One afternoon in September, Franck Sailliot marched through the northern French city of Lille alongside a couple of thousand leftist trade unionists and students. The marchers waved union flags, blew whistles, bellowed slogans. “Enough, enough, enough of this society, where there’s only unemployment and insecurity!” they yelled. “We don’t want the law of the bosses! The only solution is to revoke it!” Sailliot, a 48-year-old trade unionist who had worked much of his adult life in a paper mill in a town about an hour’s drive to the east, shuffled along, mostly silent, his hands in his pockets. As the demonstrators made their way through Lille’s town center, passing the ornate 17th-century stock exchange, they shouted, “Fire the stockholders!” and “Everything they have, they stole it!” One man wielded a bloodied, severed mannequin head and waved a French flag emblazoned with the silhouette of Robespierre, who presided over the Reign of Terror. It was a revolution of sorts, but Sailliot seemed a bit bored. The French left has long protested the encroachment of an unbridled free market, and despite some victories in halting its progress, the overall trend was one of demoralizing defeat. Sailliot debated peeling off from the crowd early and grabbing a beer.

He might have been forgiven for betraying a degree of protest fatigue. For seven months, he had participated, off and on, in a wave of large and angry antigovernment demonstrations that transfixed the country and at times paralyzed it. Chief among the objects of the protesters’ ire was a labor law, conceived by President François Hollande’s Socialist government, designed to loosen the country’s impossibly dense network of job protections. The law lacked support in the French Legislature, so in July, Hollande’s prime minister invoked special constitutional powers to push it through without a vote. From the point of view of French leftists like Sailliot, this was the latest in a series of betrayals by an ostensibly left-wing government that backed one nonleftist measure after another. Hollande and his ministers were acting under immense pressure to improve the country’s sluggish growth and chronically high unemployment, which now hovers at 9.5 percent (25.9 percent for people under 25). Everyone from the International Monetary Fund to the European Commission was urging Hollande to undertake a program of economic liberalization in order to remedy the problem. The argument for the labor law was the essence of free-market orthodoxy: If companies could more easily lay off workers in bad times, they would be more willing to hire them in good times.

The argument was unconvincing to many in Pas-de-Calais, the rural and industrial area in the northernmost tip of France, where Sailliot lives. In the 1970s, France, like other industrialized countries, began a shift away from manufacturing to a services-based economy, and within a few decades, Pas-de-Calais came to epitomize industrial decline. It is now France’s rust belt and coal country all in one. The working-class voters of Pas-de-Calais have long supported France’s Socialists along with the French Communist Party. But as in the United States, where Rust Belt voters no longer embrace the Democratic Party, these workers have increasingly lost faith in the parties of the left.

Sailliot’s union, the General Confederation of Labor, or the C.G.T., was among the most strident opponents of the new labor law. The C.G.T., formerly linked to the Communist Party, is one of the oldest and largest trade unions in France. Though its membership and stature, like those of other French unions, have declined considerably from their post-World War II height, the C.G.T. remains unmatched in its ability to mobilize workers. And many of its members retain a far-left ideology and preference for militant tactics. After a draft of the labor law leaked last February, the C.G.T. demanded that it be scrapped and recommended alternative policies: Reduce the French workweek to 32 hours (from the current 35) and give workers raises.