France in Flames: Young People Refuse to Be Sacrificed on the Altar of Neoliberalism
After the yellow vests and the anti-pension-reform protests, a new mass movement is shaking the ultra-liberal government of Emmanuel Macron. Massive youth unrest against the decrepit state and understaffed high schools has been paralysing France for weeks now. It started in mid-September as a blockade of a single high school in Creteil, a suburb of Paris, where students boycotted their classes in support of their striking teachers. Via social media it quickly morphed into a nationwide movement in which at the peak of the movement no fewer than 800 lycées (French high schools), most nursing similar or even worse grievances, were blockaded.
“The protests – ignited at the Lycée Antoine-de-Saint-Exupéry in the deprived Paris suburb of Créteil – have struck a chord across the country.
“Videos of rats scuttling through corridors in other lycées soon hit social media, providing striking symbols of the discontent. Other videos on TikTok and Instagram showed broken toilets, holes in walls and mouldy ceilings across the country. Students have complained of unbearable heat in the summer and freezing classrooms in the winter.
“The anger has also focused on long school hours, chronic staff shortages, overcrowded classes and a deeply unpopular university admissions system” (Nick Blake, ‘”Everyone hates the police” – what France's school protests reveal about a divided nation’, BBC News, 10 October 2026).
The demands of the protesters are very wide ranging but all call for a decent and functioning education system.
“The education ministry found that during the 2024-2025 school year, nearly 10% of teaching hours went untaught in public secondary schools. About 7.5% of those lost hours were due to a failure to find substitutes.
"’Today our school is paralyzed due to a lack of resources, teachers, and not enough desks’, one student told the French outlet Agence France Presse (AFP). ‘We don't have nurses or supervisors, and all they do for us is take away our phones’. Complaints about insufficient resources and funding and poor infrastructure in schools have also been raised in the student protests. ‘We are 35 per class, we don’t have enough chairs in classrooms’, a 15-year-old student told Reuters in the Paris suburb of Pantin as demonstrators clashed with police deploying tear gas in an effort to quell the protest" (Connor Green, ‘Why are students protesting across France? Hundreds of thousands take to the streets in nationwide demonstrations’, Time, 2 October 2026).
Mass movements of solidarity were recorded all over the country: students from better funded lycées in inner Paris joined the movement in solidarity while university students, teachers and workers from other sectors also came out to give their support.
“Two student unions, the Student Union and the High School Trade Union, jointly called for continued protests. ‘Students and high school students, while the authorities seek to drive us out of our places of study through budget cuts, the closure of places, dilapidated buildings, selection, or repression, let's not let them: let's block and retake the universities and high schools!’, the unions wrote in a press release” (ibid.).
Massive protests numbering some 300,000 participants took place on September 29 during a public sector strike. Then subsequently 170,000 took part on October 1, 256,000 on October 6, tens of thousands on October 8, and even more on October 13 in places all around the country. There were half a million in the street on October 17 which was a national day of mobilisation for the students.
Those protests, like those of the Yellow Vests in 2018 and 2019, are the consequence of the full blown austerity measures imposed on the French people by the very unpopular Emmanuel Macron government.
The face of austerity
Macron, when selected effectively by the ultra rich to become the new president of France in 2017, had two important missions: to make sure that the rich were not taxed (he abolished France's long-standing solidarity wealth tax – ISF – which was replaced by a significantly scaled down real estate tax) and to dismantle the French welfare state (i.e. reduce state spending) as much as possible. This has led to severe funding cuts affecting all essential public services in the country like education and healthcare – except for the army and the police.
Because of the very militant nature of the French working class, the neoliberal policies of the 80’s led by Thatcher in England and Reagan in the US, that saw the destruction of the post war consensus in those countries, could not be fully implemented there. No politicians since then had successfully managed sufficiently to impose the laissez faire of the free market on the French workers, who see their social benefits as a part of their history and the legacy of their struggle as a class. Macron, a banker by profession with no affiliation to any political party, was the perfect candidate to try and take on the task of neoliberalising France, for which purpose he has regularly resorted to autocratic decree.
Since he took over the Presidency his successive governments have no fewer than 24 times used Article 49.3 of the French Constitution (which allows the government to bypass parliament and force the passage of a bill without a vote, unless the National Assembly passes a motion of no confidence within 24 hours) to force unpopular measures and budgets through the National Assembly. The most notable use of that article was to pass the pension reform which raised the legal retirement age from 62 to 64 and accelerated the contribution period to 43 years. It has not proved possible to implement it. What his policies have achieved is to award him the lowest popularity rating ever recorded for a French president, and now he has only a few months left in office to continue trying to force through the neoliberal agenda.
Violence as the only answer
Similar to what happened with the Yellow Vests, extreme violence against the rightful anger of the people is the only answer the government has to give. Since the beginning of the unrest: “almost 7,000 people have been detained during the disorder with more than 85% being children, according to the interior ministry. More than 700 police officers have been injured in the past three weeks. But rights groups and unions accuse the police of resorting to heavy-handed tactics against minors, including the use of batons, tear gas and non-lethal flash-ball guns. At least 200 pupils have been injured, along with dozens of teachers” (ibid.).
A 15-year-old boy's hand was blown off during a confrontation between police and demonstrators in the northern city of Lens. A 14-year-old student named Eden was left with a fractured jaw and broken teeth after a police officer fired a tear gas grenade directly at his face at close range in a Paris suburb. And a 16-year-old girl named Mael lost the use of her right eye after being struck by a rubber bullet fired by law enforcement. Most recently, on 24 October, a young man had several fingers blown off in demonstrations in Toulouse, part of a series throughout France that mobilised some 400,000 (official figures) to 800,000 (organisers’ figures) people.
The French authorities had been hoping that with schools on a 2-week half-term break, the protests would fizzle out, but they have galvanized wide sections of society who have been suffering from the cost of living crisis and who have been joining in the action.
Despite the extreme violence and the clear permit to harm given to the police, young people have shown their bravery and determination by facing those state mercenaries unleashed on them to fight for their rights which are engraved on the façade of every French public building and lycées: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.
The students have also been impressive in their support for the Palestinian people, and the Palestine flag was seen at the front row of many demonstrations around the country.
There is also a clear rejection on the part of the youth of the increased militarisation (with its risk of conscription looming in the near future) apparent in many imperialist countries in the face of their unstoppable decline and continuous losses on every war front from Ukraine to Yemen.
The government’s response in terms of real measures to calm the anger has been almost nil and mostly performative.
“As the protests intensified last week, Lecornu the French prime minister called a crisis meeting on Thursday and canceled ministers’ travel plans to work on quelling the demonstrations. Days later, he introduced five initiatives to address students’ demands, including ‘ensuring classes are held, improving facilities in partnership with the regional councils responsible for them, better organizing school days, making Parcoursup [a web portal that manages admission to French universities] more transparent, and giving follow-through to the voices of high school students’. He added that a timeline and a funding plan for the initiatives would be given before the end of the month.
“Geffray French Minister of education meanwhile met with education unions, student organizations, and parent associations on Friday morning in an attempt to temper the protests through dialogue. The same day, he announced a platform students can use to submit proposals for education reform, which he said will be evaluated and used for a ‘national report.’
“High school student organizations, however, called for continued demonstrations following their meetings with Geffray, citing a lack of ‘concrete measures’ from the French government to address their complaints” (ibid.).
The Times commented on Geffray’s efforts in the following terms; “It has been left to the education minister, Édouard Geffray, a little-known technocrat, to find a way out of the crisis. On Friday [9 October] he announced an emergency plan to deploy 3,024 supply teachers to lycées with severe staffing shortages. It was one of the few concrete measures among a long list of proposals that critics doubt will ever be implemented.”
BUT: “Satisfying the protesters’ demands requires money, which the state does not have. At 5.4 per cent, France’s has the fourth-biggest budget deficit in the European Union; the national debt, at 119 per cent, is the third-biggest. France’s borrowing costs are higher not just than Germany’s, but also those of Italy, Greece, Belgium and Spain” (Peter Conradi, ‘How our local school protest set France alight’, The Times, 10 October 2026.
Yet France is ranked as the 7th richest country in the world by nominal GDP, with an economy valued at between $3-4 trillion according to IMF projections. Given that productivity has risen exponentially over the last century, the masses of the people of France and Britain should be living in luxury, not chasing cockroaches and rats in their schools. But the wealth produced in the world is being accumulated by the wealthiest 0.1% of the population with such avid greed that their various governments are provided with insufficient funds to pay for basic services needed by the population at large, who are also suffering from high unemployment and low wages. In that sense, it does not matter whether the governments in question are right wing or left wing, they will all be too broke to provide what is needed – all they can do is rob Peter to pay Paul and encourage the masses to find scapegoats on whom to vent their anger.
What’s next
Macron is on his way out and is clearly unwilling to make concessions. Why bother, at this stage? He will surely be handsomely rewarded by the ruling class for his years of service. The next French presidential elections set to take place in May 2027 will be extremely polarised with the far-right represented by Marine LePen (who is completely rejected by the student movement) and the left-wing party La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and designated as ‘far-left’ by the French media. In fact, Mélenchon is very popular among the youth and was embraced by students on many pickets he attended. It is clear that those among the young people who be of voting age next year will have the power to make the ballot swing for a government that fully embraces their demands, and so far only the party of Mélenchon has done so.
The French establishment infinitely prefers Marine LePen to Mélenchon, despite the fact that not so long ago her party was tainted with anti-semitism and admiration of Pétain’s pro-Nazi Vichy administration. She has worked hard to whitewash it of its previous associations, but still it is quite hard to distinguish the party’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies of today with its anti-Jewish rhetoric and policies of the past. In order to enable her to participate in the forthcoming presidential election, she was also released from house arrest and is not required to wear an electronic tag. Despite having been sentenced to 3 years’ detention on conviction by the Paris Court of Appeal last July of misuse of European parliamentary funds – a conviction against which she is now appealing. She has also announced that if she becomes President, France will cease funding Ukraine – a subject on which she is far more forthright than her left-wing rivals, though her promise may not mean any more than Trump’s promise to end America’s ‘forever wars’. For what it’s worth, the French ruling class would seem to be as reluctant to see Mélenchon in high office as the British ruling class was to allow Jeremy Corbyn to become the British prime minister, with all 'respectable' parties currently solemnly making the point that all looting and vandalism associated with the current waves of protest are being promoted by the ’far-left’, i.e., La France Insoumise.
There has undoubtedly been a serious amount of looting and vandalism as well as willingness to confront the police, all of which are aggravated by the accustomed resort of the French police to violent repression. Regrettably, it is only natural that repressed, deprived and despised citizens whose basic needs are cruelly disregarded should behave in such a way, especially when they lack revolutionary direction and organisation. It is not a question of being encouraged by political activists of whatever stripe – the oppressed are just doing what comes naturally in such circumstances. However, if one were being completely honest one would have to admit that this enraged behaviour is rather more likely to force concessions out of our political masters than any number of restrained and peaceful marches.
Aux armes, citoyens!