The French High School Protests Burning Across France

France woke up on October 1 to smoke outside its schools. What began last week as a scattered student blockade has hardened into the French high school protests, a nationwide uprising of teenagers who say their classrooms are rotting around them. By Thursday, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said three hundred fifty-six schools had been disrupted the day before, and police had detained six hundred twenty-five people, most of them minors, in a single day of the French high school protests.

The grievances behind the French high school protests are concrete enough to touch. In Saint-Denis, a working-class suburb north of Paris that has become the epicenter of the unrest, students set fires outside the gates of Lycée Paul Éluard and tore down a section of fencing. Fadila, a seventeen-year-old student there, told Reuters that her school had no windows, that the prefab toilets had no water, and that cockroaches and rats were everywhere. According to her account, the buildings were so dilapidated that the prefab classrooms dropped to minus five degrees Celsius in winter and hit forty degrees in summer. "We can't work in those conditions," she told Reuters.

She is not alone in that description. Gamze, another seventeen-year-old in Saint-Denis, told Reuters that students in the suburb were treated unfairly compared with students elsewhere. "It is always us... who are suffering when in Paris or in the countryside; they are not in such a situation," she said. One widely photographed placard outside Paul Éluard read "Golden offices for you, dilapidated high schools for us," according to the Reuters reporting republished by CNN affiliates.

How a school blockade became a street fight

The French high school protests started in Val-de-Marne, southeast of Paris, and spread to Lille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Rennes, Nantes, Marseille, and the northern suburbs of the capital. The demands, set out by the Union syndicale lycéenne, the school students' union, are substitute teachers, more staff, fewer pupils in a class, lighter timetables, repairs to buildings the union calls dilapidated, and relief from the stress of Parcoursup, the university-application platform. The union has described the movement as the result of a decade of underfunding.

The state's response has been forceful, and the numbers show it escalating. Nuñez said police detained six hundred twenty-five people on September 30, after four hundred forty the previous day and one hundred sixty-four on September 28. Eighty-three officers and gendarmes were wounded on September 30, against forty-eight the day before and twelve the day before that. Seven incidents were recorded on September 29 in which people threw hydrochloric acid at law enforcement officers, the Brussels Signal reported, citing the interior minister.

The injured in the French high school protests are not only police. Education Minister Édouard Geffray said one hundred nineteen pupils and staff had been hurt since the blockades began, thirty-four of them education employees, a figure he called unprecedented in the French school system. A teacher in northern France was beaten, a school head was hit by a firework mortar, and another teacher received a death threat. The IGPN police inspectorate has opened three inquiries after pupils were hurt at Sevran and Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône in the Paris region and in Tours.

Fire has become the movement's signature. In Lille, protesters set rubbish containers alight and threw bottles and paving stones. In Nantes, witnesses said part of Lycée Nelson-Mandela caught fire during the October 1 blockade. In Marseille, buses were attacked near high schools, a bus driver was assaulted, a head teacher was sprayed with petrol, and an M6 journalist was assaulted while covering the protests, according to the Brussels Signal's account. On October 1, students called an "act two," and the Union étudiante, the students' union, said ten university faculties were blocked, including Lyon two and Lyon three, Strasbourg, Montpellier, Aix-Marseille, Nanterre, and Paris one. By the afternoon, about thirty campuses were affected, a sign that the French high school protests were pulling in older students too.

Politicians are fighting over the teenagers

The French high school protests have landed in the middle of a budget crisis, which is why every party wants a piece of them. The 2027 budget, presented on October 1, sets out fifty-four billion euros of savings, freezing most spending increases and seeking contributions from pensioners and companies. Students blockading schools in the same week that the government announces austerity gives the movement a bigger stage than a school dispute usually gets.

President Emmanuel Macron, speaking in Madrid during a state visit to Spain, addressed the French high school protests directly and said he understood the anxieties and anger of young people. "However, none of these fears, none of this debate, legitimizes violence," he told journalists. He added that he had seen politicians in front of schools drumming up students and called it serious. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu wrote that fireworks, fires, and violence near schools endangered pupils, staff, and police, and he accused the left-wing La France insoumise of urging the movement to widen. He called an inter-ministerial crisis meeting on October 1, offered a consultation platform, and said the difficulties of the lycées "must be heard."

La France insoumise has embraced the French high school protests openly. Jean-Luc Mélenchon wrote on September 28 that the pupils were harmless, accused Lecornu of ordering a crackdown with an "obvious racist aftertaste," and told party officials and activists to place themselves between the pupils and the police wherever they could. In Saint-Denis, the party's mayor, Bally Bagayoko, stood with pupils outside Lycée Paul-Éluard and said violence could be a legitimate reaction to police action. Paris police prefect Patrice Faure referred him to prosecutors in Bobigny for suspected provocation to commit an offence, and Bagayoko later said his words were taken out of context.

The right has answered in kind. Bruno Retailleau, a Les Républicains senator and centre-right presidential candidate, raised the question of banning La France insoumise, calling the party seditious and accusing it of trying to organize an insurrection, the Brussels Signal reported. Edwige Diaz, who became the first president of the National Rally group in the Senate on September 29, called the students' demands "perfectly legitimate" while accusing the radicalized far-left of instrumentalizing young pupils. Education unions SNES-FSU, CGT Educ'action, and SUD Education issued statements on October 1 calling on education workers to stand alongside the mobilized students.

The French high school protests are not winding down. The union wants mass funding and has called a further day of action for October 6, and the government has yet to say what the consultation platform Lecornu promised will actually contain. Readers can follow related youth movements on the GenZ NewZ youth activists page, including Morocco's young activists campaigning for the release of detained protesters. For now, France's teenagers have the country's attention, and they are not asking politely anymore.