“I like this kinda thing because it’s revolutionary”, a 16-year-old high school student told me as we stood out the front of her school in Nice at 7am on the last Wednesday in September. As we talked, students started arriving from across the city to join the blockade of the school, the Lycée Parc Imperial, the largest in the area.
Hundreds of students trickled in, and suddenly it was hard to tell where the sea of high schoolers started and ended. Some carried things to help build the barricades to stop anyone from entering the school.
I asked the 16-year-old if she knew all the students or whether they were from other schools. She pointed out a group of high schoolers who must have travelled from another school and said: “I don’t know them, but we are all comrades”.
This wasn’t the first blockade she had been part of at this school, but she said it was different to previous blockades. This time, it isn’t just one school but more than 1,000 being blockaded.
Videos and photos of French students holding Palestinian and Algerian flags, calling for revolution, chanting against the far-right National Rally and fighting against intense repression are sweeping social media.
This comes at a moment when a growing wave of student protests and revolts is sweeping across the world. Last year, there were the Gen Z revolts that were led by students and swept across Nepal, Indonesia, Madagascar and a whole series of countries in the Global South.
In July, hundreds of thousands of students in India joined huge protests and forced the education minister to resign. At the end of August, tens of thousands of students in Germany struck from school to protest the introduction of forced military conscription. Across Chile in early October, thousands of students and teachers took to the streets to protest possible education cuts. And in Australia, high schoolers have been at the forefront of the fight against Pauline Hanson, organising two successful school walkouts in opposition to her.
French students are protesting the terrible conditions in their schools, for both students and teachers. Schools are forced to deal with inadequate funding, large class sizes, decrepit facilities and low staff pay and morale. To make matters worse, further cuts are planned in the upcoming national budget. And it’s not just schools facing cuts.
President Emmanuel Macron has announced the budget will include £54 billion in cuts and a fourth wage freeze for the public sector. On 29 September, thousands of public sector workers went on strike in anticipation of these cuts, with many strikers visiting high schools to show their solidarity with students. Teachers are also planning to strike on 6 October.
Students at Parc Imperial said their school was far from the worst, but even here the conditions are terrible. Class sizes often exceed 35 students, and the classrooms meant to accommodate them are too small and have limited, if any, heating and cooling. Temperatures can reach 40 degrees inside in summer and are freezing in winter. During the day, they said, students often do nothing for long periods because there aren’t relief teachers to cover absent teachers, often because the conditions are so bad. Students are also angry about the competitive Parcoursup system that pits them against each other to get into university.
While students and teachers struggle to manage in these conditions, the head of Parc Imperial lives on campus in luxury with his own gym and “wine cave”. Bad as this is, the main enemy, the high schoolers said, is the government. Macron puts billions into the military and police but refuses to adequately fund schools.
The cops’ crackdown on the high schoolers has been severe. The 16-year-old Imperial Parc student showed me the gauze, disinfectant and cream she had brought in her bag in case any students were injured. She hadn’t expected to use it, but ended up caring for a number of people whom the cops had tear-gassed and injured. She said she had been “naive to think the police would do nothing because we are minors. I am 16, most people are 17, 15, 14 we are very very young”. Across the country, police have injured hundreds and arrested thousands of high schoolers.
One of the first schools to start the blockade movement was Paul Éluard in Saint Denis (north of Paris). Saint Denis is a poor and migrant area that has been particularly neglected by the Macron government. Students report that the food there is inedible, rats and cockroaches are everywhere, and the buildings are falling apart. When students protested their terrible conditions, cops were sent to tear gas, brutalise and arrest them.
In response to the police brutality, teachers at the school formed a human chain to protect their students. In recent days, students from Paris 8 University have joined the students at Paul Éluard. What looked like thousands of students at University Rennes 2 voted to blockade their university in solidarity with the high schoolers, and now there are blockades at several other universities.
At Lycée Parc Imperial, in the face of cops with huge guns, batons and shields, the students marched towards them singing and throwing fireworks. A student said: “Some of main leaders are girls ... even the boys say it—there are a group of girls that are very courageous and they do the scary thing”.
The media and political establishment have tried to paint the high schoolers as violent and destructive for starting fires. High schoolers at Parc Imperial say the point of the fires was to shock the government and the respectable people who let them suffer and refuse to listen.
When the gas thrown by the police had taken over the streets surrounding Parc Imperial, it wasn’t the police but the high schoolers who helped the elderly who struggled to breathe. It is the high schoolers who raise the flag of the oppressed, the Palestinians and are fighting for money to be poured into their education and future instead of the destruction of people like them abroad.
By 9am, the police had finally managed to push out most of the students with tear gas and violently pinned down and arrested a number of students. A young woman who studied at the school said they would be back again tomorrow to do it all again. I asked if she thought they would win. She got out her phone and spoke French into it and then turned it around to show me the translation: “[The students] are determined to get what they need, and I think they will keep going until they get what they want. So, I think we will win in the long run”.
Then she asked whether, after seeing this, young people in the US and Australia might want to fight for their rights. With the direction of the world, Australia included, towards a more militarised, unequal and authoritarian society, I sure hope so.
