Student protests in France have entered their third week, amid mounting anger over the teacher shortage and deteriorating conditions in school buildings.
On Thursday, the country witnessed new demonstrations in which thousands of school students participated, while the Minister of Education, Edouard Jeffrey, announced, after meeting with their representatives, the launch of an emergency plan to ensure the provision of alternatives for absent teachers, and to review the exhausting school schedules.
Thousands of demonstrators gathered in Place de la Bastille in central Paris, while the protests spread to several cities, from Lille in the north to Rennes and Nantes in the west, and Toulon and Marseille in the south. Despite the generally peaceful nature of the marches, some areas witnessed confrontations between protesters and the police, who used water cannons to disperse the demonstrators in Rennes.
The Ministry of Education announced that the number of schools whose entrances were closed decreased from 224 on Thursday morning to 157 by noon, indicating that 96 percent of schools remained open. But leaders of the protest movement called for new marches and a day of protest on October 17.
Since late September, students across France have been organizing protests against the lack of funding for education, blocking the entrances to many secondary schools.
The protests included violence in some areas, during which hundreds of students, teachers, and police officers were injured, while thousands of people were arrested, including an unknown number of rioters who did not belong to the protest movement.
The protesting students complain about the lack of educational personnel and the deteriorating conditions of buildings and facilities in French secondary schools, known as “lycées,” which receive students between the ages of 15 and 18 years.
“Sometimes our teachers are absent for weeks without anyone coming to take their place,” Madelena, a student in Paris, told the BBC on Tuesday, as hundreds of thousands took their place in demonstrations across France. She added that her school buildings were “extremely hot” during the recent heatwaves.
Students' complaints are not limited to this. Some of them object to the ban on cell phones, and others complain about the length of the school day, which may extend until six in the evening.
One high school student told France 2: “You come home at 7 p.m., so you don't have time to sleep or do your homework.”
The Parcoursup platform, which is used to distribute students to higher education institutions in France, also raises widespread dissatisfaction.
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This frustration has deep roots. About 80 percent of students in each batch today pass the baccalaureate exams, which gives them the right to enroll in university, but not necessarily in the specialty or institution they prefer.
Thus, students find themselves in intense competition for seats in the most in-demand specializations, amid growing concern about the working mechanism of the “Parkorsip” platform, which many believe lacks transparency.
There is no doubt that the students' complaints are based on real problems. But are these problems alone sufficient to explain the form the protest movement took? How do education conditions look in France compared to other countries?
According to a recent report issued by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, whose membership includes a number of developed countries, the French government spends more per student at the upper secondary level than the average spending in European Union countries.
As for the shortage of teachers, it is indeed a severe problem, but it is no worse than in other countries. Indeed, the organization’s indicators indicate that the situation in France is relatively less severe, as fewer educational vacancies remain compared to other countries, despite the relatively low salaries of French teachers.
The extension of the school day into the late afternoon hours represents a real problem for French students, but the main reason behind this is the long lunch breaks and the complexity of the study schedules, rather than an attempt to compensate for school holidays, which are not exceptionally long compared to other countries in the European Union.
Moreover, the length of the school day is not a new thing in France, but rather a reality to which generations of students have become accustomed, despite the hardship it causes. Therefore, it is difficult to consider it a sufficient reason to explain the current explosion of anger. The same applies to pressures resulting from imbalances in the higher education system.
In most European countries, between 80 and 90 percent of young people complete their secondary education, and competition for places in prestigious universities raises tension and anxiety among students in other countries as well.
If the lack of funding, dilapidated school buildings, and fears about the future are factors that fuel student dissatisfaction, they alone do not explain how the protest movement reached an “unprecedented” level, whether in terms of the number of schools and students participating or the scale of the violence, as Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez described it.
The breadth of the protests seems particularly striking given the great risks faced by its participants.
Closing schools or universities by force or under threat is against the law, requires police intervention, and attracts rioters who deliberately destroy property. Students often find themselves in the middle of crowd dispersal operations carried out by police using excessive force.
In his latest statements, Prime Minister Sebastian LeCorno stressed that the security forces did not receive orders to “confront high school students,” but only to enforce the law.
But to understand the methods that students resort to, we must look beyond the closed school gates and the barriers erected in front of them, and return to a well-established political tradition in France, where the streets were often an arena for exercising political influence no less influential than elected institutions. Students are well aware of this.
In October 1990, a rape incident that occurred in a school in the Seine-Saint-Denis area, north of Paris, sparked a wave of mass demonstrations protesting the lack of funding and educational personnel. This is the same area that has today become one of the most prominent hotbeds of protests.
This mobilization prompted the government to allocate additional funding for secondary schools, equivalent to about 1.2 billion euros (billion pounds sterling) at today’s prices.
In October 1998, half a million students marched across France, raising similar demands, which resulted in nearly one billion euros being allocated to renovate schools and employing an additional 14,000 people in the education sector.
Student protests succeeded on more than one occasion in overthrowing government reforms, including a project to reform universities in 1986, and a plan to reduce the minimum wage for youth in 1994.
Perhaps the most notable display of the strength of the student movement was in 2006, when the government was forced to retract a law aimed at facilitating the hiring and firing of workers under the age of twenty-six, in an attempt to reduce youth unemployment.
Parliament had passed the law and was signed by then-President Jacques Chirac, but it was canceled after weeks of protests and the closure of universities and secondary schools, in movements that were often marred by violence.
The students were not the only ones who experienced the ability of the street to impose its will on elected officials. The older French also demonstrated that blocking roads could be an effective means of putting pressure on authority.
The "yellow vest" uprising between 2018 and 2019, which saw shops looted and government buildings attacked across the country, led the government to back down from increasing fuel taxes and approve additional spending worth ten billion euros.
But the street does not win every time.
In 1968, whose events are invoked by almost every French protest movement as a historical model of struggle, the student uprising effectively ended in elections.
However, today's high school students are inheritors of a political culture in which protesters compete with elected officials to represent the voice of the people and gain the legitimacy to speak on their behalf.
At the moment, the balance of power appears, at least on the surface, to be in the students' favour. An opinion poll conducted for BFMTV showed that 72 percent of French people see their demands as legitimate, while 55 percent support the protest movement itself.
With the protesters receiving the support of a large number of teachers, trade unions and left-wing politicians, the movement appears to be in a position of strength, and thousands came out again in demonstrations on Thursday, while its leaders called for a new day of protest on October 17.
As for Lecornu, who described himself as the "weakest prime minister" in modern French history, his chances of success in passing the budget through Parliament appear slim.
But this same weakness may turn into a strength card in his confrontation with students.
With the cost of borrowing rising, the budget deficit reaching 5.4 percent of GDP, and public debt reaching its highest levels since the 1940s, Lecorno finds himself shackled by financial restrictions that are no less severe than political restrictions.
