French school students have staged protests across the country in the past week, with hundreds of schools either blockaded or closed. In Lens, a 15-year-old lost his hand to a police grenade during a blockade. More than 6,000 people have been arrested, many of them under 18.
The protests have displayed the organisation and bravery of French students, who know the risks and commit to turning up day after day. France‘s revolutionary spirit is not a relic of the past, and the rousing lyrics of La Marseillaise—To arms, citizens! Form your battalions! Let’s march, let’s march!—still echo in the country’s political culture.
French pupils learn that protest, uprising and rioting are the origin story of their freedoms. The French Revolution appears in the curriculum twice, for pupils aged 12 and then again at 16. The student protests of 1968 are taught at age 14 and again at 17. Debating is encouraged in schools from as early as collège, or at about 11 years old. Young people are expected to have an opinion and not be afraid to defend it.
Protesting is taught as a legally framed fundamental right and a civic responsibility. In the final year of lycée, pupils study Rousseau’s Du Contrat Social (The Social Contract), which argues that citizens should only surrender their unrestricted natural liberty in exchange for civil and moral freedoms. They give up individual interests for the volonté générale, or general will. In simple terms, they pay heavy taxes and in return expect the country to work.
That bargain shapes how the French understand their relationship with the state. When the government raises the retirement age, lets electricity bills soar or cuts school budgets, it is seen as a breach of the social contract. Protest is the automatic response.
Britons, by contrast, are subjects of the UK and are characterised more by an American-style individualism and a desire to live and let live. There is less collective spirit. Britain has an extraordinary history of protest, spanning Peterloo, the Chartists, the suffragettes and the poll tax riots, but there is arguably a different cultural relationship to these events. They can be remembered as stand-alone episodes and interruptions to the national story rather than as the story itself. The Thatcher era also did permanent damage to unions, contributing to the British public being a grumbling but compliant one, lacking in organising power.
Because these values are ingrained across French society and in every generation, the student protesters are emboldened by firefighters, nurses, lawyers and teachers who have joined them in solidarity. Across social media, moments of support and unity are visible. A viral video of the mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, protecting students from the police is a striking example.
It is difficult to imagine British teenagers taking to the streets because they would be alone. In France, parents have joined their children in protesting and have called on other parents to do the same for the planned general strike on 17 October. This is also a response to the police brutality witnessed in the past week. Many parents were themselves lycée students and marched against education reforms and cuts. The anti-Macroniste parents do not treat their children as delinquents, but as citizens exercising their rights.
That does not mean every French parent supports every protest, or that French society is wholly united behind its students. While the French state technically encourages protest through the curriculum, the force and violence with which it has met its students says otherwise. There is also resentment of the protests among some students, particularly those from conservative households who believe the blockades are a leftwing plot.
Students in France are not necessarily more political than their British counterparts. Young British people are active, but tend to take part in established and larger movements such as Extinction Rebellion or the Gaza protests rather than initiate protests themselves. In France, protesting is taught as a legally framed fundamental right and a civic responsibility.
