FRANCE: STUDENTS TAKE TO THE STREETS
GENERATION Z REFUSES THE PRESENT AND FUTURE IMPOSED UPON US
Since 21 September, a wave of student school occupations and demonstrations has been sweeping across France. What began at a lycée in Créteil, in the suburbs of Paris, has, in less than two weeks, grown into a mass mobilisation involving thousands of students.
Students are taking to the streets and clashing with the state’s police forces because they know firsthand what the dismantling of public education means: classrooms with more than 30 students, relentless and gruelling examinations, teacher shortages, absent teachers who are never replaced, inadequate and neglected facilities, exhausting timetables, and an everyday reality that makes education increasingly difficult to access.
At the heart of their demands are large-scale teacher recruitment, smaller classes, humane timetables, and schools provided with the resources and infrastructure they actually need.
On 29 September, the student mobilisation converged with a major nationwide public-sector strike and workers’ demonstrations. From that point onwards, the struggle took on a new dimension. Occupations and school blockades spread from the suburbs of Paris to cities across the country. More than 1,000 lycées have already been affected by the mobilisations, with more recent figures putting the number of schools drawn into the movement at over 1,200.
And as the mobilisation grows, so does the repression.
Arrests have now exceeded 5,000, the majority of those detained being teenagers, while dozens of people have been injured. Students, teachers and other demonstrators are among those arrested and injured. Police repression has become an everyday feature of the mobilisations.
At the same time, the government is attempting to frame the protests primarily as a matter of “public order”. But behind the clashes lies a deeper social reality: a generation watching its schools deteriorate and its future being destroyed. Generation Z is pushing back against a social order that breeds despair — a life of mechanical repetition, endless constraints and imposed obligations.
And this is inseparable from the broader political agenda being pursued. France’s 2027 budget provides for €43 billion in additional cuts, bringing the overall fiscal consolidation programme to €54 billion. At the same time, measures are being introduced that place a heavier burden on workers while restricting public expenditure. The assault on public education is part of a wider assault on social needs.
And when a state resorts to deploying police forces on a massive scale against the teenagers living under its jurisdiction, it exposes an economic and political system that has failed catastrophically.
That is why the students’ struggle is about more than schools.
It concerns every one of us, everywhere in the world.
The students occupying their schools are not waiting for anyone to explain why they should learn to accept degradation and exclusion. Every day, they see what it means to grow up in a society where their needs are constantly pushed aside.
And they are fighting back.
The spontaneous confrontation between young people and authority carries a profound social significance: when a generation feels that its present is being stolen and that it is being denied a future worth living, revolt becomes the only path towards a better life.
And this confrontation does not appear to be over.
Following their meeting with the Minister of Education, student organisations have denounced the absence of concrete commitments or measures addressing their demands and have called for the mobilisations and school occupations to continue in the coming days.
The next chapter, then, will be written in the streets and in the schools.
A message is emerging from France that reaches far beyond its borders: young people are no longer willing to accept a future built on austerity, precarity, degradation and repression as the “new normal”.
In recent years, Generation Z revolts have spread from Serbia, Bulgaria and Albania to Palestine, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Indonesia; from Peru to India, the Philippines and Bangladesh; and across Kenya, Sudan, Nigeria and Morocco.
The future is not the business of those who design it in banks and government ministries. It is ours to shape!
It is our lives!
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