Three stories above Boulevard Beaumarchais, midway between Place de la Bastille and Place de la République, a man in a banana costume dances on a balcony. Below, thousands of young demonstrators pause their steps, chants, and songs to cheer the banana. One street over, dozens of police officers stand by, ready to control the massive crowd. A street beyond them, diners sip vin blanc on Place des Vosges undisturbed, save for the thousands of cops and teenagers nearby. Hours later, police use a water cannon and tear gas to clear the crowd from Bastille square.
This is week three of the largest French student protest movement in 20 years. Demonstrations that began at the entrances of high schools have snowballed into hundreds of thousands of marchers throughout the country—250,000 on Tuesday alone, according to the French Ministry of the Interior; 450,000, according to organizers—and violent clashes between protesters and police in Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, and other cities.
The unrest began in mid-September, when students at Saint-Exupéry high school in Créteil, a town south of the périphérique, a 35-kilometer circle of highway that separates central Paris from its more populous, less privileged outskirts, joined their teachers in protesting insufficient staffing. By the time regional authorities met Saint-Exupéry’s demands, the strike had spread. Lycée (high school) students across France began erecting makeshift barricades of trash bins, pallets, bicycles, and anything else typically found along French streets to block their schools’ entrances.
By October 1, there were demonstrations at over 1,000 French high schools. Students at dozens of French universities had erupted in protest, too, blocking campus buildings and closing some post-secondary institutions. According to French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s office, maintaining public education was “virtually impossible” amid the blockades. But one 15-year-old demonstrator told me, protesting is the only way she and other minors see to make themselves heard. “We don’t have the right to vote,” she said. “This is what we can do.”
Many of the students’ ten demands, which a student union published online, are simple: rid dilapidated high school and university buildings of rats and leaks; install climate control to make classrooms bearable in the 100-plus degree temperatures teachers and pupils sweated through this summer; fill persistent faculty vacancies; reduce class sizes, which are larger, on average, than those in other Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member states; and shorten French high schoolers’ instructional hours per day, which are longer than the OECD average.
“Students are right to question the conditions they’re currently studying under,” said Pierre, a retired high school teacher who demonstrated in support of students, and declined to give his full name. Over his 42 years in education, Pierre told me, he saw class sizes grow, and facilities decline: “The education system is completely neglected by those in power.”
But as the protests have grown and diversified, what began as a call for better conditions has become something bigger: a denouncement of France’s centrist government and its proposed austerity budget about six months before a presidential election; a nebulous demand for a brighter, more just tomorrow; or “an exercise in nihilistic resentment” that’s costing France tens of millions in damages, depending on the observer’s interpretation, and on which particular protest (of thousands) they observed.
As with most mass movements, what France is witnessing can’t be reduced to a one-size-fits-all explanation. It’s no surprise, then, that the lame-duck administration of President Emmanuel Macron, shouldering crisis-level debt, is struggling to bring the unrest to a peaceful conclusion.
“I think what worries students most is their future,” Pierre told me. Parcoursup, the online platform through which lycée students apply to higher education, similar to the Common Application in America, provides the clearest example of farsighted anxieties manifesting in the movement. Unlike the Common App, Parcoursup doesn’t simply transmit a student’s application to a university for acceptance or rejection; instead, university committees review applications, rank them, and Parcoursup then uses that ranking to assign students places in universities based on course availability. Critics say the platform, introduced in 2018, lacks transparency in how it makes those assignments, leaving students’ fates to an opaque algorithm. French students protested its introduction eight years ago, and ending its use is among their published demands now.
But algorithmic rejection isn’t the only thing bedeviling students. This year, the French unemployment rate rose to 7.5 percent among 25 to 49-year-olds. In recent years, climate change and increasing economic inequality have each spurred separate protest movements in France. And next year, the government’s public debt crisis will force it to pay investors more than it plans to spend on either education or defense. “Young people can clearly see that their future is being called into question,” Pierre said.
As more labor activists and unions joined the protests this week, it became clear that the youth aren’t the only ones fearing France’s future. “These kids are right,” said Magali, an older woman who marched holding a sign that said “Legal Team,” with a phone number for a collective that offers legal aid to arrested protesters. The government is not only neglecting schools, Magali said, but also hospitals, police stations, and other public sector buildings. “I don’t know why [police] aren’t protesting,” she told me. “All of the French institutions are falling apart.”
Students’ demonstrations have also become about their right to demonstrate, as the violent manner in which police have engaged students has pushed the state’s response to center stage.
Last week, in a northwestern suburb of Paris, a 14-year-old suffered a fractured jaw and lost several teeth after being hit in the face by a tear gas grenade. In the northern city of Lens on Monday, a 15-year-old boy lost his hand after police fired a stun grenade. And in Dunkirk this week, social media footage shows police speeding a 4×4 vehicle toward a crowd of children.
Irène, a 25-year-old French student at Sorbonne Nouvelle, a public liberal arts university in Paris, said she was demonstrating in support of high school students’ demands, but also for their right to protest—and her own. Holding a sign that read, “Excuse me, which level of hell is this?” she recalled masked riot police clearing hundreds of students assembled at her school’s campus on Monday. “They dragged one of my friends on the ground,” she told me. “We want to be listened to, not repressed.”
After Tuesday’s demonstrations, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)’s French branch issued a statement reiterating that adolescents have a right to demonstrate peacefully: “Beyond the students’ specific demands, these protests highlight key issues related to their rights: the quality of education, their participation in public life, and their protection when they take part in a gathering.”
Countless social media videos show that some protesters have not been demonstrating peacefully. Youth have set off fireworks and even lobbed mortars at school buildings; others have hurled bottles, cobblestones, and, in rare instances, hydrochloric acid at police officers, according to Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez.
On Wednesday, while the streets were quiet between Tuesday and Thursday’s demonstrations, I spoke with Rémi, a 21-year-old carpenter who told me that Paris City Hall has called his team to 20 or so schools where the front gates were broken or set ablaze. “I would have never committed acts of violence in the street,” he said. “That’s not what protesting is about.”
Even so, Rémi told me that if he were still a student, he would have demonstrated to “show his anger toward the government.” The buildings in his vocational high school were run-down—too cold in the winter, way too hot in the summer—and “no one is listening to the students’ complaints, and nothing is getting better.”
Police have arrested over 6,000 individuals since the demonstrations began. Some 87 percent are minors.
Student marchers this week carried signs that read “Financez l’education pas les lacrimo” (“fund education—not tear gas”) and “la police nous prothèse” (“the police put us in prosthetics”). Other placards bore anti-fascist slogans and symbols with deep roots in Europe: “ACAB” (“All Cops Are Bastards”), coined not in peak-woke America but in interwar England; the anarchist Circle-A, which originated in the 1960s in France; and the two-flag Antifascist Action logo, which has roots in Weimar Germany. Ending “repression and police violence” has been added to students’ list of demands.
Students’ signs have also drawn parallels between their demonstrations and France’s famed 1968 student uprising. Born in anger toward university conditions, hierarchical institutions, rigid social and sexual norms, and opposition to the conservative government of President Charles de Gaulle, the movement succeeded in democratizing classrooms and workplaces. But while many recall May 1968 as a time of hope, camaraderie, and idealism—akin to how the hazy, soft tones of time passed (and vintage photos) tint how many Americans reflect on its countercultural and anti-war movements—that month 58 years ago was violent.
Students ripped up Paris’s Latin Quarter cobblestones to chuck at police, set fire to cars, and smashed shop windows; police responded with batons, tear gas, and water cannons. Hundreds were arrested and hospitalized, and city streets looked like civil war battlegrounds in the aftermath.
“Tu nous la mets à l’envers, on te la met à Mai ’68” (“If you screw us over, we’ll give you a taste of May ’68”), proclaimed a banner hung outside the University of Perpignan, a town in southern France, this week.
What sets the current protests apart from May ’68—besides the fact that the late celebrity-philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre isn’t occupying the Sorbonne with its students—is the age of the participants. Many of this week’s demonstrators are kids.
What draws the protests into the May ‘68 tradition is students’ sweeping rejection of their present, the future to which they feel consigned, and the role of education—ideally, a force for egalité—in shaping that future.
As in most Western democracies, the increasing equality of education and job opportunities experienced in post-war France has stagnated, and its school system is not blameless: Lycée learning conditions in Paris’s well-off arrondissements are better than in its surrounding banlieues (outskirts), and in the Grandes Écoles (France’s more elite, selective colleges) compared to less selective public universities. While such inequality is common worldwide, France boasts one of the largest gaps in performance between high-income students and low-income students in the developed world, according to the Program for International Student Assessment, an exam given every three years across countries.
Some French students, even well-off ones, don’t think that’s right. In front of the blockade of the École Alsacienne, the private Paris high school that former prime minister and current presidential candidate Gabriel Attal attended, students erected a sign that read “Pour le 93” (“for the 93”)—93 being the administrative code for Saint-Denis, the poorest department in metropolitan France. The 15-year-old student I spoke with, who attends the Lycée Charlemagne, a public school in Paris’s chic Marais district, told me she was protesting mainly to show support for high schools less well-off than her own.
On Thursday, France’s education minister pledged to deploy 3,000 additional substitute teachers to the 500 schools identified as most in need. Based on the demonstrations still planned for next week, that alone won’t satisfy the movement’s organizers.
France was already poised for a tumultuous election this April, with right-wing Marine Le Pen as frontrunner and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the candidate for the far-left La France Insoumise, leading among young voters. Now, through his party’s support of the protests, Mélenchon is shoring up his base; Le Pen’s calls for tougher “anti-riot” legislation are shoring up hers; and the unpopularity of Macron’s centrist government, which many already thought would taint more moderate candidates, is on full display. Whoever wins in April will face a public accustomed to taking its woes to the streets.
“Are you going to keep protesting?” I asked a group of high school girls marching on Thursday. They responded: “Until something changes.”
