Paris — I would have written this yesterday, mes amis, but, as you know, we in France were on strike so working was out of the question.

It’s a figurative “we,” since I identify completely with people who work for the government in jobs that can go unfilled for a day or a month and nobody really notices.

Our complaints? Things cost too much. The economy is shrinking. People are getting laid off. We are afraid of the future. We work too much. Our solution? We quit working. Our goal? To bring that semi-capitalist semi-swine, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, to his little, knobbly, Hungarian knees.

Normally, strikes are about something. We want more money! More benefits! More lunchrooms! More lunch! More urinals! (Well, okay, maybe that’s not a French issue.)

But, in keeping with European tradition, specificity of grievances wasn’t really the idea Thursday. Big European strikes, and especially the French variety, don’t come with well-defined goals in mind, unless you count heckling as a goal. Here’s Liberation’s round-up. The goal on Thursday was to do what we all want to do in periods of economic disaster: scream. France is like me and you–struggling to remain afloat and demanding that somebody do something that will make a difference.

Be careful whom you ask, of course. In France, as in the U.S., demanding that the government do something has a pretty predictable result. Governments spend money, and they don’t devote a lot of thinking to how they do it. Sarkozy’s already pledged $35 billion to stimulate the French economy, which is like animating the dead, with about a third of that amount going to bolster banks. In the U.S., that $14 billion bank bailout wouldn’t even pay a fraction of the bonuses “earned” by the criminally incompetent clerks who have driven America’s financial institutions into disaster. But in France, where not everyone is in debt up to his yeux, it’s probably enough to do the job.

To the strikers in France, none of it is enough to make a difference–just like the strike itself. Because the strike was in sympathy with surly pessimism and against the irritating buoyancy of Sarkozy’s smiling government, it involved mostly civil servants and children, if you’ll excuse the redundancy. People with real jobs went to them.

The unions, whose might exists mostly in newspaper stories and not on shop floors, had called for a general strike, but didn’t even get a good regional one. The AP’s idiotic headline “Nationwide French strike shuts down public transportation” was a blatant lie, as this 20 Minutes report (and every other report) observed. In Paris, the strike couldn’t muster more than 60-70,000 people–a football match crowd, not a world-stopper. But it was a nice day, a consortium of unions unfurled their May Day flags, and there were free balloons for the kids. “Strikers” wandered around for a while, then went home to watch TV. Unions claimed 2.5 million strikers nationally; the Interior Ministry guessed half that. The old days of shutting down a nation in order to give voice to vague crankiness is over.

In fact, the most telling story about France’s big strike day was this item in Le Nouvel Observateur, in which a strike leader explains his demand that Sarkozy come up with some specific ideas.

I suppose “shut up and get back to work” is too specific, even for Carla Bruni’s boytoy.