The demonstration in Paris on June 2 bore all the usual trappings of a French workers’ action, with a union rep donning the red mesh jersey of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and cardboard signs calling to defend public services. But the mobilization, one of the first of Emmanuel Macron’s second term, came from a surprising source: France’s diplomatic corps. On the grassy esplanade between the Invalides Military Museum and the diplomatic administration’s palatial Quai d’Orsay headquarters — at the heart of a neighborhood teeming with foreign embassies and luxury apartments — the gathering of several hundred workers from the Foreign Ministry made for an exceptional sight.

The first at the ministry since 2003, the one-day strike on June 2 was a common action between the Parisian headquarters and France’s web of global consulates and embassies — the third largest diplomatic network in the world, after those of the United States and China. According to organizers, nearly a thousand ministerial workers, including both contractual employees and statutory functionaries, participated in the walkout, which also was joined by at least thirty consular-generals and ambassadors.

The diplomats are protesting a series of changes to the French upper civil service, part of a broader reform kicked off in Macron’s first term through legislation drafted in 2019. This law has provoked protests and strike movements elsewhere in the French state (as in last spring’s strike by municipal workers). This new movement, relayed on Twitter by the slogan #diplo2métier, opposes the abolition of the specific statutory status held by French diplomats, who are set to be merged into a common pool of officials in the upper civil service. This will pave the way, the striking diplomats fear, for the “interchangeability” of functionaries across ministries and state services.