French government stumbles on jobs for youth

"Young people, but which young people?" asks essayist Marc-Olivier Padis, the editor of Esprit magazine, for whom Dominique de Villepin's idea of young people is "singularly confused". For Padis, "there is a fatal uncertainty in the message that is being addressed to young people: are we speaking to those excluded from school, high school pupils, university students, young people in the workforce, graduates, apprentices, the jobless? We can only speak about them as a single category on the condition that we speak in very general terms. For exactly 20 years now (protests against university reform in 1986), messages of this kind have produced nothing but incomprehension and rejection. No one can recognise himself in the broken mirror that reflects three such negative images of youth: infantilisation, social disadvantage, precariousness."

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