> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://redflag.org.au/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # France’s student revolt - URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/frances-student-revolt/ - Published: 2026-10-18T07:13:32.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-18T08:03:52.000Z - Description: France is being rocked by a series of student demonstrations which have shaken up the political establishment. - Author: Robert Narai - Tags: Britain and Europe, #312, International, Revolts and Uprisings Video footage shows tens of thousands of school students packed into Place de la République in Paris, chanting, “High schools in struggle! Youth on fire! The revolution is on the march!” It’s 6 October, and outside Lamartine high school, students hold placards that read, “More class hours than sleep” and “8am to 6pm, are we students or in police custody?” “We are protesting because we deserve the right to have a good life”, Lyna tells *Red Flag* via text from the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis. She is a 16-year-old *lycéenne* (high schooler aged 15 to 18) at Paul-Éluard; her parents are Algerian immigrants. Lyna says many young people like her have lost faith that school will lead anywhere. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s budget proposes €54 billion in public spending cuts and the abolition of 1,588 teaching posts. Combined with police who treat young people from the *banlieues* (working-class suburbs) like *racaille* (“scum”) and a growing far right, it has created a disaffected layer of young people. “There are cockroaches and rats everywhere”, Lyna says of her classrooms. “We have classes that go from 8am to 6pm. The police harass us on the streets because of the colour of our skin and the *banlieue* we live in. We, the children of the *banlieues*, are abandoned and neglected.” Yet students in better parts of Paris have joined Lyna. “We know we’re privileged, but we support the other *lycées*”, a student at a private Catholic school told *Public Sénat* at the 6 October demonstration. “*Lycéens*, and even *collégiens* \[ages 11 to 15\], are fighting above all against the two-tier education system they are victims of”, says Arthur, a student at Lycée Charlemagne in Paris and member of the New Anticapitalist Party–Revolutionaries (NPA-R), via message. “On one side, there is pressure at every level to ‘succeed at school’ or you have no future. But on the other, everyone can see that it’s cash that determines ‘success’. Year after year, the number of students per class keeps rising, up to 35, and students go weeks, even months, without a maths or French teacher.” ### **How the revolt unfolded** The revolt began on 21 September, when about 200 students at Saint-Exupéry high school in Créteil, south-east of Paris, blockaded their school. Within days, the blockades spread across the Paris region, as students in poor and migrant suburbs linked their own conditions—including Parcoursup (an online platform that allocates places at public universities, which entrenches class and racial inequality)—to decades of funding cuts. Hundreds of thousands of students have since joined strikes and demonstrations against the government of Emmanuel Macron, and the revolt has moved beyond the demand for decent schools into a confrontation with austerity, police violence and racism. On 29 September, more than 300,000 people marched in a public sector strike against the budget, carrying signs reading “70 billion euros for the army, nothing for education”. By 1 October, the Interior Ministry reported actions at more than 1,000 schools. In each blockaded school, daily mass meetings (“assemblies”) decide the next day’s action, and the disempowerment of ordinary life is turned on its head. Arthur says debating the questions the movement raises gives students ownership over it. “The government sought to break the movement by discrediting high school students as rioters ‘manipulated by La France Insoumise’ \[France Unbowed, the left-wing party led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon\]”, he says. > “Some students target the police, and rightly so, which has sparked debate: how can the division sought by the government be avoided? What is certain is that in the assemblies we all agree not to be divided, to denounce police violence, to demand the release of all arrested students, and to say what the placards in Lyon say: ‘The burning of garbage only scares the garbage’.” And as the revolt spreads to every kind of high school, Arthur asks, “How can we maintain the working-class character of the movement and its demands, which was its initial strength, without it dissolving into a kind of ‘everyone together’ mentality?” National coordination has emerged across the assemblies: 200 delegates from 71 schools met on 10 October and called actions for 13, 15 and 17 October. “No way our struggle is going to be stolen by others!”, Arthur says. ### **State repression** The demonstrations have been met with fierce repression from the police. By 8 October, 6,877 people had been held in police custody, 86 percent of them minors. At least 215 students have been injured, including a 14-year-old whose jaw was broken in two places, a 16-year-old who lost an eye and a 15-year-old who lost a hand to a stun grenade. Arthur says the movement is drawing the connection between austerity, police violence and racism. “No way we’re going on studying in ‘prison schools’ where young women are policed on the size of the fabric they wear, out of both sexism and anti-Muslim racism”, he says. Intensified repression has only galvanised the movement. On 6 October, the third national day of action, organisers counted 450,000 people (the government, 266,000) as teachers, parents and workers marched with the students, chanting “High schools in struggle!” and “The revolution is on the march!” Placards read, “Generation 67 is doing May 68”. (In May 1968, a student revolt that began with clashes with police in Paris drew in up to 10 million workers in a general strike.) The *lycéens*’ determination has drawn in the universities. “It’s not only about ‘defending the little ones’ but joining the mobilisation behind a common program”, says Mathis Aversenq, a university student and NPA-R member in Paris. More than 30 universities were blockaded in early October. Sections of organised workers have joined the students. Teachers at Paul-Éluard formed a human chain to protect students from police; on 6 October, General Confederation of Labour stewards protected school students in Paris, and striking rail workers helped defend a university blockade in Strasbourg. But union leaders have repeatedly tried to limit the movement’s ability to link organised workers with the students. Most offer verbal support to the student mobilisations but refuse to call and organise strikes. The government has attempted to placate the movement with concessions: on 6 October, “internal democracy” sessions in place of classes; on 8 October, after a television address by Lecornu, a suspension of police grenades, 3,000 replacement teachers and a small cut to petrol prices. The aim is to wear the movement out into the school holidays, which begin after 16 October. It has not worked. On 13 October, organisers counted 480,000 people at mass demonstrations all throughout the country. At Le Havre, students marched alongside striking Siemens workers, and in Lyon police beat trade union stewards. Greta Thunberg visited Paul-Éluard in Saint-Denis and told students that “workers, university students and school students must unite”. ### **A history of attacks … and resistance** The revolt needs to be understood as part of a long cycle of resistance in France: public sector strikes in 1995, which forced the government to withdraw an attack on pensions; a student and union movement in 2006; the Yellow Vests in 2018; the 2023 revolt after police killed a 17-year-old; and strikes of millions in 2023 against raising the retirement age, which Macron defeated using Article 49.3 of the constitution to impose the law without a vote. Yet a new generation has learned from these cycles: unlike the 2006 youth movement, which reacted to a new law, the youth are going on the offensive and demanding more. Each cycle of revolt has been met by a state that has grown increasingly authoritarian and racist. In his book *Why Fascism Is on the Rise in France*, Ugo Palheta points to banned demonstrations, criminalised dissent and mainstream migration and security policies increasingly indistinguishable from the far right’s: > “More and more demonstrations have been banned in the last ten years and all dissent increasingly criminalised; Islamophobic laws and decrees have been accompanied by media campaigns targeting Muslims … In today’s France, migrants are systematically hunted down and bludgeoned by the police (on the orders of successive governments) … An ever-wider array of publications … promote a conspiratorial racism (the ‘great replacement’ theory) and calls for the establishment of an authoritarian government able to strike back against minorities and the left.” Previous presidents Chirac, Sarkozy and Hollande, and now Macron have all pushed emergency powers and targeted “enemies within”, Palheta argues, which has dulled public alarm at the rise of the fascist National Rally. Macron is the highest expression of this so far. His “separatism” law lets the state dissolve any organisation seen as challenging “Republican values”, and it was used against the Collective Against Islamophobia in France. “Denouncing discrimination was thus said to be tantamount to stirring up discrimination”, Palheta writes. Macron’s camp justified this with the far-right slogan of fighting “Islamo-leftism”, and calls now come from the centre as well as the far right to dissolve France Unbowed and the student union UNEF. (If Marine Le Pen wins next year’s presidential election, the National Rally would inherit this machinery to disband left-wing organisations.) The revolt has brought that climate into the open. The establishment has cast the suburban youth as “wreckers” manipulated by France Unbowed. Presidential candidate Bruno Retailleau accused the party of “organising the insurrection” and proposed banning it. ### **France Unbowed, the unions and the radical left** France Unbowed has become a target because of its role in the revolt. Founded in 2016 by Mélenchon, it won 7.7 million votes in the 2022 presidential election and has around 70 MPs. John Mullen, a Marxist in the Paris region and party supporter, describes it as a mass reformist organisation with deep roots in social movements. On the one hand, its MPs act as a megaphone for the revolt in parliament and stand up to the police: Mélenchon told MPs to place themselves between police and students, and Saint-Denis mayor Bally Bagayoko was tear-gassed while protecting young people. “If there is one issue which is generally guaranteed to bring reformist leaders to heel, it is that of police violence”, Mullen says, and France Unbowed’s leaders have “radically broken with this politics”. Yet France Unbowed’s strategy is to win elections and use the state to implement its program: a Sixth Republic, public banks and 831 crowd-sourced measures. On the police, it calls for “the refounding of a Republican police force”, Mullen says, rather than dismantling the apparatus that is blinding teenagers. This reformist strategy means subordinating the movement to the party’s negotiations with the state. According to Mathis, France Unbowed and the student unions close to it argue for a more moderate course. “They do not take part in the general assemblies and generally try to break the embryos of coordination”, he says, for fear of losing their monopoly of “representativeness”. And although many members are union activists and help build the student mobilisations, France Unbowed has no systematic intervention in the unions, according to Mullen. The radical left plays a quieter but more driving role, says Mathis. The radicals want the assemblies to decide and workers’ organisations to call strikes now. What gives the revolt its potential is that workers have begun to move. On 8 October, TotalEnergies refinery workers struck over pay, with the Confederation of Labour estimating more than 60 percent of staff out in Normandy. On Saturday 17 October, a cost-of-living day of action modelled on the Yellow Vests, student unions counted 800,000 people at more than 1,000 mobilisations. In Paris, Confederation of Labour members in red vests, health workers in white coats and young Yellow Vests marched with the students, despite a ban on protests near the Élysée Palace. But Confederation of Labour General Secretary Sophie Binet had said only that the confederation supported it, and some unions stayed away. Students can close schools, but only workers can shut down production, and that power could link school cuts, police violence, racism and the military budget. The movement is already inspiring others internationally. In Italy, Simone Montori of the High School Students’ Network says “the demands of the French students are our demands”. French students are teaching others how to fight. “The arrival of students feeds the feeling that victory is possible, because the movement keeps spreading”, Mathis says. Whether the organised working class enters the fray, and what politics come to dominate, will determine whether it can win.