Among the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets in France on Tuesday were Paolina and Violette, eighteen and seventeen years old, arguing politely with a white-haired man sucking apple juice from a juice box. The two young women carried signs: “EVEN PEDOPHILES don’t FUCK US as much as THE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT” declared one, handwritten in ink a few shades darker than Paolina’s blueberry-colored manicure. “FOUR RIOT POLICE FOR ONE STUDENT / ONE PROFESSOR FOR THIRTY-FIVE.” Paolina is studying fine arts at the Sorbonne Nouvelle; Violette is a communications major at the Institut Universitaire de Technologie. They had come out to the Place de la République, in Paris, to protest the conditions at French schools. The familiar scent of grilling merguez wafted through the air as Violette began to enumerate the system’s failures. “This year, the government eliminated four thousand teaching positions,” she said. (Her stats were dead-on.) The man, who declined to give his name, thought that the problems facing French schools could be resolved quite easily: all the authorities had to do was “put more A.I.” into the curriculum.
“That’s not something that interests me, in an intellectual sense or in a moral sense,” Paolina shot back. “Prompting ChatGPT? I think I know how to do it better already than professors who are forty-five years old and hardly know how to use the technology.”
In May of 1968, student protesters imagined a future of poetic discovery—“Sous les pavés, la plage!” (“Under the pavement, the beach!”) their famous slogan went. In the Gen Z revolt that some students have labelled “May ‘six seven,’ ” their rallying cries are more direct. “MACRON, FUCK YOUR PROF, NOT OURS,” with its brutal jab at the President’s marriage to his former drama teacher, is emerging as a favorite line, along with “TOO YOUNG TO BE LISTENED TO / OLD ENOUGH TO BE TEAR-GASSED” and, deliciously, “BISMILLAH, C’EST LES TENÈBRES,” quoting an undercover cop’s rumored attempt to pose as a protester on Snapchat using what he thought sounded like youth slang.
The sociologist Paolo Stuppia, a co-author of “The Geopolitics of Youth: Engagement and (De)mobilization,” explained that previous major student movements—such as a 2006 uprising prompted by a law that allowed employers to fire workers under twenty-six without cause—centered on opposition to specific policies. This time, with the French government under severe fiscal pressure and straining to fund public services, students are “making offensive claims, not just defensive claims,” he said. Their demands are extremely clear. They want repairs to insalubrious buildings (rats, roaches, puddles), reduced class sizes (France has the largest in Europe, with seventy per cent of lycée classes counting more than thirty students), and the hiring of more teachers (middle- and high-school students lost as many as twenty million class hours last year, owing to staff shortages). They want a shorter, more efficient school day. They want an overhaul of Parcoursup, a widely loathed college-admissions system, introduced in 2018.
Their concerns have failed to impress certain observers, such as the center-right deputy Philippe Juvin, who recently declared that they should “get back to work,” like “their little friends in China.” Are the students just “slackers,” as Marion Maréchal—a French member of the European Parliament and the far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s even harder-right niece—put it? Is the movement the result of “out of control mass migration” and “Islam,” as Donald Trump claimed, in a particularly unfounded bit of racist refrigerator poetry? Most French people don’t think so. According to a poll commissioned by Le Figaro, some sixty-two per cent believe that the students’ actions are justified. In Bordeaux, farmers showed up at the barricades with breakfast—bread, jam, and apple juice. (“Only terroir products,” one volunteer boasted.) In the Tenth Arrondissement of Paris, near the Canal Saint-Martin, a mural appeared, seemingly overnight, depicting the lycéens as heroic revolutionaries in a style that seemed equal parts Delacroix and Dragon Ball.
The government, focussed on unrest among struggling farmers and car owners facing surging gas prices, not to mention on the debt crisis, didn’t see the student movement coming. Emmanuel Macron’s experience of public education is limited. He graduated from a private Catholic high school before completing a few years of college prep at the renowned Lycée Henri-IV; his wife taught for years at the exclusive Lycée Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague, where her students included the children of the L.V.M.H. chairman Bernard Arnault, the richest man in France. Even Macron’s current minister of education, Édouard Geffray, has admitted that at least some of his five children attend private establishments. But plenty of people closer to the ground saw a crisis in the making. Marc Rosmini, a philosophy teacher at Lycée Antonin-Artaud, in Marseille, told me that the movement struck him as “sane” and “logical,” and that he’s surprised it didn’t happen sooner. In June, high schoolers sat for the bac, the all-important senior-year exam, amid record-breaking temperatures. (One school set up desks in an underground parking lot, in an attempt to cool students down.) It was not lost on French youth that these conditions were linked to climate change, nor that administrators had taken practically no serious action to ease its effects in their classrooms. Rosmini told me, “It’s a bit like in Spike Lee’s ‘Do the Right Thing.’ The heat wave was the drop of sweat that made the vase of what they could tolerate overflow.”
Another drop came this September, when lycéens went back to school after the summer break and were confronted with a new rule: no phones inside the school building. The rule was based on solid evidence about phones’ effects on concentration and cognition, but it was unpopular with students, who found it infantilizing and inconvenient. The ban may have had the unintentional effect of spurring them to action. A teacher who manages the library at a lycée in Marseille told me, “It gave them back some brain space to think about what was happening and to talk about it with their friends, instead of being on their screens.” The unofficial anthem of the blocus is the French-Vietnamese producer Nodey’s “No Title,” a jaunty yet martial piece of electronic music that originally accompanied a 2015 short film about a young man who has to learn to live without technology.
The blocus is one of the first major student movements to have originated in the racially diverse, historically working-class suburbs. The French Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, initially tried to dismiss the protests as outbreaks of “urban violence,” fanning theories that they were “an organized maneuver” sponsored by the far-left party La France Insoumise and its “far-left proxies.” L.F.I. has certainly been supportive. Bally Bagayoko, the L.F.I. mayor of Seine-Saint-Denis, a Paris suburb, was tear-gassed on Tuesday while trying to protect students from a police charge. (In the 2024 European elections, sixty-seven per cent of police and military employees voted for the far-right Rassemblement National.) Bagayoko has argued that “violence can be legitimate” in some cases, while L.F.I.’s leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has called for restraint, leading to charges that the Party is fuelling chaos through mixed messages. In any case, the students and teachers whom I spoke to insisted that, whatever the young people’s political affinities, their demands are theirs and theirs alone. Kawthar, a junior in the northeast Paris suburb of Pantin and a member of the newly founded Fédération Lycéenne des Quartiers, told me that the movement “has never been influenced by a political party.” She and her peers were asking authorities to listen “directly to the suburbs,” she added—“not to people who come from Paris and who talk about the suburbs as they perceive them from the center.”
As the movement has widened, and as students at prestigious, largely white schools in central Paris have joined the fight, it has become harder for cynics to discredit the movement using stereotypes about the banlieues. On Thursday, the École Alsacienne, one of the poshest private schools in Paris, was blocked for the first time. “On est privilegié! / On veut partager!” (“We’re privileged! / We want to share!”) students at Henri-IV, Macron’s old school, chanted. The subject of educational equality is particularly acute in a country that places great emphasis on credentials and diplomas, offering few other avenues for success. But the students’ concerns extend beyond French borders. At the blockades, Palestinian flags have been as common as tricolores. Paolo Stuppia, the sociologist, observed, “This is the interconnected generation, and they are experiencing the same polycrisis as young people around the world.”
Street protests, a fundamental French right, can be as effective a lever as litigation or voting, and the current unrest reflects the polarized environment that will shape the 2027 Presidential election. The R.N.’s Marine Le Pen will almost certainly progress to the second round of voting, facing either L.F.I.’s Mélenchon, who is currently enjoying a boost from the student protests, or whichever candidate emerges from the ruins of the center after ten years of Macron. On Wednesday, with public opinion solidifying against the government, Prime Minister Lecornu finally addressed the students. “We have a duty to take young people seriously,” he said. He promised to listen to their propositions even as he admitted that the state had little money to fund them, and he said that the police’s use of stun grenades would be temporarily suspended, one child’s hand too late. On Thursday, Geffray, the education minister, announced that three thousand substitute teachers would be deployed in the coming days. Where had they been hiding them?
These concessions have so far done little to appease the students. By the end of the week, nearly a hundred and fifty schools remained blocked. Students are planning another day of action on October 13th, and many of them are likely to join a revived gilets jaunes movement for a mass demonstration next weekend. On Thursday morning, a protest at Lycée Voltaire, in the Eleventh Arrondissement, was going strong. Students had risen at 5 A.M. to block the school, wheeling dozens of trash bins in front of its two entrances and fortifying them with street furniture such as billboard frames and steel barriers. Aaron, a senior in a surgical mask and a sweatshirt that read “Escape from Reality,” told me that he is hoping to work in international relations, but that his geography class was lacking textbooks. He explained, “Our professor told us that, worst case, we could use digital ones, except that the state hasn’t renewed the subscription, and we’re not allowed to use our phones.”
By 9:30 A.M., the autumn light shone on the French flag waving above the ornately carved limestone of the main entryway, where a student in a hoodie sat in a classroom chair atop the barricade. The façade of the school bore layers of history: busts of Voltaire and Ampère; a plaque paying tribute to the twelve hundred children of the Eleventh Arrondissement who were exterminated in concentration camps, “innocent victims of Nazi barbarism and the Vichy government.” A fresh crop of signs (“L’ÉDUCATION NATIONALE, MY MOST TOXIC RELATIONSHIP”) and scrawls of graffiti (“ACAB,” “FUCK THE RN”) commingled with the older symbols in a poignant tableau. Half a dozen students sat cross-legged on a sun-warmed corner, playing the card game President to pass the time. A few hours later, they’d be heading to Bastille, for another march. The movement, meanwhile, keeps spreading. In Italian cities, high-school students have reportedly begun occupying schools with their own slogan: “Let’s do like in France.” ♦
