I saw on the news last nice that France is in civil turmoil but, the evening news being the Reader’s Digest Condensed Version that it is, didn’t really go into any details. What is going on?
There are large student-led protests across the country, some turning violent with many injuries, some serious. It looks like the protests are centered on high schools, but there has been spillover to areas around schools.
Here’s a Reuters article that covers the basics.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/france-braces-day-school-blockades-street-protests-2026-10-06/
Interesting. Even Reuters is not brimming with details about the causes of the protests, which seem to center on the quality of, and facilities for, high school education, especially in poorer neighborhoods. And the background is political, with claims (denied by them) that the hard left are stoking the protests. Centrism seems to be falling on its face in France.
The current protests were driven mainly by anger over the condition of France’s public schools. High-school students began protesting in mid-September, and teachers, parents and labor unions have joined them. The first one was on September 17 in Créteil, outside Paris, when students supported teachers demanding more staff and resources. It spread through social media, with students elsewhere reporting overcrowded classrooms, canceled lessons and outdated facilities. It dovetailed with wider public frustration over poverty, inequality and pressure on public spending.
More photos here: Photos: School blockades, street protests grip France | Protests News | Al Jazeera
Government response: https://www.france24.com/en/france/20261007-what-france-s-student-protesters-want-–-and-what-the-government-is-offering
Detailed feed: https://www.france24.com/en/france/20261008-live-students-fourth-round-protests-education-funding-france
About 200 injuries, a few major ones (grenades ripping off hands, shattering jaws and teeth, etc.). Government has promised to stop using stun grenades, pause the normal school curriculum for a few days to give students space to air grievances (if they’re not out protesting, I guess), and opened some avenues for feedback. Major policy discussions & decisions deferred until the end of October.
To be fair, the answer to “Protests & Violence: What’s Going on in France?” is “an average Wednesday”. The French have traditionally taken their protests very seriously indeed. But yeah, the current ones are about schools and stoked by police overreaction, political partisanship and general civil inequality.
The mayor of Paris suburb Saint Denis, Bally Bagayoko, was caught in the middle of one of the clashes where he tried to defend a group of students from the police and ended up getting teargassed.
“Um … guys? … you just teargassed our mayor.”
How embarrassing is that?!
Bear in mind that the French police is national, not municipal or regional, so they weren’t actually teargassing their boss.
Ah, I didn’t realize that! Still, if anyone asked me, I’d deny being on crowd control duty that day at that location. LOL
The issue at hand is a serious, structural one - France is in a bad financial situation. The country is getting more and more into debt, and it is becoming harder and harder to actually balance the books. There is a serious deficit, and something has to give.
The trigger for all this was the government announcing that (among other cuts) they were cutting € 40 billion in education. As you can imagine this was not exactly welcome news for students who, very often, have to study in overcrowded classrooms and in schools that do not have many resources to begin with.
This said, there have been some cases of protestors burning down some high schools. I can’t help but wonder how on earth that can help the situation, but there you are.
Also, I have the horrendous premonition that all this will become votes for the FN in the next elections (I can’t help but compare this to the May of 1968 protests against De Gaulle, and how in the end De Gaulle got a big victory in the next elections). And well… the Front National has said that they want to slash € 150 billion from the budget. If they get into power … the students will see (1) what really savage cuts are like, and (2) how a completely unchained riot police is like.
Oh, Lord, how horrible!
Paul Krugman’s Substack offering yesterday morning was a look at France’s fiscal woes from an economic perspective. He leads off with a look at French interest rates which lately have gone up considerably, reflecting a structural fiscal deficit and some fears of outright default.
He traces the fiscal issues to France’s generous public pension system, which allowed full retirement benefits at age 62 (compare with 67 for the US) as late as 2023, coupled with its life expectancy at that age (87 years), as well as the actual age of first receipt of benefits (lower than any other country in Western Europe). Macron has wanted to move that age gradually up to 64, but it has been stalled at 62+9 months by legislative action until next year’s elections.
The cost of supporting pensions has resulted in large cuts for everything else (especially those those services not used by voters, e.g. secondary education). And it will get worse if FN gets into power, as they have promised to roll the full retirement age back to 62.
Krugman goes on to talk more about the prospect of a French debt default and what it would mean to EU unity, as well as some scenarios that could improve things in the long run, but that’s the gist of what’s causing the cuts that the students are protesting - oldsters voting for their financial interests at the expense of young people who cannot vote.
I personally don’t see the FN being able to roll back the age of retirement back to 62. They may promise whatever, but the harsh reality is that there’s not enough money to get those pensions back to what they were.
That’s what I was going to say. I was in Paris on a random day a few years back and there was a big protest in the streets and the Uber driver literally said just another day. When the French have a problem, about anything really, they protest. Protesting is not just used for “big” issues like how the US does it.
With that said, I know nothing about this particular one.
It may be related to an older pattern of trouble
The obvious reason to burn and break things, is that property damage is about all that gets the authorities’ attention. Marching in the street doesn’t matter, you can be ignored; destroying things costs the rich and powerful money, and that’s what matters. It’s certainly not a French-only thing; we see it here in the US, protests are only really paid attention to when people start destroying things. A million marching people can be ignored as irrelevant, but setting one car on fire will get more attention than that because property is infinitely more important than people to those in power.
100%. Sorta makes you wonder why we don’t just grab our torches and pitchforks and renovate the capitol. I suspect it’s because we’ve (as a society) been trained to be complacent and accepting of mediocrity for 50+ years.
Problem: there is not enough money for the school
Solution:
- Burn the school down
- ???
- Profit
I guess we will find out if it is true that voting pales in effectivess compared to burning down a Walmart Carrefour
This is one of the most common pro-rioter fallacies. Nearly all of the people being harmed are not rich or powerful. Most of the Paris shopowners who saw their restaurant or family businesses get ransacked were poor-to-middle class folks.
The truly wealthy, living in their 100-million-euro gated palaces, were barely affected a hair.
Yes. I can’t speak for the planet, but rioters in the U.S. have traditionally burned, looted, and destroyed their own neighborhoods. The 1992 Los Angeles riots were pretty much limited to south central L.A.