France's Student Protests Rooted in Real Grievances and Political Tradition

Since late September, students across France have been blocking school entrances and marching through city streets, demanding action on what they say is a crisis in secondary education. The protests have grown large enough to draw hundreds of thousands of people. They have also turned violent in scattered locations, leaving hundreds of students, teachers, and police officers injured and thousands arrested—though officials acknowledge that some of those detained were outside agitators rather than enrolled pupils.

The grievances are concrete. Teachers vanish for weeks without replacement. School buildings overheat during summer. Lycées—the secondary schools serving fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds—are falling apart. One Paris student told the BBC that instructors sometimes disappear for several weeks with no substitute assigned. Another pupil complained to a French broadcaster that school days stretching until six in the evening leave no time for sleep or homework after the commute home. Beyond the physical plant, students resent the opacity of Parcoursup, the online system that allocates university places, which has become a source of acute anxiety as roughly eighty percent of each cohort now passes the baccalauréat exam and competes for spots in higher education.

Yet the scale of the current movement—what the Interior Minister has called unprecedented in its reach and violence—cannot be explained by these complaints alone. The OECD, a club of wealthy nations, reports that France actually spends more per lycée student than the European Union average for upper-secondary schools. Teacher shortages exist elsewhere too, and by OECD measures are actually less severe in France, though French teachers do earn relatively low wages. Long school days are a chronic feature of French education, rooted in extended lunch breaks and complex scheduling rather than any recent policy change. Eighty to ninety percent of young people across Europe complete secondary education, and competition for university places creates stress in most countries. The physical decay and financial strain are real, but they do not by themselves account for why students have chosen to blockade schools and risk arrest.

To understand the tactics, one must look to French political history. In France, power has often resided on the street as much as in parliament. Students know this. In October 1990, a rape at a school in Seine-Saint-Denis—an area north of Paris now central to the current unrest—triggered mass rallies against underfunding and staff shortages. The government released the equivalent of 1.2 billion euros in today's money for lycées. In October 1998, five hundred thousand pupils marched across the country with similar demands, and the government approved nearly one billion euros for school renovation and fourteen thousand additional staff positions. Student protests have defeated government reforms before: a university overhaul in 1986, a lower youth minimum wage in 1994, and most strikingly, a 2006 law loosening hiring and firing rules for those under twenty-six. That last measure, passed by parliament and signed by then-President Jacques Chirac, was scrapped after weeks of blockades often marked by violence.

French adults have demonstrated the same principle. The yellow vests uprising of 2018 and 2019—which saw shops ransacked and government buildings attacked—forced the government to drop a fuel tax increase and approve ten billion euros in spending. The street does not always win: the 1968 student uprising, now cited as a heroic precedent by every French protest movement, was actually ended by an election. But the lycéens are heirs to a political culture in which demonstrators compete with elected officials to be seen as the legitimate voice of the people.

For now, the balance appears to favor the students. A poll for BMFTV found that seventy-two percent of French people regard their demands as legitimate, and fifty-five percent support the movement. Teachers, labour unions, and left-wing politicians back the protesters. Another rally was planned for Thursday afternoon. The government, by contrast, is historically weak. Emmanuel Macron, after nine years in power, is barred from standing in the presidential election scheduled for six months hence. His decision to call a snap election in June 2024 left the assembly gridlocked. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has described himself as the weakest prime minister in living memory and appears unlikely to pass a budget through parliament. Yet that very weakness could become an asset in confrontation with students. Faced with rising borrowing costs, a deficit of 5.4 percent of GDP, and public debt at its highest level since the 1940s, Lecornu is financially as well as politically constrained. He has insisted that security forces are not under orders to confront high-school students, only to enforce the law—a distinction that has not prevented heavy-handed police crowd-control operations that have caught pupils in their sweep.