Politics in : A year in the Merde
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It was lucky for me that Jean-Marie had put me in a hotel so close to his appartment, because that Saturday, the Paris transport workers went on strike.
' And what was this strike about? Job cuts? Safety standards? No. The unions were furious that the government had been rumored to be thinking about considering the possibility of maybe looking into the purely theoretical concept that it might one day (not now, but in, say, eighty years' time) be less able to pay for transport workers to retire at fifty.
-p.83, 84.

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We went and did more or less the same interview to as many cameras and radio mike as Jean-Marie could hijak, then he led me away from the demo to take refuge in a café on the Champs-Élysée till the trouble blew over.

''Why don't the police come and break it up?'' I asked. '' I mean, letting your dog foul the streets is illegal, so surely cows are way ouside of the law?''

''The police? Just when we need them to defend French cuisine they are on strike,'' Jean-Marie huffed.
p.117

''There is a strike by electricity workers''
p.150

(TALK ABOUT STRIKES IN ANGLOPHONE CULTURE)
-Think of a thesis..

We'd just bought out overpriced ice creams from an underpaid usherette when I casually asked, à propos of nothing, who Chasse et Pêche were. It turned out that they were of a rural political party, formed by hunters and fishermen to defend their right to ignore EU laws against the massacre of endangered species unwise enough to migrate across France.

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And they seemed to put human migrants in the same bag as feathered ones—they are all fair game. - p.166

The mayor of Trou was a certain Jean-Marie Martin, ''local entrepreneur and landowner.'' He'd been elected as an independent candidate, but, clicking around on other election results in the region, I saw that he'd benefited from surprisingly low percentages for the FN and Chasse et Pêche, who usually got high scores in the nearby rural