Teargas, memes and bin barricades: France’s angry students have revived the ghosts of ’68

Teenagers are – famously – not easy to get out of bed. But every morning, at the crack of dawn, freelance writer Victoria Moul, who moved to France from the UK five years ago, has been waking up to the sound of them wheeling rubbish bins across the cobblestones to form a barricade. The operations are tidy, efficient: a few bins, preferably not on fire, a few banners and a bunch of students. 

Moul lives in the centre of Paris, an area dense with schools. On Tuesday morning, she took a walk with one of her sons, an 11-year-old who has nonetheless been unable to attend class for weeks because his middle school shares a building with the local high school. From each blockaded school, she told me, she could hear the next blockade a couple of streets over. “The buses were going past and honking for each one, so the kids were very excited,” Moul said. “There has been violence in places, and the riot police, when they turn up, are pretty scary and aggressive, but the ones around us, at least on Tuesday, were very peaceful and cheerful.”

Across France, student-led blockades have disrupted hundreds of schools since mid-September as students protest against funding cuts, teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms and dilapidated buildings. What began as a protest at one school in the northern Paris suburb of Créteil has become a national reckoning with France’s underfunded education system, and the biggest challenge to the outgoing Macron government since the 2018 gilets jaunes movement.  

On Tuesday afternoon, as many as 450,000 French students, teachers, parents and public sector workers marched in cities across France. In Paris alone, 50,000 made their way from the Place de la République to the Place de la Nation. Many carried homemade banners. “Generation 6-7 remakes May ’68”, one popular slogan read, a witty comparison between a popular gen-Alpha meme and France’s last world-shaking movement in which students and workers united. “Sorry for the disruption, we’re just trying to save our future,” another proclaimed. On the Place de la République, Extinction Rebellion adorned the country’s emblematic Marianne statue with a vest reading “youth ignored, youth sacrificed”.

Rania and Olympe, students at Lycée Suger in Saint-Denis, the working-class suburb north of Paris, held cardboard signs protesting at school conditions and police brutality. They were accompanied by their friend Maïsenne, who attends school in the much-better-equipped Paris city centre and came out to show solidarity with her classmates. “Compared to Paris, we don’t have the same resources,” Olympe told me. “We’ve been blocking our school all week.”

“We’ll continue until the end of the year,” Maïsenne added. “If they blockade, we blockade. It only works if everyone gets involved.” 

Students, so far, have been met not with concessions but with riot police and teargas. In the northern city of Lens, a 15-year-old’s hand was blown off by a police stun grenade, which exploded after he had picked up as armed officers charged students. Fourteen-year-old Eden, in the northern suburb of Saint-Ouen-l'Aumone, had his teeth knocked out and jaw paralysed when police fired a teargas grenade into his face at point-blank range. Police have been filmed or photographed using headlocks on teenagers, appearing to grope a young woman and charging at students. Around 6,500 people, the majority of them minors, have been arrested since the beginning of the movement – roughly on par with the year-long total during the gilets jaunes protests. France’s police watchdog, the IGPN, has opened 18 investigations into misconduct. 

In advance of Tuesday’s mobilisation, there had been a pervasive climate of fear, Marine Champetier de Ribes, who teaches at a high school in the working-class Paris suburb of Noisy-le-Sec, told me. She had spent the morning preparing emergency kits for teachers, with masks, saline, plasters, fruit pouches, water, and white armbands to be worn so as to be more easily spotted by students. “We were genuinely terrified at the idea of this march,” she said. 

As a teacher in the chronically underfunded Seine-Saint-Denis department, Champetier de Ribes said that the students’ demands echoed those that teachers and staff had been raising for years – to general indifference. A substitute teacher, she said she had seen everything from mouse droppings in the staffroom microwave to cockroaches crawling on the walls and condemned toilets. In one class, 38 students were crammed in a 20-square-metre classroom. “It’s about the size of our living room. I can’t move between the rows,” she explained. “I’ve had to ask them to always have at least three absent, because I can’t fit more than 35.”

Student frustration has boiled over into the streets at the worst possible time for the French government. France faces a historic debt crisis, and presidential elections are scheduled for April and May next year – in which Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) party is currently polling at more than 30%. 

The protests have revealed deep rifts in France’s political class, with Le Pen’s party accusing hard-left La France Insoumise (LFI) – currently likely to be its main opponent in the first round of voting – of stoking the flames, in some cases literally. “There are two protests,” Laure Lavalette, an RN deputy, said on French television – one that’s “completely legitimate” and another that has been “weaponised by hooligans, supported by La France Insoumise”. Thomas Portes, an LFI deputy from Seine-Saint-Denis, told me that it was “quite contemptuous to think that 15- and 16-year-old men and women aren’t able to see that their establishments are rotten, that they don’t have enough teachers or chairs … and that they were just waiting for LFI to alert them to those questions”. 

Still, the right’s message seems to have been effectively seeded. The French media watchdog Acrimed found that 75% of mainstream television coverage on public TV channel France 2 had been dedicated to violence and destruction and just 8% to students’ demands – a trend that has extended to international newsreels showing burning rubbish bins and crowd surges on a loop. According to one poll, less than half of French people, on 7 October, said they supported the student movement. 

On Wednesday, the day after the massive protest, France’s education minister announced piecemeal reforms, including three half-days of “democratic discussions” with student groups, changes to the much-criticised Parcoursup university admissions platform, and a reinforcement of substitute teachers in disadvantaged schools. Interior minister Laurent Nuñez, for his part, declined to apologise to students, instead choosing to send a “message of support to all members of the internal security forces”, and refusing to tell riot police to restrain the use of force. 

Though Nuñez did announce a temporary ban on stun grenades, it was too little, too late, according to Champetier de Ribes. “The students aren’t fooled at all by the government’s announcements,” she said. “They’re fully aware it’s absolute bullshit.” 

As if on cue, the following day, students took to the streets again. On Thursday, they took another emblematic site – one of the many across the city where the history of revolts and revolutions are inscribed into stone: the Bastille. 

Phineas Rueckert is an investigative journalist based in Paris