French police have arrested 4,400 people, the vast majority of them minors, in a little over a week of student protests, according to the Guardian columnist Alexander Hurst, who reported from the demonstrations in Paris and other cities. The total is almost half the number of arrests recorded during the months of gilets jaunes unrest.
Three teenagers have sustained severe injuries from police munitions, Hurst reported: a 16-year-old has lost the use of an eye, a 15-year-old has lost a hand and a 14-year-old has a broken jaw. Hundreds of others have been hurt in some way.
The protests began as high-school walkouts and campus blockades. In Seine-Saint-Denis, pupils at the Lycée Paul Éluard were among the first to set up blockades outside their school, Hurst wrote. Police responded with charges and teargas.
Hurst argued that answering adolescents who say the state is failing to uphold their right to an education with riot police shows a government that has “lost the plot”. Readers outside France, he wrote, may have spent the past week assuming the unrest reflected a national tradition of insurrection rather than the conditions that provoked it.
Falling standards and missing teachers
According to Hurst, France’s education system ranks 27th in the most recent OECD education rankings, and its schools face collapsing ceilings, rats in classrooms and, at one school in Bagnolet, no drinkable water.
He reported that the average number of students per class has risen from 27 in 2010 to more than 30 today, and that half of primary and high schools began the school year without enough teachers, many of them with no substitutes or replacements.
Julie, a 34-year-old teacher who joined the demonstrations, told Hurst that staff shortages stemmed from “low salaries and poor treatment”. She commutes one hour and 45 minutes in each direction between Paris and the school on the city’s outskirts where she took a post last year after changing careers, earning €2,100 (£1,780) a month plus some overtime.
Teachers’ salaries in France stand at 56% of those in Germany, Hurst wrote, even as more than €200bn in public subsidies goes annually to businesses.
‘Trash cans can’t feel anything’
Fatoumata Sylla Wague, 17, in her final year at the Lycée Paul Éluard in Seine-Saint-Denis, told Hurst that pupils objected to the destruction as well as the conditions. “Sure some people were burning trash cans,” she said. “But trash cans can’t feel anything.” She and her fellow students felt the teargas police fired in response, Hurst wrote.
Fatoumata described conditions inside her school as “unlivable” — extreme heat and extreme cold, mould-covered walls, electricity cuts and often not enough tables or chairs for everyone. She told Hurst she would rather have been in class than braving riot police, but felt compelled to take part in a historical moment she compared to May 1968.
“If I’m fighting for our rights today, it’s because I really want to teach, but in good conditions,” she said. “And so this is for the next generation of students and teachers.”
Fatoumata also told Hurst she worries about the rise of far-right political movements in France and elsewhere. Research published in The Lancet in 2021 found that 75% of French 16-to-25-year-olds showed signs of eco-anxiety, with respondents telling researchers they were “frightened” about the future. Hurst added that students and young workers in France and beyond dislike AI and feel pessimistic about the future it portends.
Policing and policy
Hurst wrote that successive French governments have addressed problems in the country’s most troubled urban areas with heavy-handed policing that frequently targets young people through random checks he described as personally degrading. Centralised policymaking, he added, has produced a national education system that often sends its least experienced teachers to those same areas while granting senior teachers priority when requesting transfers to easier schools.
Rightwing politicians have responded to the protests by calling for harsher sentences and more law and order, according to Hurst, who argued the problem would not be solved with more police and more batons. He said a future far-right government of the kind Fatoumata fears would almost certainly intensify such tensions.
At Paris’s Place de la République on Tuesday, Hurst saw a sign that read: “On n’est pas mal éduqué, on n’est pas écouté” — “We’re not poorly educated, we’re just not being listened to.” He wrote that the response so far signals a government that does not truly want to listen, and a society that does not really claim these places, or these teenagers, as its own.
Facilities ‘made the community feel more respected’
Hurst reported that responding to the crisis will require tangible action, including upgrading dilapidated facilities. Arnaud Richards, 50, head of student services at Iqbal Masih middle school in Saint-Denis, cited the example of the Gabriel Péri technical high school in an extremely poor area, which reopened in 2022 after a full reconstruction.
The rebuild led to a calmer climate for students and teachers, Richards told Hurst. “Having the school itself be a beautiful place made the community feel more respected,” he said, adding that it created a calmer environment for pupils and staff.
Hurst wrote that better buildings alone are not a sufficient answer, and that appearing at ribbon-cuttings for new construction or renovations does not amount to listening. During Emmanuel Macron’s decade in power, he said, the government has repeatedly failed to listen in a way that makes people feel deeply seen and heard.
“Honestly, I don’t think the government cares, they just want to shut us up with false promises,” Fatoumata said. “We know nothing will change, because the government doesn’t listen to us.”
Of the difficulties facing France, Hurst concluded that this underlying absence of a feeling of “togetherness” — the sense that nobody is really listening — will prove the hardest to resolve.
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