At the centre of Paris, the Monument à la République looms over a square that has hosted every great mobilisation of the French left in modern history. The bronze statue of Marianne, symbol of the Republic, holds an olive branch above the words: Liberté. Égalité. Fraternité. During mass demonstrations on 17 October, dozens of young people scaled the monument while tens of thousands looked on. Some flew Palestinian and red flags. On the statue of Egalité, someone had scrawled “jeunesse dorée” (“gilded youth”, an old term for the idle rich). Marianne herself was draped in a giant yellow vest bearing the words: “The police mutilate high school students”.
For almost a month now, a mass student revolt has been rocking France, in one of the deepest political crises seen in the country in decades. The state that claims to embody liberty, equality and fraternity has answered lycéens (high schoolers aged 15 to 18) demanding better conditions in schools with tear gas, rubber bullets and mass arrests. That the Republic’s police are maiming young people in the streets is an indictment of the capitalist system the Republic protects.
Days of rage
In response to a national day of action on 17 October, in which an estimated 800,000 people protested across France, the government of Emmanuel Macron unleashed a flurry of violence.
Police fired tear gas into the crowd gathering at Place de la République before the march had formed. Riot police armed with batons, shields and armoured vehicles charged into crowds in Paris, Lyons, Bordeaux and a string of provincial cities, attacking protesters and bystanders alike. According to the Interior Ministry, almost 1,800 people were arrested and more than 500 police were injured, with 855 arrests in Paris alone. A teenager lost a hand in Saint-Étienne and another lost an eye in Mulhouse. Street medics were dragged along the ground by police.
The new element on 17 October was the return of the Yellow Vests, the leaderless movement of rural and provincial workers against fuel taxes and the high cost of living that erupted in 2018, until it was crushed with brute force by the state. After weeks of watching lycéens face down riot police, the Yellow Vests called their own day of action protesting the cost of living. The Yellow Vests blocked roundabouts and fuel depots from the morning and declared their support for the student revolt. Among them was Pierre, a retiree from Bandol: “I’ve been gassed five times since this morning”, he told La Provence. “[Macron’s government] is declaring war on the people.” The return of the Yellow Vests raises the possibility of the student revolt becoming a rallying point for broader working-class grievances.
Nurses, teachers and firefighters joined the Yellow Vests demonstration. In Lille, 20 rail workers marched together in their SNCF vests. Most of the working class support the movement (55 percent of the French population support the student-led protest movement, according to an Elabe poll) but are not yet part of it.
Whose Republic?
The Macron government’s strategy has been to paint the victims of violence as its perpetrators. Prime Minister Lecornu blamed “far-left groups”, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez targeted “ultra-left individuals”, while Macron declared that “nothing can explain, nothing can excuse” the violence. They pointed to a handful of burnt buildings, such as the town hall in Limoges, to paint a movement of hundreds of thousands as a mindless mob. “The perpetrators directly targeted the institutions of the Republic and the authority of the State”, wrote Bordeaux mayor Thomas Cazenave.
It is worth asking what sort of Republic the mayor of Bordeaux is defending: one in which a burnt town hall causes enormous outrage, but a sixteen-year-old losing an eye to a police grenade prompts hysteria about the need for more law and order.
The ruling class never calls the conditions that produced this revolt violence. Students in France’s poorest schools sit in classrooms infested with cockroaches and rats, in classes of up to 35. Outside school, the police stop, search and arrest young Black and Arab men from the banlieues (working-class suburbs) for the colour of their skin and the estate they live on, and their operations now cause more than one death per week. Fuel and food prices keep rising, while, according to Oxfam, 53 billionaires own as much as the poorest 48 percent of the population. This is the systematic violence the working class is subjected to every day under French capitalism.
“A riot is the language of the unheard”, as Martin Luther King Jr said. The looting that broke out in some cities is not senseless. It comes from people with little money who have been demonised for years and told that their lives are worthless.
Yet riots are not a way forward for the movement. They invite more repression and hand the right the story it wants to tell, of mindless “casseurs” (wreckers) to be answered with curfews and soldiers. And they push away workers whose strikes could win what the movement wants.
The right has also racialised the riots. Government spokesperson Maud Bregeon blamed racaille (“scum”) and “that type of population”, while fascist Éric Zemmour, leader of the far right Reconquête, described “a horde of Maghrebi and African barbarians entering the cities”.
The impact of this racist backlash can be seen in the banlieue of Trappes. On 23 October, a gunman drove through the Parisian suburb for around fifteen minutes, shooting at black and brown people. He killed a 26-year-old and wounded several others, among them a 12-year-old girl who was shot eight times. Le Monde reports that he “congratulated himself, in essence, on having ‘avenged the shopkeepers’” by attacking “Blacks and Arabs”. Politicians across the spectrum, Macron included, have professed their horror, but these are crocodile tears from the people responsible for the climate of racism. For years, they have backed laws against migrants, refugees and Muslims and echoed the politics of the fascist National Rally.
Polarisation
This is not the first time that working-class youth from the banlieues have rebelled against the French state. In 2005 and again in 2023, after police killings of teenagers, the suburbs rose without the workers’ movement: much of the left abandoned the rioters in 2005, and in 2023 the union leaders offered only statements, not strikes.
What has changed in 2026 is that the youth have learned lessons from previous struggles. This revolt began in the schools, not as a riot, and its first act was to create mass assemblies through which students can democratically direct their movement. And it has been shaped by two experiences less evident before. The first is the Palestine movement, which taught a generation about state repression and the moral vacuum at the heart of the Republic. The second is the fascist National Rally, who, if they come to power in next year’s presidential elections, pose a mortal threat to the interests of all workers and the oppressed.
The threat of a fascist-led Republic gives the student revolt a sense of urgency and a sharper political edge: students are not only demanding a better future, but defending the right to have one at all. And years of mass strikes have taught them where the power to win lies: with the workers who can shut down production.
The revolt is also radicalising the capitalist class. “A wave of shock has swept through the business world”, writes Martine Orange in Mediapart. “We have a useless, unworthy, incompetent political class”, an investment banker told Orange. “Retailleau, Attal, Philippe, Glucksmann [leading politicians of the centre and right]—there isn’t one of them worth anything.”
Many capitalists are looking for an iron fist that can restore profitability and order. France’s public debt is well above 100 percent of GDP, and the ruling class want workers to pay the bill: first, the budget cuts the students are blocking, then further attacks on pay, pensions and public services. That will require defeating the unions and the left. While many capitalists do not entirely trust Marine Le Pen (presidential candidate and leader of the RN), Orange concludes, “some believe she alone will be able to ‘restore the authority’ they crave”.
The fascist Le Pen is ready to do the job. Her party has spent years courting big business and presenting itself as the party of order. An RN government would not have to build the repressive machinery for a confrontation with the unions and the left, because the centre has already built it: bans on demonstrations, the power to dissolve left-wing organisations, and riot police and soldiers normalised and ready to be deployed against the population. Macron is currently wielding it against high schoolers and youth from the banlieues. A Le Pen presidency could wield it against unions and the left.
For decades, the French establishment has told voters that the “Republican Front” of the centre is all that stands between the Republic and the fascist RN. They say that the only way to keep out the fascists is to vote for the establishment candidate and accept their austerity and racism. Macron and his allies have used this argument repeatedly to bludgeon the left into voting for them. In 2024, the New Popular Front, an alliance of the left including France Unbowed that challenged this logic, won the most seats only for Macron to refuse to let the left form a government. The defenders of so-called “Republican values” are throwing open the doors of the Élysée to the fascists.
In the days after 17 October, the Macron government set about building a de facto state of emergency without openly declaring one. Lecornu gave mayors the power to impose curfews “where they need to”. Curfews on minors followed in Paris and other major cities. Protests were banned, and the army’s Sentinelle patrols were deployed. “If necessary, clearly we could”, said Lecornu when asked about declaring a state of emergency. At the same time, he invited the RN to meetings on the government’s crisis response. By the eve of 24 October, the ban had spread to nearly every city, and the government had mobilised 70,000 police, special forces and armoured vehicles.
Days of hope
Since 17 October, the student assemblies have spread from the high schools to the universities. In Bordeaux, about 1,000 students packed each of two campus assemblies. In the Paris region, delegates from 32 campuses voted to join the days of action on 22 and 29 October and the march on 24 October, and to prepare for a general strike from 5 November.
On 22 October, the national coordination of student assemblies called a day of action in Paris, but the police turned the march into a static rally.
The state could stop them marching on 22 October. But it could not stop them on 24 October. In a massive show of strength, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators defied the Macron government’s intimidation tactics. Hundreds of thousands of students and workers stretched over four kilometres in Paris. Tens of thousands marched in Marseilles where they held a minute of silence, hands raised, for the victims of Trappes and against fascism. In Bordeaux, more than 10,000 braved driving rain and defied a ban on demonstrating in the city centre. The cops responded with tear gas. In Lyons, around 20,000 marched in the face of armoured vehicles, as the police fired volleys of tear gas. In Nice, the police used water cannons to try to smash the demonstration. An estimated 800,000 people mobilised across the entire country. One placard in Paris summed up the contempt for the ruling-class hysteria over broken glass: “I would have liked to be a shop window, so I would be taken more seriously”.
24 October was a humiliation for the Macron government and a significant victory for the movement: the show of force was meant to intimidate people. Instead, it has only emboldened them. Macron’s government no longer knows whether it can contain the fury from below.
The day also saw tens of thousands take on the fascists in Orléans, where the RN held its congress to launch Le Pen’s presidential campaign under heavy police protection. More than 30,000 people marched, about twice as many as expected: trade unionists, young anti-racists, undocumented migrants, women’s and LGBT+ groups, and the revolutionary left. This is not enough on its own to stop the fascists winning state power, but it sent a clear message: the RN may be winning at the polls, but it cannot hold the streets.
In a major step forward for the movement, the country’s second-largest trade union federation, the CGT, has been pressured to call a general strike for 5 November. The intersyndicale, the coalition of France’s main union confederations, spent the weeks before 24 October asking the government for concessions on the budget and school funding, even excluding high school representatives from the negotiations. But Lecornu offered nothing, and now, deprived of their mediating role, they are calling for a general strike. “Workers must hold general assemblies everywhere, in all workplaces, with all their colleagues, in every administration, to generalize the November 5 strike and after”, CGT general secretary Sophie Binet said in a statement.
Macron’s dilemma is that if he continues to use repression to keep the students off the streets, he risks a social explosion. But if he relaxes his grip, the crisis of the budget and the school system returns, and the revolt continues to grow.
The movement has its own dilemma. The state has shown it will make an example of anyone who steps out of line, and the threat of prison and curfews is enough to keep many demonstrators at home. At the same time, the union leadership holds the keys to the workers’ strength and uses them cautiously. Union leaders speak boldly while preparing for a bureaucratic one-day strike. A one-day strike would let off steam; it would not break the government. (In 2023, the union leaders called fourteen separate one-day strikes over five months, and Macron waited them out.) The answer is for workers to shut down production and halt the flow of profits by going on indefinite strike in their millions.
The Yellow Vests have called “Acte III” for 31 October, and high school and university students will keep pushing for national days of action on 29 October and use the school holidays to take the argument to hospitals, railway stations and workplaces to build their own assemblies. Anti-racist organisations and trade unions defied bans on demonstrations on 26 October in response to the racist attack in Trappes.
Students and workers have shown that the Republic’s iron fist can be defied through mass action. As 5 November approaches, the ability of the organised left to carry the students’ militancy into the workplaces, and to win workers to the rank-and-file action that can take a strike beyond a single day, will decide how far this rebellion goes.
