They're rioting on the streets of Paris, and tear gas is the scent of the season

* They're rioting on the streets of Paris, and tear gas is the scent of the season. Deja vu all over again, isn't it? Only a few weeks ago, the violence was countrywide, led by disaffected Arabs and Muslims. This time, the students are at it, they've shut down the Sorbonne, and they've got the unions to threaten a general strike.

The young expect their first jobs to carry rights to tenure and compensation that make them virtually unsackable, and they like this so much that they are hurling rocks at the cops in the traditional manner. One direct consequence of such privilege at work is that almost a quarter of the young are too expensive to employ--in some blighted areas the proportion of young unemployed rises to almost half. Prime Minister de Villepin is hoping to implement a law allowing employers to take on those under 26 without any protective rights. Since he's in the running for president next year he is expected to retreat under cover of some Napoleonic flourish presented as an advance. Even so limited a scope to hire and fire, the students and the unions say, is a surrender to the brutal practices of American capitalism, and nobody becomes President of France on a platform like that.

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