RECENTLY, the actress Emmanuelle Beart was photographed being yanked by police from a Paris filled with "sans papiers" the visa-less Malians who were on hunger strike against the French government's plans to ship them home. She was in good company: leftish prelates, commercials directors, dress designers and ex-grandees showed up to express their solidarity with the victims of French racism and bureaucratic obduracy.
In Paris, the elite traditionally used to dress down to fraternise. Yves Montand and Simone Signoret favoured thick give-us-a-hug pullovers, tartan scarves and well-worn Eddie Constantine-style raincoats. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir used to get themselves up in jumble sale petanque player hats and cast-off sporty leather and polyester assistant-teacher's jackets.
True to form, with her hair tied back by rubber band, unmade-up and pale from tack of sleep, Beart looked heart-stoppingly au naturel.
However, times have changed, and demonstrations, although they have made a remarkable comeback, are now hazardous in ways which the Old Left, familiar with tear gas and overturned cafe tables, could never have anticipated.
Emmanuelle Beart is employed by the house of Christian Dior, which pays her to wear house products; and the company let it be known that it was contemplating not renewing the contract, and replacing her with Isabelle Adjani. The details remained obscure, but it seems that Dior was not objecting so much to Beart's political engagement as to the fact that she had failed to put on lipstick when protesting.
The protests of celebrities such as Isobelle Huppert and Catherine Deneuve, as well as those of Beart herself, have been followed keenly in France; and the venerable tradition of the Parisian manif long presumed defunct, is once again a serious subject of conversation among intellectuals. The protest march continues to be chic.
Still, the French could never boast much in the way of a CND movement. Protests against the attack of Rainbow Warrior, and more recently, the French Pacific tests, were muted. Ultimately the French are too respectful of the enormous powers which the French state still has at its disposal and will use against powerless victims like the poor Malians.
But French protests have often been surprisingly effective against the odds. Two months ago, a group of film-makers organised a petition against the Debre law, requiring people to report to police stations the names of any foreigners without visas staying on their premises. As many as 100,000 Parisians (including Beart, once again sans her Christian Dior lipstick) turned out in support - and the measure was dropped from the legislation.
Demonstrations in France have been respected by the authorities because they have long been part of what historian Simon Schama, describing the French Revolution, called "the incontinence of polemics". Whereas British people took to the streets because they were fed up, the French manif was a form of theatre.
Good demonstrations were elaborate rituals in the French civic cult of republicanism. They conferred on participants the sense of belonging. Not just for the left (for there are right-wing demos, too, and endless celebrations of identity staged by the National Front) they uphold the distinctively French, and not unattractive, notion that one becomes a citizen not by staying at home and watching television, but by going out and taking over the streets.
Justly or not, the French have remained proud of their upheavals - for in the course of national fetes the recuperative power of France could be celebrated, even as the national capacity for causing grief was acknowledged. The high point of the modern demonstration was in May 1968, the moment when France was brought to a halt by a series of strikes that arose out of the student upheavals of the Left Bank.
Demos in the 1970s were tamer affairs. The mystique of direct action was the political equivalent of cinema verite - you went out and did something, hoping it would be endowed with meaning. Paris streets acquired the significance of a social arena - Sartre took to hawking copies of his newspaper, La Cause Du Peuple in which he castigated Mao for not having been ruthless enough in his sponsorship of the Cultural Revolution.
Today, the French are divided over the power of the popular protest. A couple of weeks ago I listened to the observations of the Anglo-French journalist Olivier Todd, biographer of Albert Camus. Todd suggested that - sloganising was a futile and regressive activity, out of tune with the new politics which are based on demographics and consumer preference.
He attacked the thinking behind the recent demonstrations against Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front, which were supported by France's left-wing elite, including the newspaper Le Monde.
"Taking to the streets won't impress those who are attracted to the Front's xenophobic policies," Todd said caustically. "They are more likely to be confined in their racism by the sight of so many well-heeled people making a display of their good feelings." One woman did agree with Todd - she thought today's demonstrators were merely reliving their chic parents' experiences in a debased form.
But a film director, an ex-Maoist who in 1968 had been in charge of the security arrangements of a student collective, was adamant in his praise. For him, the demonstrations of the past two years had been important because they were different in character. People no longer took to the streets because they were told to by their unions, or out of ideological motivation; nowadays they obeyed the impulses of citizenship - they wanted something changed, and they were prepared to make their opinions felt.
"It's more spontaneous," hem said. "It's something new in France." The extent of this new - if indeed it is new - French fixation with demonstrations was shown last week when bank employees, airline personnel, junior hospital doctors and car workers all took to the streets. The bank employees were protesting against the government's proposal to abolish a 1937 law, to allow banks to stay open on Saturday mornings. Union spokesmen help fully explained that they were not opposed in principle to the extension of working hours, but they were protesting against the tack of consultation.
The strikes of late 1995, which lasted almost a month, involving the entire public sector as well as the nation's truck drivers, brought France once again to the edge of breakdown; but French people by and large took the side of the strikers. In the posher papers, unrest was high-mindedly ascribed to the looming threat of globalisation which French people viewed with apprehension or outright loathing, on the mysterious grounds that it threatened their national identity.
However, such views are no longer unanimously held. Bernard Kouchner, minister of health under Mitterrand, bitterly attacked last week the disruption of the health service by doctors. They want the freedom to prescribe anything to their patients, without cash limits imposed by a penny-pinching government; but his vigorously delivered message was that such attitudes were absurdly out of date. "You say you're defending the rights of sick people?" Kouchner asked. "Tell us about the future and don't mouth slogans."
Despite such attitudes, there is hope left in France for the power of the demonstration.
More than 50,000, mostly young, people travelled last month to Strasbourg in order to protest against Le Pen - and the Easter weekend television news was dominated by coverage of their demonstration. Slogans and graffiti music echoed through the town.
"Citizenship does work," my ex-Maoist friend explained. "It means something." I must agree. And I hope that Christian Dior wilt find a way of forgiving Emmanuelle Beart. They could always create a special line of odourless and quite invisible toiletries for her to wear at demos. If not Dans la Merde, perhaps it should be called Dans Le Vrai.