a reason (the stated reason for tomorrow's strike is something to do with supporting workers and disliking President Sarkozy's 2009 budget...or something like that) and tomorrow will be a general strike, so the idea is that they want just about everybody to participate. This could get very interesting. Often strikes here have their day but don't have a huge impact, but every once in a while they take off and Paris and sometimes the whole country are essentially shut down for what can be days or even weeks, depending on how serious the strikers are. I'm not expecting tomorrow to be too crazy, though. Everything I've read says that during strikes the metro continues to run, although certainly less frequently, and that's really all that matters. I have one class tomorrow and I anticipate being able to go to it. Afterwards I plan on walking around the city with my camera trying to get some good pictures of anybody who may be out in the streets demonstrating.

One interesting part of French strikes is that even the students strike. This concept is fairly foreign and bizarre to myself and most of the American students here. American students are used to paying high tuition costs to attend school, so it doesn't make much sense for American students to "go on strike" from something they're paying a lot for. French students, however, pay quite a bit less to attend institutions of higher education and seem to be a bit nuttier politically anyway.

My school, Sciences-Po, seems to be the exception for a number of reasons. First of all, Sciences-Po is mostly publically funded, but is privately run so there is little incentive for anyone to strike against the administration as it's not really an act against the government. Second, most of the professors are not professors in the way that Americans think of the profession; that is, it isn't really a profession for them. Most work outside of academia for private firms or government institutions and spend two hours once a week teaching a class on a subject related to their area of expertise. Accordingly, the professors have little incentive to strike against the school. Additionally, Sciences-Po is known for churning out future government officials (I believe Sarkozy is the only French president since de Gaulle who didn't attend Sciences-Po; he failed his first-year exams there and went somewhere else). Why strike against the people you want to work for?

Where things get interesting, however, is when students from other schools (who apparently don't like Sciences-Po that much, for a variety of reasons) try to force Sciences-Po to shut down. In fact, on Monday approximately 50 students from another university in Paris essentially occupied our two main buildings, apparently causing both to be shutdown and the street to be blocked off by police in riot gear (of which there are always a lot in Paris to begin with). I was home sick with the flu on Monday (and yesterday, although I braved the outside world today) but friends reported being turned away when they tried to go to class on Monday afternoon. They finally cleared out and things seem to be mostly normal, although they've posted guards at the front doors who are checking student ID cards. Needless to say, I'm interested to see what happens tomorrow.