Students shut down French high schools in the face of class and racial oppression

By Kevin B. Anderson

Published 18 October, 2026

First published at MROnline.

Beginning in the marginalized banlieues, France’s high school revolt has become national in scope, taking on economic and racial oppression as well as police brutality.

By October 13, the high school protest movement in France had mushroomed, prompting up to half a million people to take to the streets across the country. On that day, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg made a solidarity visit to one of the high schools where it all started, Lycée Paul Eluard, in the impoverished Paris banlieue (suburb) of Saint-Denis. Thunberg intoned that “the whole world is watching” and that it is “proud of the French students.”1 With a two-week school vacation beginning on October 16, it remains to be seen if this remarkable movement, which has already lasted over three weeks, will be able to continue. Nevertheless, a new challenge from the left, and from the youngest of the youth, has been hurled at a racialized capitalist system which in France, as in so many other places, is moving in the direction of outright neofascism.

Some three years ago, France experienced another nationwide uprising across its impoverished and ethnically oppressed banlieues and poorer city neighborhoods. On June 27, 2023, police gunned down Nahel Merzouk, a seventeen-year-old of Algerian descent who had refused to stop for questioning. As Nahel lay dead, the banlieues and other marginalized communities exploded, with teens and preteens in the lead. By the time the dust had settled five days later, 250 police stations and outposts had been attacked, 700 police injured, much property had been destroyed, and 3,000 youths had been arrested, many of them to be prosecuted mercilessly and jailed. For the French dominant classes, the mainstream media, the politicians, and the trade union bureaucrats, 2023 was seen as an irrational outburst of little long-term political or social import, something to be swept under the rug and forgotten. Little or nothing was done to address the underlying issues, least of all the country’s rampant police brutality and racial profiling.

In some ways, the September–October 2026 youth uprising has been a repeat of 2023. The communities where the current uprising originated are essentially the same as in 2023, and confrontations with the police, or rather vicious police violence against the youth, show that little has changed. The dominant rhetoric among politicians and the corporate media continues to characterize those in revolt as “savages” and the like.

But 2026 is more than a larger version of 2023. First, this year’s uprising’s size, scope, and staying power have been greater. In the first week, it spread across high schools in poor and marginalized areas of the Paris region. As it did so, it became no longer only a spontaneous revolt, but also a movement making very concrete demands.

Second, it has also spread from the banlieues and poorer city districts to more advantaged, even privileged high schools. It also involved parents, university students, and trade unions. All of this has helped break down the isolation of the banlieues, even if only for a time. Moreover, it has put into action the kinds of social forces that, if acting together, could really uproot the system.

Third, partly as a result of these wider solidarities, the movement has been more organized and more political, and has expressed clear and comprehensive demands. This was facilitated by the fact that the uprising was centered in the schools, a more structured venue than an urban community, making its participants, even in the banlieues, less isolated and less vulnerable to demonization as street thugs, “savages,” and so on.

Fourth, a greater number of key political figures have openly backed the youth than in 2023.

Finally, all this has forced the center-right government to make a few small concessions, even though its main response has been demonization and repression.

Because of these wider valences, 2026 is sometimes compared — both in the French media and globally — to the mass student-worker uprisings that were the high-water mark of the revolutionary year 1968, when ten million workers went on strike in the wake of university and workplace occupations. The comparison is surely an exaggeration. Nonetheless, 2026 is indeed a sign of wide and deep unrest of a type that cannot easily be contained by political regimes—like that of the neoliberal Emmanuel Macron in France—that represent a capitalism of austerity and whose support is plummeting. For the two sides of that conjuncture are a surge toward new leftwing political parties like La France Insoumise (LFI), and on the other side, toward the neofascist Rassemblement National (RN).

How the 2026 revolt unfolded

On Friday, September 18, students at Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, a Paris banlieue, began to demonstrate at their school, soon after their return to classes after the summer break, and following a one-day teachers’ strike. This took place after climate change and massive wildfires had led to an unbearable summer across the country. Students experienced classrooms without air conditioning, in intolerable heat. In addition, classes were too large, school days too long, teachers missing due to lack of replacement hires, and buildings dilapidated. Even toilet paper was sometimes missing. An online student survey carried out by the government amid the ensuing protests found that school days as long as 8:00 am to 6:00 PM were one of the principal complaints, especially given climate change and lack of air conditioning.

By the week of September 28, the mobilizations spread across the Paris region and then France as a whole. By Friday, October 2, protests had burst out in over a thousand high schools, with some two hundred being blockaded by students. Violence against property took place in a few locations, with a small fire set at Lycée Rosa Parks in Nantes in northwest France, to take one example. This was seized upon by the center-right government and the far right to brand the students as “savages,” rhetoric in turn used to justify the harsh police response.

While the movement began and was most active in the banlieues and poorer urban districts, encompassing both trade schools and academic high schools, it became truly national and multi-class very quickly. For example, students at the prestigious Lycée Henri IV in a wealthy area of Paris — whose alumni include Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and President Macron himself — also went on strike, hanging a banner that read “Solidarity with the high schools.”2 As journalists for Le Monde observed, “Some mobilized out of necessity, others rather from solidarity.”3

In a number of extensively reported cases, police brutalized young students, among them a fifteen-year-old boy whose hand was torn off by a police “stun grenade.” This device is severely restricted or banned outright in many other European countries. After two weeks, the police announced that they had detained at least briefly some 6,877 people, 86 percent of them minors. Clearly, the goal of such a wide dragnet was to use fear to discourage participation.4

Still wider solidarities emerged on October 6, when hundreds of thousands, perhaps even half a million people, took to the streets across France in support of the high schoolers. Some were university students and other older adults, many of whom wore white armbands as a sign that they were there to protect the country’s youth from the police — if necessary, by interposing themselves. Parents and other adults were doing the same outside many high schools. In Saint-Denis, another marginalized Paris suburb, Mayor Bally Bagayoko, a Black activist recently elected as a candidate for LFI, joined student demonstrators in an attempt to shield them from police attack.

At universities, including the prestigious Sciences Po in Paris, where Palestine solidarity demonstrations over the past few years have faced surveillance and repression, students also engaged in solidarity actions. After taking over a nearby street, however, Sciences Po students were beaten back by a violent police attack.

Grievances and demands

Almost everywhere, students mentioned a multiplicity of issues. In Lille, seventeen-year-old Fanny (who prudently wanted to be quoted only by her first name) singled out “bad conditions in which to study, overcrowded classrooms, and buildings in need of repair.” But Fanny also went deeper, calling out “the climate catastrophe, artificial intelligence that is gobbling up jobs, and the risk that the RN will win the elections,” referring to Marine Le Pen’s neofascist party.5

On October 8, a declaration from the Coordination Antifasciste also noted the “carceral atmosphere in the high schools.”

Others referred to racial and ethnic exclusion and oppression. An in-depth account of the protests in the Paris banlieue of Saint-Denis was published by Christophe Ayad, a journalist who has long distinguished himself by his coverage of both Middle East conflicts and France’s immigrant communities. As Ayad reported, student speakers at an October 4 rally asked, “Why do we have fewer chances than those from Paris?” Others declared, “There is a segregation dividing Paris and the suburbs due to Parcoursup” — a much-criticized online university selection system — “which is totally arbitrary. These inequalities are not normal!” Student speakers also decried media narratives that separated the banlieues from the rest of Paris and demonized banlieue students of color as the source of all violence: “There are the whites on one side, the Blacks and the Arabs on the other,” one said, adding, “When a student is non-white, police violence increases tenfold.” Other student protestors noted anti-Muslim discrimination: “Muslims are treated as enemies.” Still others raised wider, more political slogans, like support for Palestine. While expressing deep alienation, the students also referred to themselves as “the new France,” thus pointing to the more multiethnic and inclusive future society they envision. Mayor Bagayoko received huge applause when he told a crowd, “You honor the Republic; you honor its values; your demands are legitimate.”6

Everywhere, the slogans reflected the anger, but also the imagination and verve, of a new generation. Referring to the militarized CRS riot police, students chanted, “You were sent an SOS and we received your CRS.” Adopting directly — and in English — a slogan associated with US Black Lives Matter movement, others chanted “ACAB” (All cops are bastards). One handmade sign read “ACAB” and “July 1830,” referring to the revolution that ended Restoration attempts re-establish France’s absolute monarchy.7

What has been achieved

While the specific gains so far are very small, promises to hire three thousand teachers and to suspend layoffs of teachers, this movement’s mere existence and persistence is itself a kind of victory in the face the far-right surge that has been gripping Western Europe, including France. This is particularly significant at a time when both social media and traditional TV and other mass media are increasingly under the control of rightwing oligarchs. The militancy and creativity of the youth have broken through those barriers, just as they have of late in India with the Cockroach Janta Party.

The fact that such a militant and large-scale movement took place not in the Global South, but in Western Europe, illustrates the truly international scope of the struggle for human emancipation today.

The French high school uprising of 2026 also shows, in a most dramatic manner, that the ballot box is far from the only way to enact social change, or at least to put it on the agenda. Taking to the streets and occupying key institutions is also a model, and a more radical one.

Finally, the French youth revolt of 2026 has crossed barriers of race and class that have so often been used by dominant classes, from the days of slavery to today’s racialized capitalism, to keep oppressed sectors apart from each other and from critical intellectuals, thwarting the kind of cross-fertilization that is needed to truly challenge the system. What we have witnessed in France this year is not only an agenda of “unite and fight.” What has emerged is a movement in which the most oppressed sectors of society — youth of color, descendants of immigrants, and children of the working class — have taken the lead.

• 1

  Charlotte Bozonet et al., “Mouvement lycéen,” Le Monde, October 14, 2026.

• 2

  Arthur Carpentier et al., “Le mouvement lycéen s’étend en France,” Le Monde, October 3, 2026.

• 3

  Rémi Ducasse et al., “Nous, on ne veut rien casser, on veut se faire écouter,” Le Monde, October 7, 2026.

• 4

  “Lycéens: ce que nous dit le recours massif à la garde vue,” editorial, Le Monde, October 12, 2026).

• 5

  Carpentier et al., “Le mouvement lycéen s’étend en France.”

• 6

  Christophe Ayad, “Dans les quartiers populaires, un mouvement lycéen très politisé, accompagné, mais pas manipulé,” Le Monde, October 7, 2026.

• 7

  Lorraine de Foucher et al., “Les lycéens maintiennent la pression dans la rue,” Le Monde, October 10, 2026.

 

Student uprising in France: An interview with Basile Copin from La France Insoumise Youth

By Basile Copin & Amandla! Collective

Published 18 October, 2026

First published at Amandla!.

Basile Copin is a law student at Nanterre University and co-organiser of the “Jeunes Insoumis” (La France Insoumise Youth Group) of Pantin and Aubervilliers- Seine Saint Denis. 

There are reports that this is a movement from below, originating in working-class high schools in the Paris suburbs. Is that correct? How did it start? What sparked it?

In Hexagonal France, secondary-school students have been mobilising since 18 September to protest against the lack of resources in the national education system, which prevents them from pursuing their studies properly and looking to the future with confidence. The first mobilisation took place in Créteil, following a teachers’ strike at Saint-Exupéry secondary school. Very quickly, many other schools across the country followed suit, particularly in the poorest areas, such as Seine-Saint-Denis.

Protests had already broken out earlier in the overseas territories (Mayotte, French Guiana, the Antilles, etc.), but they had been ignored — there was no mention in the media, which now claims that the protests began in September. The erosion of the national education system, and of public services more generally, affects residents of the overseas territories more severely. They have less money to live on, problems accessing essential services such as water, inadequate infrastructure and greater social inequalities: unemployment is two to three times higher than in metropolitan France. They are also more severely affected by climate change. One of the main triggers is the increasing impoverishment of families living in areas that already lack the resources needed to guarantee decent living conditions.

How did it spread and become a national protest movement?

Through social media, many Parisian secondary schools joined the movement ‘in solidarity with the 93’. This refers to the department of Seine-Saint-Denis, a largely working-class area in the northeastern suburbs of Paris where blockades have been particularly widespread. The movement then spread throughout the country. Many other movements quickly expressed their support for the secondary-school students, beginning with university students, who had already mobilised at the start of the month to protest against the risk of universities being privatised.

In my view, media coverage and government repression raised awareness among some people who had traditionally shown little solidarity with young people from working-class neighbourhoods. Many university campuses were closed, including institutions that have historically been reluctant to protest, such as the private Institut Catholique de Paris. Better-resourced Parisian secondary schools, including some private ones, also organised blockades. Public-sector trade unions, including those representing teachers and firefighters, also joined the movement. The firefighters had mobilised at the same time after having had to confront months of record summer heat and fires with ever fewer resources. Former prime minister Gabriel Attal had notably cancelled an order for two new Canadair firefighting aircraft.

This is therefore an unprecedented mobilisation, bringing together a wide range of people exasperated by the deterioration of French public services. A major Yellow Vests mobilisation has also been called for 17 October.

What are the demands of the movement and are they evolving as the protest grows?

There are a wide range of demands, but most concern the underfunding of national education and public services, a consequence of the accelerating liberalisation of the country over several decades. Secondary schools have suffered funding cuts for several years. Urgent repairs cannot be carried out, particularly in the poorest areas on the outskirts of Paris. Buildings are poorly insulated (making indoor temperatures almost unbearable in summer and winter), and there are either not enough toilets, or they are not always available.

Where the uprisings began, secondary-school students are demanding the resources they need to study in decent conditions, particularly the effective replacement of teachers who are absent. In the vast majority of secondary schools, most pupils are missing at least one teacher because of inadequate staffing. Even when teachers are absent for long periods (as much as several months), they are not replaced, except in the years leading up to examinations. Teachers are only recruited from within their own educational district, which means that sometimes there are fewer applicants than vacancies. In Seine-Saint-Denis, a pupil loses an average of between 12 and 18 months of learning over the course of their schooling; that’s above the average for French pupils. Because of the increasing impoverishment of society, nearly one in four children have to skip at least one meal a day. School meals are supposed to be affordable, but the dilapidated state of schools in the suburbs makes these meals unfit to eat, with food sometimes contaminated by parasites or insects.

Access to water is also a very important demand because a considerable number of schools, especially in overseas territories, lack access to drinking water. Some schools are even contaminated, with faecal matter found in tap water. Finally, students are demanding decent premises: for example, many secondary schools and universities have mould in their buildings, which is extremely dangerous for respiratory health; cracked ceilings collapse onto pupils or staff; there are sometimes rats; and prefabricated classrooms intended as temporary solutions have remained in place for 20 years. University students are also demanding more affordable access to housing.

How is it organised? There are always challenges for such movements, with tension between horizontal and vertical forms of organising. Is a form of national organisation emerging or is this still a collection of local organisations?

What is notable about the emergence of this movement is that it was organised by the secondary-school students themselves. They organised independently and succeeded in coordinating their actions. Some, after ending their own blockade, went to support students at neighbouring schools or in nearby towns.

This large-scale mobilisation naturally drew organisations and trade unions into the struggle, while ensuring that they did not impose a top-down organisational structure. Social media also enabled young people throughout France to come together and create large-scale movements nationally, rather than limiting mobilisation to the local level. For example, a call to ‘retake the Bastille’ emerged on social media, leading to one of the largest gatherings on Thursday 8 October. This is a reference to the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, during the French Revolution, commemorated on France’s national day.

There are some suggestions that this is broader than just about issues of schools; it is a mobilisation also against the rise of the right – a youth response to that, in the light of elections coming next year. How far is that the case?

Beyond demands relating to education, the movement has also taken a stand against neoliberal and far-right policies. This is not surprising when one considers that the parties supporting President Macron have voted together with France’s largest far-right party, the Rassemblement National (RN), on as many as 86% of its measures in the National Assembly. Many slogans have been heard, including ‘Everybody hates the RN’, ‘Youth says fuck the National Front’ (the RN’s former name), and the Italian slogan ‘Siamo tutti antifascisti’ (‘We are all anti-fascists’), making clear that young people reject reactionary policies. Record youth participation is anticipated in the next presidential election, and nearly one young voter in two is considering voting for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the candidate of France’s radical left.

There’s a lot of violence against the protestors, with reports of 215 students and 85 teachers badly injured. How are the students responding to this?

Unfortunately, the number of abuses committed against secondary-school students has increased dramatically since you asked your question. This unjustified violence has deepened the already widespread distrust of the police and other public institutions. Many elected representatives of La France Insoumise (LFI), the movement represented by Jean-Luc Mélenchon in presidential elections, have supported young people facing violence. They have even gone as far as to intervene directly against the police, as the mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, did. He and other elected representatives have also been roughly treated by the police.

Reactions have varied: some young people are terrified of an institution that is supposed to protect them but instead chooses to repress them, while a whole section of the population is outraged. They include elected members of the radical left, but also parents, teachers and lawyers mobilising to defend the children.

There are reports that university students, parents, and also workers are becoming mobilised. To what extent is this true?

Large numbers of activists, parents and workers have mobilised alongside the young people. Some have formed human chains in front of the pupils to act as a barrier against the security forces. This is very important: the mobilisation has grown and is supported by a much broader section of the population than university and secondary-school students alone.

This unprecedented mobilisation presents an opportunity to put intersectionality and the convergence of struggles and demands across society into practice, as people express concern about the country’s future. Although many elected representatives and trade unions are present alongside the young people, they leave the young people at the front of the demonstrations, to emphasise the desire for change expressed by Gen Z and those who are even younger.

We have heard that, unlike other youth uprisings (including ours here in 2015), political party representatives are being welcomed rather than being treated with suspicion as opportunists. Is that the case? If so, why?

Many movements and political parties have joined the movement, but it is important to distinguish between them on the basis of what they say and what they do. The vast majority of parties that have joined are on the Left or identified with the Left. But there are significant differences in how they act. On one side are movements such as La France Insoumise, whose elected representatives have put themselves on the front line to protect young protesters from police violence. This movement is committed to responding to secondary-school students’ demands and investing heavily in education. As a result, its representatives and activists are welcomed by secondary-school students and young people.

On the other side is a significant section of ‘social democracy’, represented in particular by the Socialist Party, which has long demonstrated that it is neither social nor democratic. Its elected representatives promise support for young people in struggle, but their record when in power paradoxically demonstrates the opposite. Former president François Hollande, from the Socialist Party, was responsible for the largest cuts to funding for French public schools (before Emmanuel Macron) and facilitated Macron’s rise to power by appointing him economy minister. The right and far right have not even deigned to pretend to listen to the young people, preferring to call them ‘thugs’ and ‘layabouts’ on television. There is therefore only one bulwark left against the destruction of public education in France, which is why the radical left enjoys so much support among young people today.

Of course, as activists from far away, as soon as we hear of a student uprising in France, we think of May 68. We are probably dreaming. To what extent is there any resemblance?

There are strong parallels with the events of May 1968. Although the current movement has not yet reached the scale of that uprising, it is one of the largest youth mobilisations since then. The French government has expressed fears about the movement continuing, and some people are describing the days ahead as ‘the return of the Yellow Vests’, the mass movement that brought the country to a standstill in 2018 and 2019, with a first mobilisation planned for 17 October

It is encouraging to see that France’s young people still recognise that the French people are revolutionary by nature and have always known how to rise up when those in power take away their rights. Today, Gen Z and those who follow must decide: would they prefer to continue with a neoliberal system that is preparing to put the far right in power in 2027? Or are they ready to break with the logic of dismantling public services by rebuilding a new, more egalitarian society through the creation of a Sixth Republic, as advocated by La France Insoumise and Jean-Luc Mélenchon?