From The New Yorker · Lauren Collins · · 4m
French students demand schools that work
Hundreds of thousands of French students are blockading schools to protest crumbling buildings, massive class sizes, and staff shortages. The government is scrambling to respond.
In brief
Hundreds of thousands of French students are blockading schools to protest crumbling buildings, massive class sizes, and staff shortages. The government is scrambling to respond. French students have launched a nationwide blockade movement demanding repairs to schools, smaller classes, and more teachers. The…
Two students make their case
Paolina, eighteen, and Violette, seventeen, protested at Place de la République in Paris on Tuesday with signs about education failures. Paolina studies fine arts at Sorbonne Nouvelle; Violette studies communications at Institut Universitaire de Technologie.
The government cut four thousand teaching positions
Violette told a protester that this year the government eliminated four thousand teaching positions. She was citing accurate statistics about the scale of staff cuts affecting French schools.
“This year, the government eliminated four thousand teaching positions”
The movement started at one school
On September seventeenth, students and teachers at Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, a Paris suburb, erected a blockade using trash cans. They were protesting no nurse, no deputy head teacher, leaks, clogged toilets, and un-air-conditioned classrooms.
The blockade spread nationwide
Two weeks after the first blockade, students at some six hundred and forty lycées and thirty universities across forty cities had joined the movement.Adults including parents, teachers, elected officials, and trade unions like the C.G.T.
Police arrested around seven thousand protesters
Around seven thousand protesters, most of them minors, have been arrested. During Tuesday's march alone, officers arrested around two hundred more people than they did on the day the gilets jaunes sacked the Arc de…
Police violence injured children
In northern France, a police officer threw a tear-gas grenade directly into a fourteen-year-old's face and shattered his jaw. Another child picked up a stun grenade that police had launched and lost a hand.
Students' slogans are direct and pointed
Unlike the poetic 1968 student movement, Gen Z protesters use blunt slogans. One reads: Macron, fuck your prof, not ours, a jab at the President's marriage to his former drama teacher.
“MACRON, FUCK YOUR PROF, NOT OURS”
Students are making offensive demands
Sociologist Paolo Stuppia said this movement differs from previous ones by making offensive claims, not just defensive ones.
France has Europe's largest class sizes
Seventy percent of lycée classes in France count more than thirty students, the largest class sizes in Europe.
Most French people support the students
According to a poll commissioned by Le Figaro, some sixty-two percent of French people believe that the students' actions are justified. In Bordeaux, farmers showed up at barricades with breakfast.
Macron's education experience is limited
Emmanuel Macron graduated from a private Catholic high school and attended Lycée Henri-IV.His wife taught at the exclusive Lycée Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague.
Heat and a phone ban sparked action
In June, high schoolers sat for the bac exam amid record-breaking temperatures.In September, a new rule banned phones inside school buildings.
The movement originated in working-class suburbs
The blocus is one of the first major student movements to have originated in the racially diverse, historically working-class suburbs.
Students insist the movement is theirs alone
Kawthar, a junior in Pantin and member of the newly founded Fédération Lycéenne des Quartiers, told me the movement has never been influenced by a political party.
Prestigious schools have now joined in
As the movement widened, students at prestigious, largely white schools in central Paris joined the fight. On Thursday, École Alsacienne, one of the poshest private schools in Paris, was blocked for the first time.
The government made limited concessions
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Lecornu said the state had a duty to take young people seriously and promised to listen to their propositions.He said the police's use of stun grenades would be temporarily suspended.
“We have a duty to take young people seriously”
Students are planning more action
The government's concessions have done little to appease students.By the end of the week, nearly a hundred and fifty schools remained blocked.
The movement is spreading internationally
The movement keeps spreading beyond France. In Italian cities, high-school students have reportedly begun occupying schools with their own slogan: Let's do like in France.
“Let's do like in France”
The essence
French students have launched a nationwide blockade movement demanding repairs to schools, smaller classes, and more teachers. The government has made limited concessions as protests spread.
