From Pension Reform to Regime Crisis: The Social Movement of 2023 in France

At the time of writing, France had experienced more than a dozen days of combined industrial and protest action since January 2023, with numerous strikes and millions of people walking in the streets, and some kind of secession of many citizens from the political authorities.Although they coalesced around a simple slogan -the refusal to accept a new pension reform that would raise the legal retirement age from 62 to 64 -the protests fostered the expression of a wider social and democratic revolt.As such, they have revived many aspects of the global cycle of "anti-austerity and pro-democracy protests" (Flesher Fominaya, 2017) that had been put on hold during the pandemic.Indeed, beyond the issue of pensions, the movement gave voice to a latent social anger about the degradation of work that has been less and less acceptable after the celebration of "essential workers" during the COVID-19 crisis.According to the European Survey on Working Conditions, France is at the top of the list for work-related exhaustion and accidents (Eurofound, 2022).In small and medium-sized cities, workers performing physical tasks, whether in the manufacturing or care sectors, are over-represented; echoing concern about this, the protests were particularly strong in such cities: 10 to 15 per cent of the population was sometimes found demonstrating.More broadly, as the "Yellow Vests" upsurge had already reminded us, the lowest-income workers are concentrated in those areas where the disappearance of public services and the rise in the cost of living is felt the most. 1 But the movement has also expressed a democratic break-up with political leaders who continue to implement the neo-liberal agenda in spite of the protests that have been taking place since the mid-1990s, both in the streets and in the ballot box (Amable, 2017).This feeling that the political elites are indifferent to popular demands proved all the stronger against Emmanuel Macron as he was re-elected president by default in 2022, more because of rejection of the far-right candidate than adhesion to his project.Given this dual dimension, both social and political, the protests have taken diverse forms.A first sequence, between January and March 2023, was characterised by the centrality of the labour movement, which gave the impulse and structured collective action throughout the country.The massiveness of the demonstrations was made possible by the militant network of labour organisations, and especially their dual structure -professional and territorial.The unity between usually divided trade union organisations in the intersyndicale (a collective of trade union federations) gave great strength to the movement, because it increased the legitimacy of the unions' discourse and allowed their respective militant networks to reinforce each other.The role played by trade unions refuted all those who, in the political, media or academic fields, presented them as marginal 1 During the winter of 2018-2019, the spontaneous mobilisation of inhabitants residing mainly in these neglected areas had been interpreted as a revolt of "peripheral France".

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