# The French Protests Were Inevitable || Peter Zeihan

Source: [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6teI4bG6lx8)

## Why France is protesting: the demographic shift

**Peter Zeihan (Speaker 1):** [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6teI4bG6lx8&t=0s)

Hey y'all, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from a foggy Colorado. A lot of you have written in asking what the hell is going on in France. We've got protests again—not just labor, this time also students. Why? Okay, three things.

First of all, France is going through a delayed moment that most of the rest of Europe and the bulk of the advanced world already has. Birth rates started dropping in the rich world back in the vicinity of World War II, with globalization's onset. People finally had access to international markets, and so everyone could specialize. They started taking services and industrial jobs, and those were all in the cities.

When you live on the farm, kids are free labor. You have a bunch. When you move into the city, kids are just an expense. You have fewer. So we saw periods in the '80s, '90s, 2000s, and 2010s when various countries across the spectrum finally reached the point of demographic inversion, where the birth rate had been so low for so long, they were now starting to age out. That generates a whole host of problems. But for purposes of this conversation, it's financial.

## Fiscal pressures and centralized power

**Peter Zeihan (Speaker 1):** [01:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6teI4bG6lx8&t=64s)

Because when you've got a big generation—the last big generation to be born—that is in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, then you're awash with money. You can spend that on infrastructure or education or social services or whatever. But when they hit their 60s, all of a sudden that money goes away. They're no longer paying taxes, and they start taking from the system in terms of pensions and health care.

Everyone has made this transition ahead of France because France was a more rural country. The land is just better, and so its transition from rural to urban happened slower. They didn't finally have a birth rate crunch until just this decade. So they're at the very early stages of that transition, and they have a very robust social security state, just like most of Europe. But this is the first time that they have actually had to deal with the fact that the money is no longer there.

That means they have to cut programs, and wherever they cut is going to cause a problem. Some of the biggest cuts have been in health, public safety, and education. So it's the students that are rebelling now because they see the quality of the education and the facilities that they have just being less than their forefathers, and they're right. Other countries have found ways to make do over time, but it's never easy, and certainly isn't in France either. So that's one.

Number two, France is a little bit different. France was the first country to really centralize, and for most of its modern history, Paris has been large and in charge and has decided what's happened everywhere. That means you have a lot more smoothness when it comes to policy. So it was really easy to put these social programs into place in the first place.

When you're dealing with countries that are more federal, whether it's Germany or the United States, there's more debate, there's more conversations, and the richer regions tend to not want to subsidize the poorer regions as much. So the subsequent social welfare state isn't as big, and it's easier to pare down.

That doesn't happen in France because everything is centrally designed. So if you want to protest, you just go to Paris, because that's where all the power is. And so all the protests always tend to be louder.

## France's imperial legacy

**Peter Zeihan (Speaker 1):** [03:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6teI4bG6lx8&t=191s)

And then the third piece is the French imperial legacy was very different from, say, the Dutch or the British. Most European empires installed their own people in their colonies as a layer over existing political elites and economic elites. They certainly took their cut, but it was a more corporatist empire where the colonials actually ran their own businesses, harnessing, of course, whatever happened to be in the colony.

I don't mean to suggest that they were nice about it, but it generated an economic activity that was left behind when they left. And while they were there, the colonials were involved in the economic activity.

It's not really how it went down with countries like, say, France or Belgium or Japan. There, to be perfectly blunt, they raped the locals, sometimes literally, and destroyed the local political elites and economic elites and just took over directly. It was more of an extractive empire, so when they left, there wasn't a lot of friendly memories left.

So if you look at countries like India, which screams about colonialism, they still have reasonably good relations with the rest of the Commonwealth. And the Commonwealth exists. And London is at least tucked to. In the former French colonies, there's not a lot of that. There's cooperation with the security elites, and that's about it.

Well, what that meant was that the French were basically sticking a straw in all their colonies and pulling the resources home. They spent those resources on a lot of things, including, say, the social welfare state. And when those colonies went away, the cost of the state got borne by the locals, so they now have some of the highest tax rates in the world. And there's just a lack of a certain amount of economic realism.

## “Public money” versus taxpayer money

**Peter Zeihan (Speaker 1):** [04:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6teI4bG6lx8&t=291s)

There's this concept in France called public money, where the idea is that the government has the money, and it's a bottomless source, so of course we can demand the government to do whatever we want.

In most countries, that's called taxpayer money, and there's a concept that we're actually paying for all of this, so we should probably have a conversation about how much of it we really want to pay for.

## The 1968 comparison and closing offer

**Peter Zeihan (Speaker 1):** [05:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6teI4bG6lx8&t=314s)

I think the best historical example, going back to the 1968 protests in France, which were some of the biggest, was the slogan was, “Be realistic, demand everything.” That's definitely what we're seeing now.

It's not that the students are wrong about what they're saying. It's just that they're part of a system now that is almost custom-designed to not cut spending. And now they're in a situation where they have to, and they just don't have a historical experience of doing that. And so here we are.

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