So I'm in a hurry, facing a busy evening, and I type "Culture" into google, and this from the International Herald Tribune comes up:

PARIS It is a time-honored summer ritual in France: a marathon of culture in cities and towns throughout the country.

But this year's performing arts festivals are in jeopardy because of strikes by workers in the arts over tougher regulations for unemployment benefits.

Already the Montpellier Dance Festival, which was scheduled to run through this week in that southern French city, has been canceled. So have performances at the Comédie-Française and several other Paris theaters.

At dawn on Monday, the police stormed a theater in Caen in Normandy and evacuated 100 strikers who had staged a sit-in since Friday. In Marseille, organizers of the city's eighth annual arts festival called it off rather than risk the unpredictability of wildcat strikes by unhappy workers. The 18-day festival involved the production of 14 plays and expected 17,000 visitors.

"I don't want to take risks," Apolline Quintrand, the Marseille festival's director, said at a news conference. "It is out of the question for me to enter into a fratricidal war with the crews."

Whatever happened to the idea that culture is supposed to be about taking risks?

Summer festivals in France and throughout Europe have become big business. Last year about 900,000 spectators attended a staggering 650 music, dance and theater festivals across France. French tourism has already suffered this year from the sharp drop in the value of the dollar, the political fallout from the war with Iraq and fears of the SARS virus. In cities like Avignon and Aix-en-Provence, festival organizers and local businesses rely on income from the summer festivals, and the cancellations could be financially disastrous.

Singers, dancers, actors, choreographers, technicians, circus performers - all sorts of people with seasonal employment in the arts - have united in protest. The object of their wrath is a deal signed last week by three unions with the French employers' association that would reduce unemployment benefits to eight months from 12 months a year for workers who do not have full-time work.

The agreement also requires workers in the arts to work 507 hours in 10 months rather than over the course of a year before they are eligible for the benefits. A hundred arts workers, including prominent performers and directors, sent an open letter last week to the center-right government supporting the protests and objecting to the new rules.

"We are witnessing today a swift degradation of French political cultures, of which the change of compensation for seasonal workers is only one facet," the letter said. Calling the labor agreement an "unacceptable policy of the right," the letter demanded that the government reject it and called for a national and Europe-wide debate on the subject. Jean Voirin, an official with the hard-line union CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail), one of the two main unions that did not sign the agreement, was quoted on Monday in Le Parisien as saying, "This is a catastrophic agreement that will not resolve the true problems." ...

This is like a British coal miners sttrike.

But Daniele Rived, an official with the union CFDT (Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail), which was one of those that signed the accord, told Le Parisien, "By signing, we feel like we have saved a system that was in jeopardy." The unemployment system for these workers has suffered enormous losses in recent years.

Other commentaries predicted that the disruption of the festivals would damage France's cultural standing in the world. "One of the best images of France's trademark - the liveliness of its culture, its creativity, its diversity - is seriously threatened," said an editorial in the Tuesday issue of Le Monde. "The craft of the artist has always been precarious because it's haphazard and uncertain."

The culture minister, Jean-Jacques Aillagon, met with festival directors and has urged arts workers to go back to work. He said the agreement offered "considerable advances." He called the strikes irresponsible.

But the director of the Montpellier festival for the last 20 years, Jean-Paul Montanari, said: "I support the workers. Otherwise why would I have canceled my festival?"

In Britain, a strike by "arts workers" would be greeted with guffaws of laughter. "Britain's theaters closed. British economy brought to its knees. Government acts to avert crisis." I don't think so. And as if to prove my point, I just told my friend Chris Tame that there was a strike by French arts workers, and what did he do? Correct. He guffawed with laughter.

But I told him: no. Over there, this is serious. The French economy depends on this stuff. The fact that French arts workers can stop working and thereby stab the French economy in the heart, shows you how seriously they take their culture over there.