How a School Strike Became France's Gen Z Revolt

Transcript

Saturday night, Limoges: the town hall’s bell tower, the emblem of the city, burns, then falls. It began a month earlier, with a teachers’ strike at one high school near Paris. This is how a school strike became France’s Gen Z revolt. How did it spread to more than a thousand schools? What do the pupils want? And who pays to rebuild a town hall that stood for 143 years?

It is the seventeenth of September, a few weeks into the school year, in Creteil, a suburb of Paris, France. At the Saint-Exupery high school, which has about 1,500 pupils, the teachers go on strike. They say the school is short of resources and short of staff. Teachers there are absent again and again, and several teaching posts are not covered. Very quickly, their pupils take their side.

First come the barricades, built from bins and from barriers taken off a building site next to the school. The school sits below a row of tower blocks, and for several days the pupils block its gates. Their list is short: teachers, nurses, and a school that is properly run. Time magazine would later describe what they were protesting as a chronic shortfall of teachers and poor facilities.

Then the protest finds an audience. Deputies from the left-wing party La France insoumise come to the school. Videos of the blockade spread online, pushed notably by Booska-P, a French website that covers rap. The pupils win a meeting with the regional education authority. And they win something real: a new deputy head, the nurse everyone had asked for, and promises for the school. For the pupils of Saint-Exupery, the blockade worked. So why didn’t it end there?

At Saint-Exupery, the anger cools. Elsewhere, it is only starting. In the week of the twenty-first of September, other high schools around Paris start blockades of their own, in Val-de-Marne, in Seine-Saint-Denis and in Versailles. Their pupils compare their schools with the public high schools in the city centres, and they do not like the difference. By that Friday, the local education authority admits that the movement is growing, with more than ten schools blockaded in a single day. The police make about thirty arrests.

A strike over one school’s missing teachers had found a grievance that pupils far beyond Creteil shared. And it had found a way to travel: a phone, a video and a feed. Within days, the movement would no longer belong to Creteil at all. Then the biggest pupils’ union called on every high school in France to block its gates, and the police would never be far behind.

On Monday the twenty-eighth of September, two ministers send a telegram, seen by the news agency AFP. Laurent Nunez, the interior minister, and Edouard Geffray, the education minister, order the police to step in whenever there is violence or a school is fully blocked. Their words: the pupils’ expression must be respected, but violent actions cannot be tolerated. The State has drawn its line.

Then the other side answers. Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leader of La France insoumise and a candidate for president, accuses the government of ordering a crackdown, with what he calls an obvious racist aftertaste. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu hits back at what he calls the party’s irresponsible one-upmanship. And the pupils, caught between them, do not go home. Their union’s call to block the schools goes out anyway, and the threat of police only seems to feed it.

In less than a week, the movement reaches every corner of France, and university students join it. By the interior ministry’s count, more than a thousand of France’s roughly three thousand seven hundred high schools are caught up in it. On some days, the authorities close hundreds of schools as a precaution. How does a government stop a movement that spreads this fast?

At the school gates, the confrontation turns physical. Education minister Geffray says that by the start of October, 170 pupils and 65 school staff had been hurt. In Lens, in northern France, a teenager’s hand is torn off, and in Tours another young protester loses the use of an eye. The police inspectorate opens inquiries into how some pupils were injured during the blockades. Interior minister Nunez insists the police have acted with a great deal of proportionality.

Then, on the sixth of October, the pupils take the fight to the streets. Between 266,000 and 450,000 people march across France, depending on who is counting. Even the size of the crowd becomes a fight. But behind the marches and the blockades sits the same complaint that started it all in Creteil: the teachers who are not there. So what exactly were the pupils asking for, and could France afford to say yes?

On Thursday the first of October, with the blockades only days old, the government presents its budget for 2027. Education minister Edouard Geffray tells the news agency AFP that the priority given to education is, in his words, objectively preserved. On paper, the ministry says its budget goes up by 1.2 billion euros, to a little over 64 billion. So why are the pupils still outside?

Their complaints start with the basics: buildings they call unhealthy, timetables that are overloaded, and teachers who are missing. Their union says some classes reach 32 or 35 pupils. Then there is Parcoursup, the national website that decides who gets a place on which course after school. Pupils call it stressful, opaque and too selective, and some want it scrapped while others want it rebuilt.

Joined by university students, the protesters more broadly demand a massive investment of 10 billion euros. That is over eight times the 1.2 billion the education budget adds. Could any French government write that cheque?

Look closer at the budget, and there is something else inside it. France expects 180,000 fewer pupils when school starts again in 2027, after 160,000 fewer this year. So the ministry cuts teaching posts. It says that falling numbers alone would have justified far deeper cuts, and that it chose to keep the same number of teachers per pupil. With inflation, the education site Cafe pedagogique notes, a rise like this only keeps the budget where it was.

Under pressure, the government starts to give ground. In less than a day, it drops new fees for some courses after high school that were meant to raise 300 million euros. Geffray announces the redeployment of 3,000 replacement teachers, with contract teachers hired on top. An online platform collects the pupils’ complaints, and many of them greet it with scepticism. Parcoursup, the government says, is open to change, but will not be scrapped.

And the State has little room to move. France runs one of Europe’s largest budget deficits, and its public debt stands at 119.3 percent of its economic output. In the same budget, the armed forces get 6.4 billion euros more.

As for the teachers the pupils asked for, the answer sits in a single line. That budget still plans to cut 1,588 teaching posts.

In Geneva, Switzerland, a United Nations spokeswoman, Shabia Mantoo, makes a statement about France at a press briefing. We are following with concern, she says, the incidents linked to the student protests and the blockades of high schools, some of which have turned violent. She asks that the protests stay peaceful, that the police use no disproportionate force, and that the right of peaceful assembly be respected. In Paris, Prime Minister Lecornu calls talk of political orders for police repression a lie, and speaks of accidents that can happen.

The French State has been here before, and the record of it is long. In May 1968, action committees from the high schools joined the students’ revolt. The night of the barricades left hundreds injured, and the movement spread until some seven million people were on strike.

Then came 1986, when high school and university students marched together against the Devaquet bill and its selection at university. In Paris, the police counted 200,000 marchers, and the organisers counted a million. Days later, a young man named Malik Oussekine died after being beaten by police officers. Two days after his death, Jacques Chirac withdrew the bill.

In 1990, the fight was about money for schools, as it is today. The government answered with an emergency plan worth 4.5 billion francs of the time. So more than once, when pupils have taken to the streets in France, the State has paid up or backed down.

And in 2006, the target was the CPE, a new job contract for the young. On a single day, the government counted 1,054 high schools disrupted. The CPE was dropped. Will this movement be the next entry in that record?

Abroad, the record is newer, and some governments fell. The protests in Bangladesh in 2024 are widely described as the first successful Gen Z revolution, and they inspired others, from Nepal to Madagascar to Morocco. In Bangladesh and in Nepal, the protests brought down the government. Social media has been their common tool, just as it was for the pupils of Creteil.

Back in France, the bill for the violence was already climbing. Early in October, the education minister counted 24 schools burned or ransacked. In Nantes, the Nelson-Mandela high school was damaged by a fire, and the damage was estimated at about 20 million euros. And on the seventeenth of October, the pupils would march with others angry about prices, and that day would never stay a school protest.

Saturday the seventeenth of October starts calmly in Limoges, a city in central France. The marchers gather at a roundabout in the morning, then move to a square in the centre. Across the country, the interior minister counts 550,000 people in the streets that day, 110,000 of them in Paris.

In the late afternoon, near a motorway interchange, it turns. Firework mortars fly at the police, and tear gas comes back. A police car burns on a slip road, and the motorway is blocked. The authorities count about 5,000 marchers in Limoges, and they say 700 of them are radicalised and extremely violent.

The mayor, Guillaume Guerin, says huge wheels were thrown at the officers, and that there were battering rams of 200 kilos. It was perfectly organised, he says. The prefect says every police officer and gendarme that could be deployed was sent. Then, the mayor says, the police run out of the grenades they use to break up crowds, and the march splinters into the city. So where does it go?

A group heads for the town hall, a building opened in 1883. Municipal police officers try to stand in the way, and their car is set on fire. Windows are smashed, and the ground floor goes up in flames. According to the mayor, the caretakers at the door are told they will be killed. France 3’s regional news says that no protest in the city ever did so much damage.

Firefighters arrive just after six in the evening. By seven, the flames have reached the roof. Cars burn in front of the building, and shops are looted nearby. And at about half past eight comes the moment you saw at the start.

By the next morning, the facade still stands, but the authorities say the old building is almost completely destroyed inside, the register office with it. The prefect says this was not random destruction: there were people giving orders, and crowds that followed them. Prosecutors open an inquiry for destruction by an organised gang, and on Sunday morning, the prosecutor says, seventeen people, seven of them minors, are in police custody after many arrests. Outside the ruins, one resident puts the shock into words. “It’s a nightmare. People could have died.”

After the fire, Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu writes to the mayor of Limoges. The town hall will be rebuilt with the State’s help, he promises, because it is the symbol of a nation that will not be knocked down or intimidated. The mayor asks the government for a special plan and, in his words, a rain of millions. Lecornu replies that the mayor is entitled to transparency about how the building was protected.

But the bill for that Saturday is not only counted in stone. A 22-year-old police officer died in Nantes after being struck by a vehicle, the interior minister said. A protester died just north of Paris after a cardiorespiratory arrest, BFMTV reported, citing the Paris police, and prosecutors are investigating.

Across France, the police arrested more than 2,300 people over the weekend, and the interior minister says more than 600 officers were injured. In Marseille, some protesters briefly forced their way into the city hall lobby, and in Lyon a fire broke out inside the tourist office. President Emmanuel Macron condemned what he called sowers of chaos, and warned that those who looted even town halls would be prosecuted and punished. Jean-Luc Melenchon wrote that, against the images of violence, tens of thousands were marching calmly: two worlds, two realities. Even the authorities said the vast majority had marched peacefully.

Then the school holidays begin, and the blockades pause. The pupils’ groups say they will use the break to sharpen their demands. One of them calls for action again on the second of November, when classes resume, and for joining the unions’ national day of protest three days later. Will they still be heard by then?

Because the anger now has somewhere to go: an election. France chooses a new president in April 2027, and the far right and the far left lead the polls. The frontrunner is Marine Le Pen of the National Rally, and on the other side stands Jean-Luc Melenchon. Both campaign against the establishment, and both, as Time magazine puts it, promise to wish away budget constraints.

On Sunday evening, President Macron spoke to the nation, and gave voice to the public’s anger and shame: nothing, he said, justifies the violence. Those who looted will have to pay back for the damage, he said, and those who sought to bring down the Republic will be held accountable. He pointed to what he called insurrectionist elements from radical far-left groups, joined by numerous criminals. But a speech does not change the arithmetic of this story. The State has promised to help rebuild the town hall. The budget bill, still before parliament, cuts 1,588 teaching posts.

So how did one school’s strike become France’s Gen Z revolt? A real shortage of teachers, a few videos that travelled, and a government whose first national answer was an order to the police. The government announced replacement teachers and an online platform, but many pupils met it with scepticism. The government’s concrete measures, including on Parcoursup, are due at the end of October.

In Limoges, the prime minister has promised the town hall will be rebuilt with the State’s help. Whether the classrooms get their teachers back is now a question for the budget debate, and after that, for the voters.