Bordeaux, France – France’s student-led protest movement, which generated shocking scenes of violence and destruction and at least partly inspired a wave of similar civil unrest in other parts of Europe, is showing few signs of subsiding.
Hundreds of thousands of protesters turned out in cities across France for the third weekend in a row, despite a massive mobilization of police and security services aimed at preventing rioting and looting that broke out after previous protests. At its peak last weekend, organizers said one million people took to the streets.
A broad coalition of student groups, trade unions and political activists has formed in this movement. While the students who started the protests have specific complaints about the French education system, the protests are taking on a generational form cri de coeur About deteriorating economic prospects and quality of life across Europe.
“Whether we are from the suburbs, the countryside or the big city, we don’t know what future we can imagine for ourselves,” says 17-year-old Parisian Mathis Le Coz Ndzi. “The current government has not managed to give us a clear picture of the future, or the world we are moving into. So we feel completely lost.”
“Will our degrees still be of any value when we are 30, long after we have completed our studies?” the student asks. “We are not prepared for the world to come. The one for which they have prepared us no longer exists.”
Le Koz Ndzi is one of thousands of high-school students who have joined protests in recent weeks demanding more money, more teachers and better educational facilities.
“We have all seen the photos shared by our fellow students restrictionsShowing dilapidated buildings, crumbling classrooms. The conditions under which we are studying are shameful,” says Le Coz Ndzi. There are some big problems at his own school in Paris, he says. But he joined the protest in solidarity with students from other places.
While anger over France’s long-underfunded education system may have been the catalyst for the protests, they have turned into a much broader economic movement.
“Our country is supposedly prosperous, yet wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few. What we are seeing is a deterioration in living and working conditions and a decline in public services,” explains 31-year-old labor lawyer Dianne Derian. rolling stone. “For me, it’s like May ’68. Students started the movement, but ultimately it exposed very deep failings in society, affecting both students and the rest of the population.”
Regardless of the motivations and demands of the protesters, the rioting and looting that accompanied them has drawn the attention of politicians in France.
Bordeaux mayor Thomas Cazenave says, “The demands and complaints of the protesters could not be heard over the sound of destroyed storefronts, looted shelves and burnt infrastructure.”
The intensity and scale of the unrest alarmed the government of President Emmanuel Macron.
Sophie Brocas is the prefect of Gironde, a department in a region of southwestern France known for its beaches and wine, and is no stranger to emergencies. He oversaw the evacuation of residents and tourists in the summer in the wake of the region’s worst wildfire in decades.
Last week, the 65-year-old political appointee – a prefect is a type of unelected governor – oversaw the evacuation of his own official residence in Bordeaux after riotous protesters stormed the building and looted it.
The protesters dispersed only when RAID – an elite French counter-terrorism force – was dispatched to liberate the residence.
“We were overwhelmed for several hours,” says Brockes. Describing the rioters, she says: “I believe their profile is quite diverse. Forty percent are minors, and there are a lot of people who have no criminal record, who are not habitual criminals, but what we call ‘opportunistic criminals.’
She says, “This is looting for personal gain – either for personal gain, to resell, or because some of them just get swept up in the action.”
Bordeaux is one of several cities across France where protests descended into mayhem and chaos, prompting Macron to respond with harsh action. More than 70,000 police, gendarmes and soldiers have now been deployed in an effort to curb the violence.
“Nothing justifies it, nothing explains it, nothing excuses it,” Macron said in a televised address on October 18, after the first major riots broke out in Paris and Marseille. “Tonight, we are all feeling anger and shame.”
Now thousands of protesters and rioters have been arrested, including several deaths. Macron, who has become an increasingly unpopular leader in the final year of his presidency, has resisted declaring a state of emergency – as sought by far-right politicians.
Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally party, declared, “The state has lost control of everything.” Le Pen is widely considered a top contender for the presidential election in May. She vowed that her party would “restore order” if elected to power.
But the elections are still seven months away. For now, Macron’s government is trying to neutralize the protests in the same way that it did gilet johnsOr the “Yellow Vests”, the protests that began in the first year of his presidency: with a combination of concessions, dialogue and a no-nonsense police response.
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu promised to end the controversial university admissions system, increase funding, more teachers and more investment in schools at a meeting with student leaders on Monday. But students say that is not enough and have vowed to continue nationwide protests. Government critics say that although France’s Senate quickly passed a bill aimed at increasing punishment for rioters after the violence, it has not acted with the same urgency on education reforms.
The violence in France has also attracted the attention of American politicians.
“You are destroying your country,” President Donald Trump said, taking aim at Macron.
Trump has tried to link the protests to the upcoming US midterm elections, telling a rally in Kansas that he expected to see similar unrest if Republicans did not win.
“We will not let that happen to this country,” he said, continuing the speech he used for Democrats. “When you see the burning towers and the massive fires in France, just remember this is what the radical democrats want to do to America.”
Trump was referencing the video that became an online viral sensation of the burning spire of the Limoges Town Hall clock tower. While the truth was quite dramatic – the rioters used a battering ram to break down the doors of the town hall before setting the building on fire – many right-wing commentators characterized the spire as a “steeple”, implying that the rioters were burning churches throughout France.
Far-right activists like Elon Musk, who habitually peddles the “Great Replacement” and other white supremacist ideologies, regularly portray Europe as being overwhelmed by Muslim immigrants. As the riots reached their peak, he tried to portray the unrest as a looming sectarian race war, in which hordes of Muslim immigrants were violently eradicating the rapidly diminishing remains of European Christian civilization.
There is a long history of this kind of explicitly racist fear-mongering about barbaric hordes knocking at the doors of Europe, and it dovetails nicely with nativist anti-immigrant populism in the US, but differs in its appearance. Sheet And Palestinian flags – which in many regions have become an almost common symbol of leftist resistance taken out of their original context, like portraits of Che Guevara – there is little evidence to support the idea that the riots in France are motivated by a unifying ideology, Islamist or otherwise.
However, there are signs that the protests and the unrest that accompanied them are manifestations of broader anti-establishment sentiment, which became evident as similar civil unrest spread across a series of European cities over the past two weeks.
In Italy, thousands of people marched in Milan and Rome against rising military spending and the war in Gaza. People rally in Brussels against the rising costs of education in Belgium. In Spain, citizens took to the streets of Madrid and Barcelona to protest against rising housing prices and rents. In Albania, the gathering of students in Tirana against government corruption sparked a series of protests and actions. In Serbia, a nearly two-year-long student-led anti-corruption movement culminated in a victory party with the ouster of Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic in an election on October 25.
Protests began or took new forms in 14 European countries in October. While it’s too early to say whether the movement in France is a harbinger of the spread of the spirit of revolution across the continent, the fact is that almost all of the protests had something in common: They were largely started by Gen-Z students, and they all spilled over into broader grievances about the cost of living.
The war in Ukraine has forced governments across Europe to increase defense spending, starting work on a major rearmament as they contemplate direct conflict with Russia. Meanwhile, the war in Iran has increased global instability and driven up fuel prices around the world, affecting almost every corner of economic activity.
Aurelien Boudon, a 36-year-old vocational high-school teacher in Saint-Denis, a suburb of Paris, is the national secretary togethernessA French federation of trade unions. He says the students he talks to aren’t just complaining about the education system, “they’re also talking about their parents who are no longer able to fill the gas tank or keep the fridge stocked.”
Economic pressures are only exacerbating a general anxiety about the future not felt in decades, with a sense of helplessness now pervasive in most European societies.
“People are asking: What do we have to do to be heard?” Boudon asks. “They feel as if they have tried everything: petitions, demonstrations. Even when large numbers of people mobilize, even when everything happens peacefully – perhaps especially when everything happens peacefully – they are still not heard.”
With few solutions offered by the mainstream political establishment, people look elsewhere for answers. Civil discourse gives way to extremist politics in a kind of ideological parallelism to the protests themselves: often the idealistic and well-intentioned student protesters of the day are conflated with anarchists, thieves and saffron – “Saboteurs” or hooligans of the night.
Because of the culture wars and engineered social media outrage, it is unclear whether in France or the US, reactionary and revolutionary politics generate heat through the same economic friction.
In many of the world’s wealthiest countries, life for most people – especially young people – is getting worse. And no one at the top seems able or willing to do anything about it.