Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
in a general strike that virtually paralysed the country. It was a period of creativity and new
ideas, with slogans like '
L'Imagination au Pouvoir'
(Put Imagination in Power) and '
Sous
les Pavés, la Plage'
(Under the Cobblestones, the Beach) - a reference to Parisians' fa-
voured material for building barricades and what they could expect to find beneath them -
popping up everywhere.
But such an alliance between workers and students couldn't last long. While the former
wanted to reap greater benefits from the consumer market, the latter supposedly wanted to
destroy it. De Gaulle took advantage of this division and appealed to people's fear of an-
archy. And just as Paris and the rest of France seemed on the verge of revolution, a mighty
100,000-strong crowd of Gaullists came out on the streets of Paris to show their support for
the government, thus quashing any idea of revolution. Stability was restored.
Paris is run from the Hôtel de Ville (City Hall) by the maire(mayor) with help from 21 ad-
joints(deputy mayors), elected by 163 members of the Conseil de Paris (Council of Paris)
and serving terms of six years.
Modern Society
Once stability was restored the government immediately decentralised the higher education
system and implemented a series of reforms (including lowering the voting age to 18, and
enacting an abortion law) throughout the 1970s to create the modern society France is today.
President Charles de Gaulle resigned in 1969 and was succeeded by the Gaullist leader
Georges Pompidou and later Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. Socialist François Mitterrand be-
came president in 1981 and immediately nationalised privately owned banks, large industri-
al groups and other parts of the economy. A more moderate economic policy in the
mid-1980s ensured a second term in office for the then 69-year-old Mitterrand.
Jacques Chirac, mayor of Paris since 1977, took over the presidential baton in 1995 and
received high marks in his first few months for his direct words and actions in EU matters
and the war in Bosnia. But his decision to resume nuclear testing on the French Polynesian
island of Mururoa and a nearby atoll was met with outrage in France and abroad, and when,
in 1997, Chirac gambled with an early parliamentary election for June, the move backfired.
Chirac remained president but his party, the Rassemblement Pour la République (RPR;
Rally for the Republic), lost support, and a coalition of socialists, communists and Greens
came to power - under whom France's infamous 35-hour working week was introduced.
Chirac's second term, starting in 2002, was marred by some of the worst violence seen in
Paris since WWII. In autumn 2005, following the death of two teenage boys of North Afric-
