France’s school unrest has moved far beyond the classroom

French governments know the old rule: when the young take to the streets, trouble is rarely far behind. That lesson, learned in 1968 and never quite forgotten, is back in circulation as school protests spread across France and the state discovers, once again, that adolescence can be a public-order problem.

The unrest began in Seine-Saint-Denis and has spread across France. On Thursday, hundreds of lycées were blockaded; on Friday, around 400 were closed to protect staff and students. Universities are beginning to join in, which is usually the moment when a local grievance acquires the gift of national inconvenience.

The damage has been more than symbolic. In Nantes, the main hall of one lycée was destroyed by fire. Smaller fires were set at school gates across the country, and the cost of the damage is said to run into the millions of euros. Education Minister Édouard Geffray said 65 teaching staff, including 40 school heads, had been injured. The government also says around 300 police officers and firefighters were treated for injuries, while about 2,000 people, mostly minors, were taken into custody.

Student groups tell a harsher story of their own, saying two teenagers suffered serious eye injuries and that another lost many teeth. That is the point at which a protest over classrooms and funding stops looking like a tidy petition and starts resembling the sort of disorder that French politics specialises in producing, then pretending to be surprised by.

The demands themselves are not mysterious. The students want more money, more teachers, smaller classes and better buildings. Many in France would find that hard to quarrel with. Protest over education funding is almost a national habit, and the system is plainly under strain because money is tight.

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has published a draft budget for next year and says he aims to remove €54bn from state spending. Whether he can actually deliver that sum is another matter, but the direction is clear enough. The era in which Paris could buy social peace with public largesse is drawing to a close, and teenagers demanding an extra nurse or better insulation may be disappointed.

Yet money is only part of the story. The deeper fear in Paris is political. On the right and in the centre, there is a strong suspicion that the hard left is trying to ride the movement ahead of the elections, with France Unbowed and Jean-Luc Mélenchon appearing alongside the students, notably in Saint-Denis. The local mayor, Bally Bagayoko, drew criticism after saying that violence can sometimes be legitimate.

A leaked internal report prepared for the Paris police department went further. It said the early phase of the movement in Seine-Saint-Denis was being encouraged by far-left student groups and political organisations such as France Unbowed, and suggested the tensions could be part of a strategy to impose ideas before the national vote. The report pointed to the presence of protesters who were not lycéens, the vagueness of the demands, Palestinian and Algerian flags, and tactics such as calls for demonstrations at police stations.

France Unbowed denies doing anything more than supporting a legitimate protest. Mélenchon has urged students to avoid violence, saying it only serves their enemies. But his critics believe the veteran politician knows exactly what he is doing, especially since polls show he has strong support among 18- to 24-year-olds and that young voters remain the most unreliable part of the electorate.

That is the real calculation: keep the movement alive, keep the attention, and hope street politics turns into ballots. It is a familiar French gamble, and not a particularly reassuring one. Mélenchon is also polling badly in a runoff against Marine Le Pen, which means the country may be heading into a volatile election season with the school protests already serving as a warning signal.

Written by Thorben Thiede thorben.thiede@alpineweekly.com