Student union calls package ‘crumbs’; national strike set for 5 November
French students won their first government concessions Monday after more than a month of demonstrations that have drawn hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets. The package includes $4.45bn in government loans for the renovation of rundown buildings, more university spaces, more teachers and other administrative changes. A spokesperson for l’Union Étudiante, a national university student union, called the package “crumbs” and vowed to keep fighting; more actions are scheduled for 31 October, with a national strike called for 5 November.
The movement, known as the mouvement lycéen, began in mid-September, when students in metropolitan France mobilized against poor conditions in public high schools. It has spread from a single campus in a Parisian suburb to include high schoolers and university students nationwide, with public sector workers, climate activists, labor unions and everyday people joining in solidarity. The unifying concerns center on the climbing costs of daily life, shrinking funds for social services and general anxiety about the future.
Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets on two consecutive weekends: on 17 October, when a day of largely peaceful gatherings ended in looting and vandalism, and on 24 October, when the state met the movement with aggressive policing and protest bans intended to keep people at home. More than 35,000 people protested in Toulouse on 24 October. Curfews, teargas and sweeping arrests have not deterred the students.
In an analysis published Thursday, the Guardian examined what the French movement’s organizing offers US activists, drawing on historians, labor-studies scholars and student movement specialists. “There’s this idea, very deeply rooted in France, that expressing yourself by demonstrating is a democratic right,” said Quentin Deluermoz, a historian at the University of Cambridge and Université Paris Cité who studies social movements. “When something truly problematic is felt on a large scale, people will demonstrate to make their voices heard and demand a change or adjustment in policy.”
While fundamental structural differences between France and the US complicate easy comparisons, the French student movement is nonetheless, the Guardian wrote, a useful reminder of what makes demonstrations powerful on both sides of the Atlantic.
Union infrastructure underpins the movement. French unions provide organizing power within the public sector, calling strikes, filing the paperwork that makes them legal, consolidating worker demands and negotiating with the state. The right to strike, enshrined in the constitution, belongs to individuals: once a work stoppage is called, anyone can join it, whether unionized or not, and workers who follow protocol generally cannot be fired for walking off the job, though they do lose pay.
The US offers no comparable protection. “Going on strike is a very risky activity,” said Eric Blanc, an assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers and author of the Labor Politics Substack. “If you have to pay rent and make sure your kids have food next week, you’re going to think twice about taking action even if you know it could benefit you.”
The US has nonetheless seen what an effective action can look like, namely the 2018 teachers’ strikes that spread from West Virginia to Kentucky and Arizona. By walking out of their classrooms for more than a week, public school educators “created a crisis” that forced politicians to pay attention, Blanc said, and they did so knowing it would spark anger at either the state or the teachers. The teachers, he said, “were really conscious about winning over parents and community members”: they rallied bus drivers, custodians and other support staff, coordinated childcare at local community centers and food donations for families affected by missed school meals. The West Virginia strike “broke with the rules and practice and went straight to the [state] capitol to demand more money”, in Blanc’s account, and ultimately won a 5% pay raise for all public sector employees in the state.
The French protests have drawn a broad coalition without diluting demonstrators’ demands. The gilets jaunes, or yellow vests, a leaderless movement that came together in 2018 to protest fuel-tax increases and eventually the cost of living, set the date for the 17 October action in early September; after the student movement took off, it posted a call on its website inviting “Gen Z, Indignés [anti-austerity activists], farmers, firefighters, workers, teachers, healthcare workers, climate activists, residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods and retirees” to join. Unions then called protests on the same day. In Paris on 24 October, multiple groups merged into one march, along one route. “It wasn’t just the numbers that mattered – it’s that we had a single demonstration with everyone,” said Robi Morder, a jurist and political scientist specializing in student movements.
That solidarity is important for the students because it lends legitimacy to a more vulnerable group and because workers have leverage high schoolers lack. Students have their own unions and representation in talks with the government, but their walkouts do not carry the legal standing of workers’ strikes; when the lycéens boycott their classes, Morder said, it “doesn’t bother anyone except the high school students, since stopping work isn’t like in a factory”. “We have to be very strong and very numerous, that’s the idea: strength in unity,” he said. Teachers’ unions have already organized walkouts in support of the students, and a general strike is coming next week.
Earlier this month, the students drew up a list of 10 emergency measures, including the need for “clean and functional sanitary facilities”, staffed classrooms and buildings adapted to extreme heat and cold. “What’s happening in the high schools is the same situation as in the hospitals and in all the public services,” Deluermoz said. Blanc said mobilizing around grievances that are “really widely and deeply felt” tends to be a productive avenue for organizing. “One of the exciting things about the French movement is that it’s focusing on these core issues of economic redistribution,” he said. “It’s oriented not just to making the point, but towards winning something” — which, he said, “necessarily obliges a higher degree of sustained participation”.
The Guardian also pointed to US examples of the same dynamic at the local level: in Minneapolis this winter, unions, community leaders, mutual aid networks and everyday people pulled together to push back against ICE, and in Cascade Locks, Oregon, voters banded together to recall their elected officials and cancel plans for the construction of a datacenter. Dana R. Fisher, a professor and director of the Center for Environment, Community and Equity at American University, said US protests generating immediate effects tend to revolve around specific community threats at the state and local levels, often catalyzed by “a moral shock”, she said: “Someone murdered by ICE, families being targeted at schools by immigration agents.”
The analysis contrasts that with recent large-scale US protests at the national level, which, the Guardian wrote, “have often been less about making demands and more about voicing dissent”, citing No Kings as an example. No Kings, the analysis noted, may mobilize parts of the population not previously involved in activism, but its most immediate impact is showing that many people are upset — in this case, about authoritarianism. Social media, it notes, has played a central role in the French mobilization: while several experts said organizing via social media can prove difficult and ephemeral in the long term, it undeniably catalyzes people to get out into the street. The Guardian cited the Black Lives Matter movement, which sprang from a Facebook post in 2013 after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager in Florida, and has leveraged social media as an organizing tool ever since, and noted that footage of George Floyd’s murder shared in May 2020 triggered protests against racially motivated police brutality around the world. In France and now beyond, the footage of young people in the streets, Morder said, has created “solidarity among young people”: “They recognize each other; they face more or less the same problems.”
The Guardian reported that law enforcement has responded with a heavy hand more or less since the lycéen movement began, using military-grade weapons that have cost teenagers eyes, hands and teeth. Deluermoz described a “war of images” online, with protesters and some media circulating “shocking scenes of police violence inflicted on people under 18, with very childlike faces”. The government, he said, has countered by advancing the narrative “of the casseur, of looters, to give the impression of anarchy and justify a use of force that legal experts … consider disproportionate”.
While photos of shattered Parisian storefronts and Limoges’s flaming city hall may have consumed international headlines, the Guardian reported, a different scene played out on social media, where teens filmed viral dances and “aura battles” (a trend in which two people face off in competing displays of charisma) in front of police. The injection of meme culture into the manifs, the analysis noted, draws a line under the inherent absurdity of riot police facing off against kids who are asking for more chairs in their classrooms, and reflects a gen Z-specific sense of humor that translates across borders. The phrase “bismillah, c’est les ténèbres” entered the lexicon in early October when a screenshot from Snapchat circulated online, apparently showing a request to access an organizer group. “Hi, in the name of God, it’s the darkness. When’s the blockade, wallah, bro?” the message said, followed by a string of Algerian flag emojis, according to Al Jazeera. Students quickly blamed undercover cops, reading the nonsensical mashup of Arabic and French slang as an example of racial stereotyping by police, and co-opted the line as a slogan that has now popped up on protest signs in France as well as Belgium and Italy.
The Guardian noted that none of this guarantees the students will get their way: France faces a dire budget crisis and is poised to elect a new president next spring, with candidates on both sides of the political spectrum spinning the protests to serve their own agendas. The movement has nonetheless surfaced popular concerns that apply not only across France but around the world. “There’s something deeper at play here,” Morder said. “It’s seeping into society. We see reactions here from adults, parents, grandparents, employees, who say: ‘We’re very proud of the young people, because they’re moving, they’re acting.’”