Lea Firmiani
The French Fifth Republic has never seen such an explosive social movement so close to the presidential elections. Constitutionally barred from running for a third consecutive term and unable to obtain a majority in the National Assembly since the 2024 snap elections, Emmanuel Macron seems to have hoped to wait out this lame duck period, focusing on foreign policy and leaving the sticky business of governing in the hands of an unpopular prime minister [1]. With the retirement reform officially ‘suspended’ until after the election, it appeared as if nothing would rouse France from an anxious “politics as usual” until the run off, which may yet feature a showdown between the left-wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) and the far right Marine Le Pen of the Rassemblement National (National Rally).
And yet, France has exploded in popular unrest prior to polling. As many struggles do, it began in the colonies. High school students in overseas departments of Mayotte and French Guyana occupied their schools as early as August 31st.This was followed by students in metropolitan France: first in Rennes and Caen, then in the economically disfavored suburbs of Paris before reaching the capital proper and the rest of France by late September.
The students are currently on vacation until schools reopen next week. We will have to wait and see if occupations continue; though it seems likely. They are very present at protests, either co-organized with university students or the union marches. Many have adopted confrontational tactics in their first protest movement. Squaring off with police in a small group of demonstrators, I stood next to a young woman who timidly said it was her first ever protest. We hit the shields together.
They are protesting a lack of necessary renovations in schools and a lack of teachers. Many classes are not substituted if a teacher is absent; the most affected students will miss nearly 20% of their classes because of staffing issues [2]. Moreover, students are exhausted by the 8am to 6pm schedules that are riddled with hours of free time between classes due to poor staffing and space shortages. Finally, students are extremely stressed by Parcoursup, the university application platform, which algorithmically sorts students and often sends them acceptance answers days before the start of classes. Students demand its abolition, or at least its serious reworking. Although French education spending is average for members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), these resources are not distributed evenly between institutions. A sizable portion goes to subsidizing private schools, while the poorest public schools are plagued by high turnover and large class sizes which can bloat up to 43 students. Despite France having a larger student population than most of Europe, successive governments have slashed teaching jobs and education funding over the last decade.
Universities have faced similar budget cuts, aging infrastructure, and territorial inequalities in status and funding. In early October, University students declared solidarity with the high schooler’s movement, occupying campuses and cancelling classes. They have elaborated a set of 10 common demands for hiring, renovation, subsidized cafeterias, and increased democratic representation [3].
These inequalities constitute a major vector of racialization, as they are concentrated in poor banlieues (suburbs) with large Black and Arab populations. Despite the revolutionary motto “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” above every school entrance, these children have never been allowed equal standing in French society; they face higher rates of unemployment, police racism (stop and frisk type policies are common), and an increasingly hostile media.
French highschools are very segregated by class and race. Evidently by geography, but also by curriculum. After middle school, students are sorted between professional and general high schools. Professional high schools offer trade certificates and more limited academic subjects (for example, they do not have philosophy classes) while general high schools prepare students to pass the baccalaureate. This degree guarantees access to university (unless you fall through the cracks of Parcoursup). Students’ wishes are supposed to be taken into account, but they often face pressure or disdain from orientation councillors who push them into professional highschool based on labor market conditions. For example, even if a student would like to learn about electronics, they may only offer construction. It’s technically possible to go to university after, usually after earning some kind of 2 year technical degree, but this depends strongly on one’s initial training. Overall, the effect is persistent inequality in access to higher education, despite increases in the postwar period [4].
The movement has built an inter-class coalition to cope with these divisions. In TV interviews, students from well off institutions consistently emphasize their relative privilege and a desire to guarantee the same conditions for others, while students from working class areas emphasize police brutality, missing teachers and dilapidated school buildings. The government created an online platform for students to submit their complaints; such a process unsurprisingly favors the more general demands of middle class students in general highschool (less school time, more spots in university) over those of more disadvantaged schools. If the coalition holds fast to more working class demands, the government will be in a sticky position: continued austerity in education will be impossible, but hiring enough teachers is already difficult. Throwing money at the problem can only do so much. School renovations are often done shoddily despite great expense. Teachers complain less about pay and more about persistent issues with staffing, constant reorganization [5], unsupportive management, administrative bloat, and a lack of resources to teach students with special needs or poor french skills [6]. The students’ reformist program therefore already gestures at a qualitative rupture with neoliberalism: deep changes are required, but the Macronists did not have the state capacity to implement any of them.
The students have been massively politicized for LFI; Insoumis deputies are mobbed for selfies in every march. Some students who have received media attention [7] following eloquent street interviews have explicitly joined the movement. Polls show strong polarization among 18-24 year olds between LFI and the far-right National Rally (RN) led by Marine le Pen [8]. These polls, however, cover likely voters, while the working class youth that LFI needs to bring to the polls are more likely to abstain than vote for the right. The social movement may increase electoral participation and foil pollsters assumptions.
France has strong student movement infrastructure. Today, there are 3 high school student unions. The first is Renouveau lycéen, a centrist group whose general secretary is close to Renaissance, the party of Macronist candidate and former Prime Minister (and former Education Minister!) Gabriel Attal. Next is the Union Syndicale lycéenne, a group further to the left, some of whose leaders are close to La France insoumise (LFI). Finally, there is the apolitical Les lycéens, which presents its rejection of political parties as its defining feature [9].Their main activity is supporting candidates in High School Life Council elections at the school, academy, and national levels. Only the school councils are directly elected; each higher body is chosen by representatives from the level below. Reliable figures on membership are hard to find for any of these groups, but the Union syndicale lycéenne (USL) likely has a few thousand activists, Renouveau lycéen (RL) around a thousand, and Les lycéens fewer still.
While these organizations do organize protests or act as plaintiffs in legal battles around school policy, they are not big enough to govern a movement of this size. The actual heart of the student movement is each school’s General Assembly (AG). These are ad hoc assemblies of students, and sometimes staff, convened by handing out flyers outside the school. Usually a student or staff union can reserve a room, and then, voilà, people show up or they don’t. When they do, they debate and decide what to do: attend a protest together, write an official letter of protest to school management or the ministry, or escalate further. Blockading a school is the preferred escalation tactic. Students picket in front of school doors and don’t let anyone in, sometimes building barricades with trashcans or whatever else is available. The blockade is generally set up at the front gates,since the goal is to attract public attention, but sometimes the school director may let them inside to put distance between students and the police. In France, General Assemblies are a common feature of social movements and can be held for workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, or really any other group of people. When they are not held at a specific workplace or school, they are usually held in union halls, or even town halls of sympathetic city administrations.
The high school occupation movement kept its momentum in the face of brutal police repression. One young man in Lens lost his hand after police fired a grenade into the kettled crowd; another most of his teeth in a town north of Paris after being shot in the head, nearly point-blank, by a stun grenade launcher. These early instances of extreme violence are unfortunately not isolated:many others, adults and children, have been severely injured by police since mid-September [10]. This violence has been normalized over the last decade of French class struggle, reaching terrifying intensity during the Yellow Vests movement in 2018 and the uprisings against police violence in the summer of 2023. Protesters losing eyes is no longer uncommon.
Adult solidarity with the student movement was initially driven by concern for children’s safety, with parents and teachers forming human chains to protect students from the police. That stance is widely popular. It produced positive media coverage and drew support from parents, the left, and unions. The first occupied school around Paris started along with a staff strike, but teacher involvement has been uneven. Unions supported weekend protest marches, where crowds wore white helmets to protests in reference to parents who wore them to stand between police and student protesters following the murder of Malik Oussekine in 1986. French polls are notoriously inaccurate and right-leaning, but they do give an idea of the general trends. Until mid October, a slim majority supported the movement’s demands and a sizable majority favored dialogue over repression, though a majority also favored severe punishment for any protesters who adopted more confrontational tactics or vandalism.
October 17th, the yellow vests [11] joined the fray in a massive protest against rising costs of living and decaying public services, particularly gas prices, demanding that oil companies absorb the cost out of their windfall profits. The trade unions organized large marches around the country [12], while “wild” protests set out in the cities to take up public space in rich neighborhoods and attempt to get to the Élysée Palace, in classic Yellow Vest fashion [13]. Police deployed tear gas, riot shields, and batons against these from the early morning onward. Repression and conflict were no less severe at the “authorized” marches: police fired tear gas from windows onto Place de la République Square in Paris before the march had officially begun. Rioting continued that night and the next. In Paris, dozens of stores were looted and cars burned, and protesters got within 300 meters of the Élysée. In Marseille, protesters broke into the town hall. In Lyon, a tourism office burned to the ground. The height of this wave of property destruction came in Limoges (a medium-small French city in the west-central part of the country, population 186,000), where protesters burned down the city hall.
Two things stand out. First is the geographic spread and intensity of the protests: almost every city in France was affected. Property damage reached town centers and tourist districts, and the police, who had more or less anticipated the number of protesters in Paris (if not their militancy), were overwhelmed everywhere else. Even in Paris they seemed spread thin, entrenching themselves around government buildings and some luxury stores. Police reported around 1,000 injured officers, though that figure is difficult to verify.
Second is the convergence between protest movements with different social bases: the high school movement, rooted among racialized, working-class youth; the Yellow Vests, a heterogeneous but more rural and peri-urban movement of poor workers, mostly white though not exclusively [14]; and the trade unions and left parties. So far the unions have limited their support to march logistics, but they have now called a one-day general strike for November 5. Unions are careful to call general strikes (even single-day ones) only when they are confident of success, so they must be hearing a lot from their base that this is worth striking over. Bringing all these social forces together is an incredible achievement, and the high schoolers deserve the credit.
It is worth spending a few paragraphs on the labor movement here, since I think it will interest Salt readership. France has several industrial unions which operate across many sectors. They coordinate action through the Intersyndicale, an ad hoc board of unions that agree to act together during a given social movement. (currently, it is composed of the 3 largest national federations; CFDT, the CGT, and FO, plus two unions with strong education presences: Unsa and the FSU). The left wing Sud/Solidaires supports the movement, but retains its independence from the Intersyndicale; it called for prolonged strikes from the 24th onwards rather than a 1 day general strike.
In France, union density is very low (about 10%), but almost all workers are covered by the sectoral bargaining agreements that unions negotiate. Joining a union is therefore closer to joining a political party, with different unions competing at a single workplace for seats on the workplace committees. Outside a few workplaces dominated by one union, like the CGT in electricity production or oil refining, union activists often have to build strikes ad hoc, by convincing their non-union colleagues to strike or by persuading the locals of other unions to join the movement regardless of what their national leadership says. This dynamic is why unions tend to be conservative about declaring general strikes: sometimes the union staff can’t mobilize the base and the strike flops. That is often the case in education. One friend of mine was a teacher for 10 months in a middle school and said he was one of two consistent strikers.
Labor has been less militant over the past two years. It won a partial victory on the retirement reform, since implementation was postponed until after the elections, which hands the next president a very hot potato. But that victory came at a cost. Many trade unionists have been prosecuted, either for breaking “minimal service” clauses (electricity workers in Marseille cut power to police stations) or for “terrorism apologia” (supporting Palestinian liberation).Prolonged strikes also strained wallets and nerves. The movement seems to have finally recovered from that fight. For now, we have to wait and see if the base will heed the call for the November 5th general strike. If it goes well, we can expect more one-day general strikes and potentially some prolonged strikes in key sectors such as rail, oil, and electricity. Given the Yellow Vest’s emphasis on fuel costs, refinery strikes could be brutal for the government. They could potentially draw buses of protesters out of Paris to join picket lines in Normandy or the Bouches-du-Rhône,as happened in the retirement reform fight, or prompt blockades of the gasoline depots around major cities. There is precedent for this: during the retirement reform struggle, protesters regularly blockaded garbage truck depots after strikers were legally requisitioned under minimal service laws for public sanitation.
After the October 17 riots, media coverage was extremely negative [15]. For the next week, we were treated to endless discussions of the morality of looting and racist blathering about the “culture” of looters. The government gave barely veiled orders to the judiciary [16] to be severe, and many young people with no criminal records were sentenced to months of jail in accelerated hearings. The slower, full trials will probably bring similarly harsh sentences. Some of these convictions may be overturned or commuted on appeal, given scant evidence and slapdash legal argumentation, but we have still seen the most severe judicial repression in the history of the Fifth republic [17]. Curfews were declared and enforced in big cities and in smaller cities with right-wing administrations. The government also attempted to ban as many protests as possible, often announcing the bans the night before a march so that courts could not rule on them until after the march had begun.
On Saturday, October 24th, a massive police presence was meant to deter the movement: in Paris, helicopters, armored vehicles, and counterterrorism units, with soldiers deployed as backup. There was less open confrontation with the police and fewer successful wildcat marches, but 800,000 or more turned out despite the rain, with record-breaking numbers in Lille, Marseille, and Toulouse [18]. Clashes continued into the night, but far less property damage has been reported, and there were far fewer arrests (around 1,300 nationally). Some of those arrested were far-right thugs, who seemed to be operating with tacit police approval in some places [19]. In an attempt to split the movement, Macron directed Prefects to only allow marches by trade unions, and even these were not always authorized. The left and civil society have roundly criticized this restriction on the right to protest as unconstitutional. Courts were either too slow or too favorable to the government for authorized marches to happen in Lyon, Bordeaux, Metz, Limoges, Montpellier or Nancy. Protests happened anyway, met with greater or lesser repression. Overall, while the heavy police presence and administrative harassment (bans on protests, moving the path of the authorized protest at the last minute in Paris) seem to have discouraged the most aggressive tactics, they have not been enough to break the movement. For now, the momentum remains.
The government is exhausted, many of its ministers dogged by scandals that would have forced their resignations if there was anyone for coach Macron to call in from the bench. They are thus forced to close ranks and have no scapegoats to offer up. Case in point: Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez is in the spotlight for police brutality, having previously been under fire for lying to media after telling journalists that Franco-Palestinian European MP Rima Hassan of the left wing movement La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) had illegal drugs in her purse. In the Council of Ministers on October 22, the Prime Minister explicitly demanded that “off the record criticisms of Nuñez to the press must stop” [20].
Yet the effort to close ranks has been undermined by Jupiter himself. Emmanuel Macron undercut his Prime Minister by unexpectedly receiving a delegation of high schoolers on Friday, when the PM was supposed to see them Monday. He has attempted his usual strategy of en même temps (at the same time), simultaneously saying that the protesters’ demands are “legitimate” and that “the general recommendation is that there be no protests at all”. Despite taking center stage, he seems to have very little to say beyond encouraging repression. On the other hand, his absence would certainly be heavily criticized. His personalist brand of politics has made him the incontournable lightning rod of social anger; more protest chants name him than any other politician by a wide margin, and no one really believes the Prime Minister is independent of him. Behind the pretty face and strict marching orders, the movement that shares his name is currently fragmented: two of his former prime ministers, Gabriel Attal and Édouard Philippe, and one formerly allied interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, are running to succeed him. Association with the hated folk demon is a liability and they have taken pains to distance themselves from the president. Will the social movement force the bourgeois bloc to close ranks again?
The social movement has galvanized the left, in particular LFI, who are very popular among students. A few weeks ago, Bally Bagayoko, LFI mayor of Saint-Denis and Pierrefitte, a working-class suburb north of Paris, went viral for standing between students and police, getting tear-gassed in the process. The media and government have undertaken a massive campaign to blame LFI for looting, to the point of reportedly directing intelligence services to lie on reports and blame LFI [21]. The Insoumis’ in-your-face style and reticence to condemn violence by protesters without first couching it in a broader discussion of social and police violence has made hay in the media and the assembly, while the Green Party and Socialists simply say “yes, we condemn violence.” Despite LFI’s love of revolutionary references, they defend nonviolent modes of political action, and there is no evidence linking them to any violence thus far [22]. Despite LFI’s rejection of seizing power by force (it is the “radical” left and not the “far”, “extreme” or “ultra” left), amalgamations between LFI and an amorphous mass of nihilistic anarchists abound, with some on the right demagogically suggesting banning LFI (not likely), while others such as Marine Le Pen set their sights on more realistic targets like the NPA-R (New Anticapitalist Party-Revolutionary) [23]. Regardless of the fact that there is no evidence, the left will have to hold fast to prevent dissolutions of any organizations in the next months. None of this is likely to matter in the first round of the Presidential elections, as LFI is used to “bad optics” and this is hardly the first storm it has weathered. What remains to be seen is if it will drive the second round to Marine Le Pen in the likely scenario of a Mélenchon-Le Pen showdown.
The Greens and small parties of the center left have supported the movement, joining authorized marches and rallies to protect occupying students from the cops, while maintaining their unconditional condemnation of looting and violence. The Socialist Party, on the other hand, has been distant. The recent “social democratic” primary winner Raphael Glucksmann has avoided protests entirely, stating his support for the demands of the movement but mainly focusing on accusing LFI of orchestrating a harassment campaign against him after he was doused in flour by an unknown protester after his primary win. He is seen as a future Macron by LFI and part of the Greens, and would probably rather that all the chaos stop so that reasonable men in suits can resume their media appearances to talk about foreign policy, in particular Ukraine.
Marine Le Pen and the RN had their official congress over the weekend of October 24. Energized by apocalyptic images of burning trash cans and distressed shopkeepers, delegates reelected Jordan Bardella as party president nearly unanimously; he would likely become prime minister should Le Pen win. This came despite recent revelations of extremely antisemitic text messages from his early years in the party [24]. This scandal is also unlikely to affect the first round, as RN voters are hardly known to care much about antisemitism – Marine Le Pen’s father is notorious for his holocaust denial and far right Jewish voters prefer Eric Zemmour’s Reconquête! – but may hurt in the second. August speculation that the relationship between Bardella and Le Pen had soured seems overblown. Le Pen has even taken a broader “right unity” approach, proposing that Bardella would lead a “national unity government” with Ministers from the Gaullist right [25]. In a crowded field of right and center-right candidates, this may prove a tempting way out. Macron, carried to the Presidency by the “republican front” against the far right twice, may end up bringing the far right into power [26].
Few expected a social movement this intense. We must all be grateful to the youth, who’ve reminded us that history never seems like it will move until it does. The cards have all been reshuffled, and political formations are scrambling to capitalize on the moment. The riots show a deep anger and dissatisfaction with the racist order of French capitalism and the undemocratic institutions of the Fifth Republic. Only a Sixth Republic can restore legitimacy to an increasingly dictatorial French state, along with massive purges and reforms of the police, but conservative parts of French society may yet unite around law and order. Regardless, the promises of social progress and pro-business policy, financial deregulation and climate justice that characterized Macronism are dead. It seems likely that from now on, it will be one or the other.
Update: On October 26, two online influencers briefed by the government leaked that concessions were in the works: €1 billion in university funding, 800 secondary- education jobs preserved rather than cut and a stunningly insufficient 15,000 extra spots in public universities (to give all those who want one a spot, we would need around 180,000). The big announcement was a “reworking” of Parcoursup, with its abolition in 2028, as well as a hard cap of 28 students per class starting next fall. Note that next fall is after the presidential election, so Macron is making promises his successor may or may not hold to. The sentiment around me is that these concessions are insufficient and that the mobilization will continue this weekend and on November 5th. On October 31st, we’ll see if we’ll take the treat or keep playing tricks.
Notes
[1] Lecornu, despite having no majority in the Assembly, has not been dislodged, as first the Socialist Party (center left) and then the National Rally (far right) voted against or abstained from voting on motions of no confidence earlier this year.
[3] https://union-etudiante.fr/10mesures/
[4] https://shs.cairn.info/revue-constructif-2024-2-page-30?lang=fr
[5] In the past 10 years, there have been several “overhauls” of the education system, many led by short-lived ministers with a lot of political axes to grind.
[7] A sudden national spotlight has discombobulated their lives; I will therefore refrain from naming them in this piece. For more see https://www.lemonde.fr/campus/article/2026/10/23/etre-un-des-visages-de-la-mobilisation-lycéenne-sur-lesreseaux-sociaux-et-dans-les-medias-une-notoriete-soudaine-a-double-tranchant_6798954_4401467.html
[8] One must always be careful, French polling is notoriously bad. Take numbers with a grain of salt. https://www.tf1info.fr/politique/elections/presidentielle/sondage-lci-pour-qui-veulent-voter-les-jeunes-lors-de-lelection-presidentielle-2027-2471222.html
[11] The yellow vests are a heterogeneous movement, originally created in 2018 to protest against emissions taxes on older cars which mostly belong to poor rural or suburban workers who must drive to move around. Their rapid spread transformed the movement into a broad, populist uprising against austerity and the arrogance of governing elites, demanding higher wages, better public services, and the constitutionalization of the Citizens Initiative Referendum, which would provide a legal mechanism to force a referendum on any subject by petition (this has since become a plank of LFI’s program for a new constitution). The yellow vests had some institutionalization, with a national coordinating committee and even an attempt at running slates in municipal and European elections. Today, that coordinating committee and some of the people who became famous in 2018 have returned to the streets, and the classic tactics of the movement- roadblocks and militant protests aimed at seizing government buildings have been a part of the national uprisings. Beyond this, it is difficult to say if it is really “the same” yellow vests as 2018 or if a new generation has adopted the symbolism of the movement.
[12] The CGT estimated 800,000 protesters, though given the dispersion of many smaller, unauthorized protests and occupations throughout the country- wild marches in cities, round-a-bout occupations and road blockages in the countryside, the number may be higher. The Ministry of Interior estimated 550,000 protesters.
[13] One Yellow Vest chant goes “Emmanuel Macron / Président des Patrons / On va te chercher chez toi! (x2)”, Emmanuel Macron / The bosses’ President / We’re coming to get you at your house! (x2).
[14] This is the widely held view on the original Yellow Vests. As noted in footnote 11, there is not really any sociological research out yet to confirm the new Yellow Vests represent the same groups, though old yellow vest leaders have remained influential.
[15] News media in France is very consolidated and generally controlled by billionaires. Far right channel Cnews is owned by Vincent Bolloré, while the more liberal-Macronist Rodolphe Saadé owns BFMTV. These channels are essentially fonts of invectives against La France Insoumise, ‘black blocs’, ‘islamo-leftists’ and so on. They are extremely popular. Public radio and TV channels have joined the chorus as well, with France Info dedicating nearly all of a 12 minute segment to broken windows, spending only 2 minutes on the demands of the movement. Even more shockingly, on the 25th they broadcast images of property destruction in Tirana (Albania) while discussing the protests in France! They have since apologized, but the lie already made it to those half-listening at prime time. Public perception of the movement may hinge on media hysteria over property damage, which has been mobilized politically against LFI, supposedly the puppetmasters behind all this. It remains to be seen how the less violent night of the 24th will be received in public sentiment.
[16] https://www.vie-publique.fr/discours/305054-gerald-darmanin-20102026-cnews-manifestation-du-17-octobre-2026 and https://blogs.mediapart.fr/leo-pedro/blog/201026/la-criminalite-organisee-appliquee-aux-manifestants-letat-de-droit-endanger
[17] https://www.franceinfo.fr/societe/mobilisation-du-17-octobre/c-est-sans-doute-la-semaine-la-plus-repressive-de-lhistoire-de-la-ve-republique-denonce-l-association-des-avocats-penalistes_8250220.html and https://basta.media/Proces-17-octobre-derriere-les-consignes-fermete-Darmanin-les-vies-brisees-de-gens-ordinairespeines-de-prison
[19] https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2026/10/25/manifestations-du-24-octobre-1-314-personnes-interpellees-danstoute-la-france-annonce-le-ministere-de-l-interieur_6800057_823449.html — It is no news to activists in french cities with large far right street gangs, like Lyon, that they often seem to coordinate with the police and have been filmed running to hide from antifascists behind police lines many times. For reporting on this collusion on October 24 see: https://www.humanite.fr/culture-et-savoir/ultradroite/24-octobre-comment-des-milices-dultradroite-ont-attaque-desmanifestants-sous-loeil-des-policiers
[22] Some may object that the Quentin Deranque affair is a counterexample. Others would reply that public rehabilitation of a Petainist thug who went out looking for a fight is so shameful that they should probably forget this line of argumentation.
[23] They are a more realistic target because of their size and avowed revolutionary belief in seizing state power, but they are not a more politically justified one. I strongly condemn any dissolution of left wing organizations.
[26] The idea that Macron has fuelled the rise of the far right on purpose as a long term political strategy is very popular. Since he is allowed to run for a third, non-consecutive term, he might be hoping that Le Pen will win in 2027 but prove incompetent, corrupt, and unpopular before he sails back into power in 2032 on yet another republican front. I personally think this is a risky and somewhat ridiculous plan, to say the least, but what do mortals know of Jupiter’s mind?
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