‘We Burn Trash, You Burn Our Future... Under Our Text Books, Anger’
France’s nation-wide school revolt began with missing teachers, overcrowded classrooms and buildings in disrepair. Three weeks later, after indiscriminate force used by the police, it has become harder to say where the education dispute ends and a wider argument about inequality, policing and the French State begins. The presidential election of 2027 hangs over this, but it should not obscure where the trouble started: inside the schools.
By Narendra Pachkhédé in London
The revolt did not begin where France is accustomed to remembering its student rebellions. It began in the lycées of Créteil and the poorer suburbs around Paris, away from the Sorbonne and the Latin Quarter, where the memory of May 1968 still hangs over almost every account of youth and dissent. The geography matters because the complaints emerging from these schools were immediate and unromantic: missing teachers, overcrowded classrooms, broken facilities and buildings in disrepair.
One of the first blockades was at the Saint-Exupéry lycée in Créteil, where several teaching posts remained unfilled. Le Monde traces the mobilisation there to September 21, 2026 and describes how it spread across the Paris region and then across the nation in barely ten days.
By October 6, pupils were marching with teachers, parents, university students and trade unionists across France. Le Monde reported an official turnout of 266,000, against an organisers’ estimate of around 450,000.
The protest remains unusually decentralised. There is no single organisation directing it and no single measure the government can withdraw to end it, something that has helped it spread, but may also make settlement harder.
The complaints remain strikingly concrete. Teachers are absent and not replaced. Classes are too large. School days can run from eight in the morning until six. Parcoursup, the national university admissions platform, brings another kind of anxiety.
In poorer urban schools, pupils and teachers describe leaking ceilings, holes in walls, broken toilets, rats and inadequate furniture. Angelique Chrisafis reported these conditions for The Guardian, including classrooms that exceeded 35C during recent heatwaves. In the 2024–25 school year, 7.5% of secondary-school teaching hours were not delivered because absent teachers had not been replaced, according to education ministry figures, reported by Le Monde.
The placards offer their own account of what has happened since. Reuters photographed a Paris banner reading “We burn trash, you burn our future.” Other demonstrators carried “Schools with no money, country with no future” and “Under our text books, anger,” an obvious borrowing from May 1968’s “Under the paving stones, the beach.”
Reuters photographs reproduced in ABC’s October 7 report also show how quickly the imagery of schooling and policing has begun to overlap. In Perpignan, one girl held a sign declaring: “Too young to be heard, but old enough to be tear-gassed.”
Not every homemade sign needs to bear the weight of political interpretation. The change in language is noticeable: from teachers and schools, to the future, and then to the police.
The Republic in the Classroom
What the current protests reveal is not simply the deterioration of France’s schools, but the unequal conditions under which different pupils encounter the education system. The education question itself is less straightforward than the images of crumbling schools might suggest. France cannot easily be described as a country that simply stopped spending on secondary education. Éric Charbonnier, an education analyst at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), told The Guardian that French spending on upper-secondary education is 28% above the OECD average. The same report gives an average of 29 pupils in French-language classes, compared with 26 across the OECD; teachers and pupils around Paris described classes of 36 or more.
Part of the answer may lie in the way responsibility itself is divided. According to the French Ministry of Education’s account of the division of responsibilities, the State retains responsibility for curricula, national qualifications and teaching staff, while the regions own public lycées and are responsible for construction, major repairs, equipment and their material operation. A missing mathematics teacher and rainwater coming through a classroom ceiling therefore travel through different administrative chains. For the pupil sitting beneath that ceiling, they belong to the same school.
In France it touches something larger than administration. The republican school has long been asked to do more than educate. It is supposed to weaken the hold of class, family and geography and bring children into broadly common conditions of citizenship. Yet, social background retains an unusually strong relationship with educational outcomes.
The mobilisation has also crossed some of the boundaries it is protesting against. On October 6, as Le Monde reported, banners from schools in working-class Seine-Saint-Denis appeared alongside pupils from prestigious Paris schools; at the private Massillon lycée; one placard read: “Private and public, all children of the Republic.”
There is an Indian echo here.
After the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) paper-leak agitation, the Cockroach Janta Party’s (CJP) School Thik Karo campaign moved from the integrity of the examination into government schools themselves, especially in the rural Hindi heartland, documenting the abysmal state of toilets, drinking water, mid-day meals, pot-holed and watery roads leading to the school, classrooms, furniture and teacher availability. Called ‘Social Audit’ -- the CJP released hundreds of videos depicting the sordid and abjectly neglected reality of India’s dilapidated village schools, especially where poor students have to study. One was being conducted in a cow shed. At its first reported audit in Maharashtra’s Hingoli district, The Indian Express documented broken windows, inadequate benches, dilapidated toilets and inadequate safe drinking water.
So much so, many of the BJP-led state governments immediately stopped the entry of CJP teams inside the schools. This could not deflect from the reality of the schools.
In India, the argument moved from the examination paper leak itself: from whether the test was fair to whether students had ever reached it on equal terms. France’s lycée revolt reaches a similar question from the other end, beginning with the unequal conditions inside the schools themselves.
The Protest and the Police
Then there is the violence.
It has impacted the nature of the movement, though it cannot explain why the protests began.
Schools have been damaged and in some cases burned or ransacked. Protesters have thrown fireworks and other projectiles. Police officers have been attacked. By October 6, at least 215 teenagers and 85 school employees had been injured, while the prime minister’s office said more than 700 police officers had been hurt. More than 6,100 people had been arrested, most of them minors, according to Reuters’ October 6 account.
The individual cases are more difficult to absorb than the totals.
At Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône, a 14-year-old boy was struck in the face at close range by a tear-gas grenade. He suffered a double fracture of the jaw and severe dental injuries. In Tours, a 16-year-old lost the sight in one eye after an injury prosecutors said was consistent with a shot from a lanceur de balle de défense (LBD), the rubber-projectile launcher used by French police.
In Lens, a 15-year-old lost a hand when an EF-SON — the model designation of a new-generation 40mm stun grenade manufactured by Alsetex — exploded during a police intervention. Le Monde’s detailed reconstruction of the three cases notes that early reports differed over whether the Lens teenager had picked up the grenade; prosecutors say that has not been established.
On October 7, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez temporarily suspended the use of the EF-SON at student protests while investigators establish what happened in Lens. The Inspection générale de la Police nationale (IGPN), France’s national police inspectorate, is examining 18 cases arising from police conduct during the protests, Reuters reported on October 7. The government rejects the description of its overall response as “police repression” and points to serious attacks on officers and damage to schools.
Whatever language one uses for the policing, the dispute is no longer quite the one that began in September. A pupil who starts by asking why a teacher has not been replaced may, several days later, be discussing how a police grenade is supposed to be fired outside the lycée.
That gives “We burn trash, you burn our future” another meaning. Burning bins make better television than an absent mathematics teacher and there is some evidence for the students’ frustration with that imbalance. Action Critique Médias (Acrimed), a left-wing media-monitoring organisation, examined France 2’s lunchtime and evening news broadcasts between September 28 and October 1. Acrimed’s own analysis found that France 2 devoted most of its lycée-protest coverage over four days to violence, fires and clashes, while less than two minutes concerned the pupils’ demands. It is a limited sample from an advocacy organisation, but it helps explain why students have become so conscious of the image through which their revolt is being seen.
Radical-Left La France Insoumise (LFI) is now visibly involved. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the veteran leader of La France Insoumise and a candidate in the 2027 presidential election, has backed the students, and party representatives have joined blockades. Government ministers accuse the party of encouraging or exploiting the unrest; LFI denies this, and Mélenchon has urged non-violent action.
But the chronology matters. Le Monde reports that the Saint-Exupéry staff action began on September 17 and pupils began blocking the school the following day; LFI MPs appeared there from September 23. The grievances were already producing action before LFI made the movement a national political cause and political appropriation may follow a movement without explaining its origins.
France has been here before, although the comparisons never quite fit. The movement against the Devaquet university reforms in 1986 grew into a national crisis, made darker by the death of Malik Oussekine after a police assault. In 2006, lycée and university mobilisation helped force withdrawal of the Contrat première embauche (CPE) youth-employment contract.
The difference now is that there is no single law to withdraw: no decree simultaneously replaces teachers, reduces class sizes, changes Parcoursup and repairs buildings. Neither side has an obvious exit.
2027 Presidential Elections
The presidential election sits somewhere in the backdrop of all this and it should stay there. These protests were not created by the campaign to succeed Emmanuel Macron, and reducing them to an electoral prelude would misread their origins. But France is now little more than six months from choosing another president and Macron cannot seek a third consecutive term.
The French Interior Ministry has scheduled the official election calendar with the first round for April 18, 2027 and the second for May 2. Its constitutional powers remain considerable, but politically, though, there is a sense of a period running out. The dissolution of the National Assembly in 2024 failed to produce a dependable governing majority, and governments since then have had to negotiate their way through a fractured Parliament. France also faces rising borrowing costs and pressure over its public finances. Reuters reported on October 6 that the school unrest was unfolding alongside a heavily contested 2027 budget and deteriorating sentiment towards French debt. But the schools complicate the fiscal argument. France already spends heavily at lycée level. The disagreement is therefore not reducible to austerity against spending, however convenient that division may become during an election campaign. It is also about whether a large State can make the resources it already commands appear where citizens actually encounter it.
A pupil in a poorly served lycée can experience that State as strangely absent when a teacher is missing, then as overwhelmingly present when rows of riot police appear outside the school gates. That contrast is difficult to ignore in a political system that has spent years talking about reform, efficiency and the authority of the Republic.
The same evidence is already being interpreted in different ways. On parts of the Right, high expenditure lends itself to an argument about an expensive State that still fails to perform well enough. On the Left, missing teachers and deteriorating buildings are being read as evidence of weakened public provision despite the headline spending figures. Neither account by itself quite resolves what the pupils are describing.This is where 2027 enters the story. Whoever follows Macron will inherit an argument over what the French State should provide, what it can afford, and whether its institutions still produce anything resembling the equality they promise. The lycée revolt has supplied unusually tangible material for that debate, although the pupils did not begin by trying to write anybody’s presidential programme.
For now, France’s schools remain the centre of the story. There are teachers to replace, buildings to repair and classes to reorganise. There are also teenagers with severe injuries, thousands of arrests and a government trying to decide how much of the movement can be answered through policy and how much through public order.
No one can yet know whether this becomes a longer social movement or begins to recede once some immediate grievances are addressed. It is probably better not to pretend otherwise.
What can be said is that the argument has already moved some distance beyond the condition of particular lycées. The pupils began by asking why their schools were not working as they should.
France is now being made to answer a somewhat larger, and less comfortable, version of that question.
Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic, essayist and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva. His latest book is Form as History: When History No Longer Requires Us --Daraja Press, 2026.
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