The high school revolt in France, which began among working-class youth, is not a narrow complaint about schools. It is the concentrated expression of a social system in deep crisis—and it also points toward the solution. The rekindled class struggle has put “violence” back at the center of debate: the revolutionary violence of the masses against the reactionary violence of the bourgeois state apparatus. France’s most oppressed proletarian youth have instinctively grasped the class nature of the state. From the Paris suburbs to rural high schools, they have shaken the foundations of the old society and reminded the wealthy, the bourgeoisie, and their watchdogs that the Terror of 1793 has only been postponed.
The October 1 actions sent the bourgeoisie and its state into a frenzy. The proletariat of the metropolitan suburbs launched a wave of revolutionary violence that would have made their Communard ancestors proud, resurrecting memories of the Reign of Terror. These youth are the heirs of the Sans-culottes and the sons and daughters of the Paris Commune. Through organized spontaneity, they have destabilized the bourgeois consensus and given vibrant expression to deep-seated rage.
The October 6 demonstration, during which police were ordered to hold back, was an attempt to regain control and reintegrate the movement into the mainstream by draining off its militancy. The communist movement must therefore push to destroy that consensus by increasing the mobilization and militancy of the masses. To explain the explosion of revolutionary violence as the result of a teacher shortage is to depoliticize the movement. The real issue is the future of a youth whose future is evaporating. The demands of the insurgent masses were entirely different; they boiled down to “fuck the cops” and “burn down the school,” condensed into “we are not dogs.” The bourgeois school is not an agent of proletarian emancipation but a tool for training people to accept an unjust order: capitalism. Meanwhile, the police haunt the daily lives of working-class neighborhoods and terrorize young people in their own living spaces.
The educational reforms have deepened this crisis. Parcoursup and the baccalaureate reform established selection criteria for entry into higher education. There were protests, but when the reforms were implemented and made permanent during the COVID crisis from 2020 to 2022, they had a demobilizing effect. Final-year high school students, who had been highly active in previous movements, became trapped by the Parcoursup schedule. The burden of “consequence-free” activism thus fell on lower-year students—the last grade without exams—who were less politically equipped and less independent, in human and material terms, to take on movements that could win over their older peers. The introduction of specialized programs threw high school administrations into disarray. Class groups were broken up, schedules were stretched thin, and the baccalaureate lost the sacrosanct value it had held for 222 years. These reforms played a dual role in restructuring French imperialism. The first and primary movement is the militarization of society: money siphoned from the National Education system is being funneled directly into the Defense budget, whose growth has accelerated since the beginning of the Macron era. The second trend directs the monitoring of youth. To meet the ideological imperatives of the march toward war, the bourgeoisie expects young people—and particularly proletarian youth—to toe the line, for it is they who will be sent into the line of fire to serve its financial interests. To control this youth, it is necessary to destroy any prospect of a future outside a servile attitude toward the state, which from a very young age must appear as a threatening and all-knowing force that they will learn to love later through something like Stockholm syndrome. The struggle teaches that a reactionary trend can make a transition into its opposite and produce mass resistance. That lesson must be kept in mind in other areas of class struggle, such as imperialist militarization.
High school students took the lead while remaining connected to their demands. Unlike during the CPE or the pension reforms, they did not serve as a reserve for trade unions or bourgeois political forces in a struggle against a government initiative. They rose up in a revolt rooted in specific demands—for teachers, school renovations, and more—but with a political substance. What they demanded, they demanded not just for themselves but for everyone. This is how we must understand the mass line: the Young Communists and all those who listened to young proletarians understood from the beginning that sector-specific demands limited to individual high schools were not what was causing such anger. There was something deeper and more general, something that became apparent when, in early October, more than one-third of schools were blockaded or disrupted according to official figures—which the ministry consistently underestimates. High school students heroically dared to fight with the means at their disposal, without buckling down. They creatively adapted their methods of struggle to the new situation by introducing elements of mass mobilization instead of relying only on small, determined blockades starting at 6 a.m.
This movement is characterized by a clear class character. The hegemony, the initiative, and the composition all personify proletarian character. From the Parisian suburbs to remote high schools blooming up in rural areas for the first time in decades, the composition of the high school student movement has been transformed. In 2023, the great June uprisings mobilized a whole generation of young people nearing adulthood, and it was generally these young people who were arrested and thrown into prisons for rebelling. But anyone who paid close attention knows there were also plenty of younger ones, a bit closer to middle school age, who are now the generation of high school students before us. They were shaped by that uprising and by the methods of struggle against the police and the bourgeois state. The use of social media and modern means of communication, which these young people use extensively, has played a very positive role both in organizational methods and in a shared identity. Isolated groups and loosely connected networks made a dramatic transition in just a few days into a united national movement spreading rapidly across the country. This has engineered the regime’s growing desire to suppress these tools in the event of a major political crisis. This media blackout is the next step on the agenda of reactionary forces in France and the West in general, with this new wave of rebellious working-class youth skyrocketing. The movement has undergone a significant transformation in character. Previously, it was the “activist” high school students from the city center who would come to the party in the suburbs. Now it is working-class youth who are gathering behind them all the masses who want to follow them. What the struggle brings to the fore is the impact of the proletariat within the masses, even when it has only an inexperienced leadership in a few places.
Some people applaud students in public but want to divert them toward their own electoral and conciliatory goals. Such opportunists berate high school students at the slightest sign of unrest, seeking to turn their anger toward the ballot box or toward a “way out of the crisis.” They seek to distort reality and restore the proletarian youth to subjugation to the order of the bourgeois school system and to the petty-bourgeois leadership within the high school movement. But they will be left helpless in the face of the wave of class struggle rocking the country. Whatever they gain today by convincing a high school student to vote for Melenchon in 2027 or a few young people to join their collective, they will lose a hundredfold in the class struggle. For this generation, it is at age 17 that they will have seen in the streets that politics in our time unfolds in open confrontation with the bourgeois state. The struggle serves as a testament that history does not move backward, and that whatever we sow today, we will reap too.
The revolt is also producing international solidarity. On October 18, a solidarity gathering and march in the Spanish state drew about 70 people, according to Servir al Pueblo. Organizers expressed support for protesters in France and connected that solidarity to calls for stronger mobilization in Spain, including a general strike planned for November 11, following a national housing movement driven by demands for affordable rents and stronger tenant protections. In Bremen, Germany, on October 17, under the slogan “It is right to rebel,” hundreds of young people and students demonstrated in solidarity with the fighting students in France. Activists from the Red League and AIL–Section Germany participated, answering the call of AIL–Section France. Chants like “Long live international solidarity” and “Everyone hates the police” were heard. Dem Volke Dienen stated that the demonstration highlighted the growing political engagement of students in Germany, both at an earlier age and in greater numbers, and the desire for a similar situation to that in France. In Berlin there were also mobilizations of students expressing solidarity with French youth, taking them as an example to blockade their schools and protest against militarization plans. In Greece, on October 18, Greek and French students gathered in Athens to express solidarity with the ongoing student resistance in France and to denounce police repression against demonstrators. Activists from Partizan and AIL–Section Greece took part, and KKE(m-l) also published an article. In the Netherlands, Revolutionaire Actie and AIL–Section Netherlands shared a solidarity demonstration for French students at the Embassy of France in The Hague on October 18 and issued a statement in solidarity with la jeunesse communiste and the entire student revolt in France on Instagram. In Portugal, during the encampment in Lisbon, activists from AIL–Section Portugal raised a banner in Rossio Square in homage to the French fighting youth. In Norway, Kampkomiteen published a statement in support of the popular uprising in France. In Italy, a statement joined in solidarity with the uprising of student and popular masses in France and promoted the International Anti-Imperialist League Conference on October 31 in Naples. Protests in the Spanish state have recently brought together campaigns over public education and housing and many others, while also raising debate about repression and the right to protest. In Madrid, an open-ended public-education strike began on October 14 with several linked demonstrations. Students and families joined educators in mobilizations against privatization and in support of better pay, smaller classes, and greater investment in public education. On the first day, demonstrators blocked major streets, police intervened at the Complutense University campus, and there was a large march to Puerta del Sol with calls for an investigation into police repression.
The French high school revolt is therefore not an isolated outbreak. It is a warning and a school. It shows that working-class youth can lead, that the bourgeois school and the police state are inseparable, that educational reform is being used to militarize and discipline society, and that repression at home and war abroad are connected. The task is not to drain militancy into the ballot box but to build solidarity and mass mobilization. The generation that has seen politics unfold in open confrontation with the bourgeois state will not be returned quietly to servility.
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*Freelance journalist
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