A snapshot from the vocational high school in the suburbs of Paris:
Almost a hundred students and a handful of teachers are gathered outside the school's entrance. The teachers are easy to identify, partly because they are the only white people in the crowd, partly because they wear a paper hat with the words "I'm on strike" on their heads. A boy, maybe sixteen, holds up a piece of cardboard on which he has written: "Respect our rights before you ask for our respect".
French hip-hop mixed with Johnny Hallyday thunders out of the speakers. Passing vehicles – a food delivery service, an IT company, a fire truck – honk their horns in a gesture of solidarity. On the other side of the street, two policemen are standing and monitoring the event.
It is Tuesday and "phase three" of the high school blockade is underway.
The expression is a nod to the yellow vest protests of a few years ago. The two movements are not without parallels: A proletarianized, economically hard-pressed rural population without political representation at the time. An ethnicized suburban generation in an education system that seems rigged against them now.
In both cases, it is about a kind of abyssal roar of the periphery, where demands for better material and institutional conditions are at the center. But while the yellow vests kept political parties and the union movement at bay, the high school rebellion has been organized through student unions and quickly joined by teachers' unions, public employees and students in higher education. Starting last week, students at the elite high schools in inner-city Paris also joined.
It is an unusual order.
French educational uprisings have almost always started at the prestigious universities and then spread to the rest of the country. Unlike May -68, when the children of the French bourgeoisie did away with antiquated educational structures, this movement begins in the suburbs and focuses on teacher density and acceptable school premises. Like the '68 movement, the high school protesters are demanding fair university admissions systems, which under current practice rank high school grades differently depending on which school they come from.
It is the crackling picture of a nation that howls the praises of universalism, but fails at the simplest questions of meritocratic control. Under the presidency of Emmanuel Macron, thousands of posts have been removed from the country's primary and secondary schools. The number of teachers today is fewer than in 2008, while the number of upper secondary school students has increased by 250,000. A large majority of the classes have over 30 students, one in five more than 35.
Even so, the protests have taken the French government to bed. That today's teenagers, who are often described as an illiterate, Tiktokified generation that can barely tie their own shoes, were able to organize themselves and demand a better study environment (of everything!) came as a complete surprise.
In recent days, representatives of the governing party have been guilty of a series of self-goals when, among other things, they tried to convince student representatives on television that the major school crisis is rather that one in three French fifteen-year-olds cannot read a simple text.
As if this was not precisely the basis for the protesters' demand for better study conditions.
The violence in clashes between police and protesters was initially at an unusually high level even for French circumstances. The police have been banned from using so-called stun grenades, after a 15-year-old boy in Lens had his hand torn off and forced to amputate. Thousands of teenagers have been detained in recent weeks in France. Many are children in the sense of the law and previously unpunished.
But after the government portrayed the protesters as uncouth troublemakers at the beginning of the blockades, they have had to back off in both communication and action. In the middle of last week, students at a number of prestigious Parisian universities joined the student movement, which looks set to be the largest since 1968. Several of these institutions have, piquently, produced France's current ministers.
Emmanuel Macron has consistently condemned the violence and destruction externally, but is said to have been furious internally at the police's treatment of the protesters, which he considers "too harsh and totally unempathetic" (Le Parisien, 6/10).
In France, the police are under the direct operational control of the government. This means that it is Macron and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu who are held more or less responsible for police brutality.
- Without even trying to have a dialogue, the government treated the high school demonstrations as if they were suburban riots. It is a political choice, which goes against the principle of not using violence against minors, says sociologist Vincent Tiberj, who researches the political involvement of young people. (Le Monde, 6/10).
Distrust of the police is widespread in France and not least in the country's suburbs. The largest police union, the Alliance Police National, is close to the far right and in an opinion poll before the second round of the last presidential election, 74% of all active police officers stated that they would vote for the National Assembly.
A Frenchman in my immediate vicinity usually talks about his "personal record", when he was stopped and body searched by the police ten times in one and the same day, for no other obvious reason than that he is black.
In 2023, the Supreme Administrative Court ruled for the first time that French police engage in systematic racial profiling during ID checks, mainly of young men of non-European origin. Two years later, a historic judgment was handed down against the French state in the European Court of Human Rights in the same case. The biggest confrontations between police and protesters in the past week have taken place in the inner city of Paris, without any discernible ethnic signs.
France has not seen clashes between protesters and law enforcement on this scale since the Yellow Vests, but also the anti-pension reform and peasant protests a couple of years ago resulted in widespread damage and violence.
In France, they speak of la culture de la casse – the culture of destruction. To some extent, it concerns masked anarchist groups with a large capital of violence that infiltrate demonstrations to create chaos. It is also about a historic French folk sport, smashing public and private property when protesting.
The level of tolerance, or possibly resignation, in the face of this often appears astonishingly high for someone from a more order-oriented culture.
While representatives of the left-wing LFI party are accused of exploiting the protests and inciting violence, Marine Le Pen has, unsurprisingly, supported the police. Ahead of the presidential election in May next year, where she is the favorite, the grand old lady of the European extreme right has also clearly changed her communications. National gatherings are rarely slow to exploit social unrest in the suburbs as political fuel, but during the high school demonstrations, interestingly enough, they did not play the immigrant card.
The high school demonstrations currently have a tailwind in French public opinion, three out of four think their struggle is legitimate. On Wednesday, a pressed Sébastien Lecornu promised to "listen to the high school students". Education Minister Édouard Geffray has promised 3,000 substitute teachers across the country. The student unions have put forward demands for investments in the school equivalent to 10 billion euros.
By the middle of the week, the protests had spread to at least 40 French cities and several neighboring countries. By all accounts, this is a movement that France's decision-makers will have to reckon with ahead of the presidential election next May. Maybe it can even change the political game plan until then.
