Seen on the Streets; The French protests are about much more than jobs. Elites don't get it.

Byline: Olivier Roy (Roy is the author of "Globalized Islam" and is a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. Write him at oroy@compuserve.com.)

It is oddly disconcerting, for a Frenchman, to watch the latest Paris protests while on a visit to America. Here, too, demonstrators are marching--many of them recent immigrants determined to work in the booming United States, however lowly the job and poor the pay. Back in France, by contrast, youths are marching against a measure designed to create jobs specifically for them. And they are joined, shoulder to shoulder, by the children of those immigrants who would, in fact, most benefit from the new law.

By now, the whole world is familiar with France's controversial Premier Contrat d'Embauche, or first-job contract, which allows employers to dismiss new hires under the age of 26 without notice or even explanation. With his government weighed down by persistently high unemployment, particularly among the young, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin proposed the law in hopes of buoying his prospects in next year's presidential election. If employers indeed rushed to hire young people knowing they would not be burdened by them in bad economic times, de Villepin calculated, he would put a dent in the country's jobless rates--and in a stroke win the support of France's youth without losing that of older workers. As it turned out, he lost the support of both and sparked the biggest street protests since May 1968. Why?

First of all, it's important to understand that today's youths are not ' 68ers. Rather than revolutionary, this new generation is conservative. It is afraid of change--European integration, globalization, deregulation. Those on the streets may clothe their opposition in the argot of leftist defiance, but at bottom they want nothing more than to benefit from the same social and job advantages their parents enjoy.

Even the immigrants? In most countries--including the United States--immigrant populations are among the hardest working, asking only for economic opportunity and a chance to educate their kids. In France, last November's riots among the banlieues were interpreted as a similar desperate cry: to create jobs, and to remove the racist barriers blocking access to those jobs. Yet here those same kids are, manning the barricades against change, clamoring for state-enforced guarantees of benefits and job security. The vast majority of French citizens--of whatever background--would prefer a cozy government sinecure to a job in the rough-and-tumble private sector.

This is a remarkable indictment of French sclerosis--and it is a reminder that many of the alienated youth branded "immigrants" by the press are actually second and third generation, as French as any of their compatriots in the streets. But the picture is complicated. Though many are reluctant to call attention to the fact, the recent marches have also been disrupted by the same people who rioted in November. Gangs of school dropouts from the ghettoes ringing the city, often African or Arab, joined the demonstrations to fight the police as well as other youngsters whom they see as "white" bourgeois. Thus, while most protesters were marching against one form of perceived injustice--an unpopular government ...