France’s High School Movement Has Entered a New Phase

Por Rym Khadhraoui — Tribune

It’s just over a month since teenagers in Mayotte, a French overseas territory, launched a protest against conditions at their high school: a facility built for 900 students in which 2,300 were enrolled. The movement they started — demanding more public investment and a better deal for teachers — has now upended French politics, inspiring hundreds of thousands to take to the streets in support of a new social settlement.

As the protests have expanded, the state’s response has become increasingly violent, culminating in the chaotic scenes of last weekend. The coming weeks will decide whether it’s the left or the far right stands to benefit in the runup to presidential elections in six months, where it is likely that Marine Le Pen will face off against Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

To analyse the movement and its next steps, Tribune spoke to the French political activist Rym Khadhraoui about the character of the uprising, the rival forces trying to capitalise on it, and why it’s reached a crucial crossroads.

What is the current situation of the protests? How have they developed over the past month?

The 17th of October was a turning point. Even before the high school movement started, there was speculation that the gilets jaunes would reemerge on that day to protest the rising price of fuel. By the time it arrived, we’d already had a month of massive youth-led uprisings. The entire country was in a state of anticipation. The hope was that different sectors would join forces — students, teachers, farmers, rail workers, all those hit by the cost-of-living crisis — and transform the demands around education into something more general. In the end, about 800,000 people turned out across France and caught the state entirely off guard: the biggest national demonstration since the movement against the pension reform in 2023. In Paris, heavy teargassing and kettling early in the day injured protesters and prevented the demo from properly forming. And there were also scenes of confrontation with police, damage to public buildings and stealing from shops in several cities. 

The latter became the focus of public debate and media coverage. Macronism, of course, responded in the only way it knows how: with repression. Overnight curfews are now in place in some cities. Macronist politicians talk of calling in the army, expediting trials with harsh sentences, banning social media and outlawing protests altogether. We’ve entered a new phase, in which the movement has expanded and the state’s response has escalated.

Where do we go from here? It’s clear that Macronism is weak, and that because the government has no way of answering the movement’s social demands — none at all — it will continue to lash out, generating constant images of brutality which will reverberate across the internet. It’s also clear that more rounds of protests are coming, despite rising authoritarianism and school closures over the next two weeks. Some people are talking about October 24th as a time for act two of the gilets jaunes. The big trade unions have called for a day of action on November 5th, which may be accompanied by strikes. So there’s every reason to hope that this expansionary phase is just getting started.

Why was the movement able to broaden outward from its original constituency of high-schoolers?

France is known for having strong public services, a strong idea of redistribution. Macron’s aim was to break that promise and create a fully neoliberalised country like Britain. The high-school movement was a resounding assertion that the French will not accept this: that now, after ten years, they are ready to bury Macronism once and for all. The first school that went on strike was in Mayotte, a French overseas territory. It was followed by students in Créteil in the banlieue of Paris who had very specific demands linked to conditions in their school, which, like most public schools across the country, has dramatically deteriorated in recent decades. They lit a flame that spread rapidly. 

There’s a distinctive feature here that we should point out. Unlike the gilets jaunes or the pensions protests, this movement was not opposing a specific law or demanding the repeal of a particular reform. From the beginning, it was an entirely positive protest, driven by the students’ feeling that they deserve more, that the state must meet its social commitments. The teachers were at the core of their demands; there was a spontaneous solidarity between them. These kids were deeply concerned with their teachers’ working lives, with the need for things like mental health support and nurses and psychologists in schools. It was impossible to portray them as selfish teenagers. 

It didn’t take long for the movement to reach even the privileged and prestigious schools in the centre of Paris that are historically very right wing. Students there rose up and made clear that they were doing so in solidarity with schools in the banlieues. Obviously Gen Z has been politicised by many issues like the genocide in Gaza, the climate crisis, state racism, feminism. But even so, this kind of pure solidarity — the act of setting up a barricade because you are concerned about the situation of others — seemed like something new. That’s what made the demos so beautiful, so joyful. And it’s what made the state’s crackdown so barbaric.

Eight thousand people — 89 percent of them children — were arrested in just over two weeks. The total number arrested over a year of gilets jaunes protests was ten thousand. That shows you the intensification of the repression under Macron. Each day when the protesters assembled, the first act of the police would often be to spray them with tear gas, before moving in with a barrage of sting-grenades and rubber bullets. At least two children have lost eyes. One has lost a hand. A fourteen year-old boy had his jaw broken and teeth knocked out. The extent of the violence revealed Macronism for what it is: a political project that first causes children to lose a decent education, and then causes them to lose limbs when they protest. The movement began to bring in much wider layers partly because of public sympathy for the students in the face of this horrifying assault. 

So those are two of the factors: the positive character of the movement and the outrage at the state repression. And then there is a third element, related to the upcoming presidential elections that will be held in April. Often France’s social movements die down in the runup to elections, but this time it’s different. In 2024, the leftist coalition, the Nouveau Front Populaire, won the elections for the National Assembly. Macron famously refused to respect the result, instead appointing a right-wing government which has ruled with an iron fist, attempting to slash social spending and smother dissent. So for many young people, the idea that we would wait for elections, that we would defer politics until polling day, no longer holds. Journalists have been asking some of the high school students, ‘Why don’t you simply cast your ballot in six months?’, and their response is almost always the same: they don’t have six months to wait; they don’t have a maths teacher right now. They have concrete demands that will only be answered if they take action.

How are France’s different political forces responding to the unrest? Let’s start with the far right. 

Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National has been trying to perform a double-act. On the one hand, they claim to have some ‘social’ conscience, to care about public services. On the other, they emphasise ‘security’ in the sense of hard borders, law and order, and state racism. This balance is now becoming impossible to maintain. Since the legislative elections of 2024 they have shown that they are aligned with Macron’s party on every major economic principle. They’ve voted in favour of its free-market policies. They’ve shown how desperate they are to reassure the investors and the EU. They just outlined their ‘alternative budget’ and — guess what? — it involves massive cuts to public spending. Confronted by a mass movement for more public investment, RN has no credible response. Its only option is to swerve away from the ‘social’ and fully embrace ‘security’, leaning even further into the issues of identity and immigration. 

Whether this will be effective depends on what happens over the coming weeks. What we’ve seen since October 17th — news footage of windows being smashed and shops being robbed — could play to the RN’s advantage if the wider public turns against the protesters and begins to support the crackdown. The RN could then weaponise a very particular discourse of ‘order’, one which has no problem with children being maimed or mass arrested, but which cares an awful lot about things like theft and property damage. The party will try to present itself as the protector of this order, against a Macronist bloc that is too weak to enforce it and against a left that actively wants to destroy it. This message already resonates with a significant portion of the population. Probably around 30 percent of people would say we should put all the protesters in jail. If Le Pen becomes the tribune of this group, and convinces others to join them, then this makes things very difficult for LFI. 

But there are a couple of reasons why the RN may struggle to pull this off. First, it’s hard for it to be the ‘party of order’ when pretty much all the other parties apart from LFI are vying for this same position. Its discourse isn’t that different to what the centrists are saying. Even the Socialist Party’s candidate Raphaël Glucksmann has been calling for all necessary measures to restore order. So it doesn’t exactly come across as an ‘anti-establishment’ line.

Second, it could be harder for the RN to mobilise nationalism when France has such a proud national tradition of popular protest. There’s the side of France that wants to lock up the protesters, but there is also another side of France — one that’s constantly ready to strike, that’s deeply engaged in social movements and proud to be marching in the streets. What we’ve seen with the student movement is a reappropriation of national symbols as revolutionary. When I was blocking my high school during the last big youth movement exactly twenty years ago, we would never have sung the national anthem or waved the French flag. Now this is changing. A young Black girl interviewed in front of her school recently told reporters, ‘Our curriculum is literally full of people who revolt — Arthur Rimbaud, La Boétie, Olympe de Gouges — and then they’re surprised when we revolt!’ She’s right. And it makes it all the more ridiculous when reactionaries try to blame the protests on Muslim immigrants. What could be more French than storming a public building to bring about social change! 

So it’s possible that the right’s attempts to exploit the protests could backfire, especially if the left ensures that strong social demands remain at the centre of the movement and that police violence is opposed at every turn. These are the battle lines going into the presidential campaign.

So is this the strategy of the left, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon?

Mélenchon remains hugely popular with the young. The latest poll gives him 49 percent with 18 to 24 year olds. When he joined the protests he was received like a rockstar. And it’s not just him. Senior LFI politicians like Bally Bagayoko, the mayor of Saint-Denis, came out and literally stood between the police and protesters. Others joined the blockades themselves. This is a party that’s channeling the energy of highly politicised young people who have strong ideas about what the state should provide. 

In this sense LFI has no real rival on the left. Glucksmann has taken a moderate position, expressing some sympathy with the protesters while condemning the disorder. But that fails to cut through when the entire terms of the debate are being set by LFI: it is shaping the field of discourse with its boldly antagonistic approach. It is the only major party brave enough to stand with the protesters against the repressive apparatuses. It is also the only viable electoral force that has a genuine answer to the protesters’ demands: a redistributive programme that will put people before financial markets — taxes on wealth, public ownership, price caps, social investment, a lower retirement age, ecological planning. Macronism’s total inability to address inequality and material hardship has had a radicalising effect on many people, to the extent that these social policies have now become mainstream. The more Mélenchon can keep the emphasis on them, the more he stands to gain. 

Of course, October 17th has put him in a somewhat trickier position. The official line from the government is now that the ‘ultra left’ has been fomenting riots and disorder. The investigative outlet Mediapart has reported yesterday that several territorial intelligence and police sources say they were pressured to portray LFI as being behind the movement and the related violence, despite internal assessments reportedly finding no evidence for that claim.

But Mélenchon and the party have already been accused of this for years now, so I doubt how effective this new wave of demonisation will be. Some of the population see him as a terrifying figure who simply wants to stoke chaos; many others know better. Mélenchon has said repeatedly that he supports peaceful protest and that he wants the students to know that there is no cause for despair — that voting for him at the presidential election can help to make their demands a reality.

It’s now up to the wider left to maintain this sense of hope as we enter this critical period. There are expectations that a general strike could be called, though it’s too soon to say. This could be a way of pushing the movement to the next level, linking student activism to workplace mobilisations — again, not simply to object to this or that law, but to advocate a total overhaul of the system itself. This broad movement can keep up the pressure on LFI as we head into the election to remain a vehicle for deep systemic change. 

We don’t yet know how this will play out — whether the movement will continue to grow, and whether it will propel Mélenchon to the presidency. But even in the worst case scenario that Le Pen wins the runoffs on a pledge to restore order, the events of recent weeks have revealed something hugely important: that the French people will not accept her programme. New coalitions will form. New barricades will go up. We will not submit.

Fonte: Tribune