France’s Protest Culture Is Out of Control
· The Atlantic
The French protest too much. Over the past two decades, paroxysms of rage, violence, rioting, arson, and looting have regularly seized the nation, imposing enormous costs on civil society. During the 2005 banlieue riots, the deaths of two boys evading police sparked three weeks of severe property destruction and violence. In the years since, pandemonium has broken out over veil bans, the commemoration of NATO’s anniversary, the legalization of same-sex marriage, even the arrival of ridesharing apps.
Today France is once again at the mercy of protesters. Since late last month, student protests have paralyzed the nation’s school system. They began on September 17 at a high school outside Paris, in Créteil, where teachers went on strike over unfilled posts and a lack of funding, and students promptly joined them. This triggered a domino effect, as the sociologist Valérie Becquet called it, in which students across the country demonstrated in solidarity, calling out similar problems in their own schools. Social media supercharged the process; demonstrators have filmed themselves constantly, creating a spectacle of revolt that spreads online and through text chats that they use to mobilize.
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According to Le Monde, nearly a third of France’s 3,700 high schools had been disrupted by October 1, a number that has almost certainly grown. The largest demonstrations so far took place yesterday, extending to 40 cities and drawing an estimated 250,000 participants. My daughter’s junior-high school in Paris has been affected too. “Tensions ran high at times,” read an email from administrators to parents, “particularly due to numerous arson attempts by individuals from outside the school.” Since then, by order of the prefecture, all instruction has stopped.
[Read: The problem with America’s protest feedback loop]
Protesters have demanded more teachers and support staff, smaller classes and improved facilities, and greater parity between poor and wealthy schools. They have also called for the abolition of the Parcoursup, a university-admissions online platform that critics claim reproduces social inequality and imposes undue stress on students. Some of these demands may be valid, but the violence fanning out across France has little to do with pedagogical concerns.
For some time now, there has been an existential crisis at the heart of French life, rooted in a pervasive sense that the future will never equal the past, that the state cannot achieve what its citizens expect. The national pie is often seen as zero-sum, which explains why so many constituencies, from retirees to high schoolers, refuse to give an inch. Their anger accumulates, then it boils over. And the government is either unwilling or unable to contain it.
Five of the videos that have gone viral reveal the nihilistic resentment beneath the pretext of school reform. In the one I can’t get out of my mind, a 15-year-old dressed in a black hoodie, black sweatpants, and mask calmly approaches a woman in Marseille and sprays her face with a makeshift flamethrower, leaving her with first-degree burns. In a scene from Nantes, an inferno fills the lobby of the Nelson Mandela High School, which cost 75 million euros to build in 2014. In the third video, a keffiyeh-clad blond-haired teen in Paris smiles as he explains to a reporter, who has asked about a policewoman being chased and tripped by teenagers, that “the ends justify the means.”
Elsewhere, a masked teen stands atop a car addressing a crowd of euphoric classmates, who hold their smartphones out as if they’re at a concert. He counts the police he sees: “There are only 10 of them,” he screams. “In the name of Allah, we can kill them all!” The crowd erupts in cheers. The fifth clip depicts a large and rapturous group of teens in the Loire Valley, backpacks on and smartphones out, gathered in a circle, rapping the lyrics to “M*R*H.” The song opens with a reference to the Bataclan terror attack in 2015 in which 90 people were killed: “I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid of hell; the pact is intact—who but Allah can stop me? / Bataclan—playing dead, lying flat—I’m gonna pick ’em off one by one.”
The violence hasn’t been limited to one side. Last week, a police officer fired a tear-gas grenade at a teenager’s head, knocking out most of his teeth. More recently, a 15-year-old lost his hand after an officer fired a stun grenade.
Meanwhile, racists and propagandists have been quick to blame the savagery on Islam, accusing unassimilated immigrant populations of undermining French society and Western values. Donald Trump has done the same. “What’s happening in France is nothing less than out of control mass migration. This isn’t about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country!” he posted on Truth Social yesterday. But in reality, the protesters are an extremely diverse coalition. Inside a Catholic church, a group of young white girls also filmed themselves singing “M*R*H.” One could make the case that these mindless acts of rebellion are evidence that immigrant groups have actually assimilated quite well, given France’s long and bloody history of revolt, stretching back through May ’68 to the French Revolution that overthrew the king.
In recent years, France’s protest culture has been indulged and glorified to the point of insanity. This has become a particular problem during Emmanuel Macron’s tenure, which began in 2017. Protests have not only enfeebled his administration but also eroded the political viability of centrism in France. In 2018, the gilets jaunes, or “yellow vests,” led a national revolt ostensibly against fuel taxes that nearly incapacitated Macron’s presidency until the coronavirus pandemic subdued it. In 2023, nationwide demonstrations coupled with indiscriminate violence and mayhem followed the police shooting of a teenage motorist near Paris. That same year saw further street clashes and rioting over disputes surrounding pension reforms and the construction of water reservoirs. In 2024, farmers blocked roadways and damaged government property. Last year, hundreds of thousands of people participated in protests led by the anti-austerity Bloquons Tout movement (“Let’s block everything”).
[Thomas Chatterton Williams: Dystopian fiction becomes reality in France]
The resulting destruction and disarray have been a boon to the far-right National Rally, which appears well positioned to win next year’s presidential election in the spring. In response to the current chaos, its leaders have called for anti-rioter laws and blamed the leftmost party, France Unbowed (LFI), for encouraging the students and lending a physical presence at some of the schools.
Indeed, some on the left have sought to exploit the nihilism convulsing France by spurring it on. On September 28, Bally Bagayoko, the mayor of Saint-Denis and a member of LFI, danced with students while singing the “La Marseillaise” in front of a flaming blockade at the lycée Paul Eluard. The following day, he made his message clear. “La violence, à un moment donné, peut être légitime”: At a certain point, violence can be legitimate.
As an electoral tactic, cynicism might just be working for the LFI. During yesterday’s protests, the aforementioned blond teen in a keffiyeh was filmed kissing the party’s leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, on the side of the head. Mélenchon was beaming.