‘If We Burn, You Burn With Us’: France’s Youth Ignite a Massive Revolt

PARIS — “Make sure you tell the Americans that trash cans aren’t the only things burning in France,” 16-year-old Ewen told Truthdig as protesters gathered on the Place de la République on Saturday. Tear gas canisters had been falling into the growing crowd for about an hour, and the teen struggled to make himself heard with his mask.

“Our future is burning, too,” Ewen added. Due to the repression and arrests by police, most protesters asked that only their first names be used.

In rapid succession, he listed everything he’d come to protest against: his rat-infested high school, the violent police repression of the student movement, but also the lack of hospital beds across the country, the cost of living, the saturated job market and the quickly-forgotten fires that ravaged France this summer. During the country’s hottest summer on record this year, some 250,000 acres of forest burned.

Grabbing his three friends, Ewen then posed for a photo, holding up a sign that read: “If we burn, you burn with us!”

“It’s a ‘Hunger Games’ reference,” Ewen explained, as though I were decidedly too ancient to get it on my own. “It means that we’re not just fighting for ourselves, but for you, too.”

Marine Champetier de Ribes, who teaches literature at a school in a Paris suburb, told Truthdig that she felt France’s youth had awakened something in the rest of society. “Us adults had collectively fallen into torpor,” she said. “They shook us out of it and reminded us all that we’re right to be angry.”

On Oct. 17, that torpor lifted in plain sight. Between 550,000 and 800,000 people marched across the country. Though much of the national and international coverage focused on the violence that marred the margins of Saturday’s protests, the lesson was elsewhere: In less than a month, the high schoolers’ movement managed to pull a tired, resigned country back into the streets. Students were joined by teachers, parents, doctors, nurses, lawyers, pensioners, Yellow Vests, farmers and firefighters in perhaps the most intersectional movement France has seen in decades.

“They write the rules, and we follow”

Champetier de Ribes, 34, told Truthdig that she and her colleagues across the education sector had been organizing for years, but had been slowly losing steam. “No one was listening to us,” she lamented.

In her school alone, she cited “cockroach-infested walls, clogged toilets, rat droppings in the microwaves and boiling classrooms that have yet to cool down after this summer’s heat waves.” Champetier de Ribes said she has also been forced to fit 38 students into her 215-square-foot classroom, which never has enough chairs and desks: “I’ve had to insist that at least three of them be absent every week so I can teach the rest,” she said.

Champetier de Ribes said teachers had become disillusioned. “We’d quite forgotten how to be angry, until, that is, our students began leading by example,” she said.

Starting on Sept. 17, high schoolers across the country began barricading their schools to demand better material conditions and equal education opportunities. The movement began in the Paris suburb of Créteil and it spread fast: By Oct. 1, the Interior Ministry reported that more than 1,000 of France’s 3,700 high schools had been affected, over 200 of them blockaded. 

The students’ demands are more specific than their critics let on: a 10 billion-euro investment plan for schools, and an end to Parcoursup, the national platform that manages university admissions, which is often compared to a “social sorting machine” and criticized for its lack of transparency.

They’re also asking for more teachers, Last year, students across France lost some 20 million hours worth of lessons because absent teachers were not replaced. The education shortfalls are a result of President Emmanuel Macron’s neoliberal approach to public education funding while simultaneously increasing defense spending.

Teachers, in turn, organized to support their pupils. “They write the rules and we follow,” Champetier de Ribes said. She and her colleagues created an Instagram account to share the students’ demands with a grown-up audience: “We have to speak their language,” she added with a laugh.

From the start, the movement was met with force. The government, which chose to label the movement not as a “school protest” but as “urban violence,” sent police riot squads directly into high schools and universities.

Eden, 14, had his jaw fractured and most of his teeth knocked after being struck in the face by a tear gas grenade in a Paris suburb, leaving him, according to his mother, barely able to eat through a straw in his hospital bed. A 15-year-old in the north had his hand torn off by a so-called anti-encirclement grenade. On Saturday, in the eastern town of Mulhouse, Maïssa, 17, was struck by a tear-gas canister and lost her left eye.

Some 6,773 minors have been taken into police custody since the protests began in mid-September. Complaints are currently being filed across the country for verbal and physical mistreatment of these high schoolers during their detention.

This level of violence gave teachers yet another cause for concern, Champetier de Ribes said. “We were, to put it plainly, terrified at the very idea of seeing our students face off with the police.” Five months pregnant, she herself cannot physically protect her students, as tear gas is highly toxic. But she did help her colleagues prepare emergency kits. Identified with a white armband, these teachers carry masks, saline solution, bandages, disinfectant, water and applesauce pouches, ready to assist their pupils should they need help.

“This generation shook us awake,” Champetier de Ribes said. “Now, we have to be there for them, and alongside them.”

Christophe, who teaches mathematics in a private Paris high school, joined the protest Saturday with a sign that read: “You should not have betrayed us. We’re here to take our future back.” He told Truthdig that, while his was not an underprivileged school, his students had nonetheless joined their peers on the street, demanding equality. “My students may not be the ones getting beat up, but they’re still children,” he said.

Down the street, as tear gas dispersed the musicians of the New World Orchestra, another sign read: “Too young to be listened to, big enough to get beaten up.”

A convergence of anger

“I initially thought the movement seemed a bit harebrained,” 50-year-old Rachid told Truthdig at Saturday’s protest. The family doctor, who asked that his last name be withheld, had been perplexed by the high schoolers’ scattered demands and confused by the odd costumes and the “aura battles” they performed on the barricades in front of their schools.

“I thought this was another one of these social media trends I simply no longer understand,” he quipped.

But after his daughter’s classmates were heavily tear-gassed by the police, and still came back the next day, he began seeing things differently. “These kids, I realized, have a good head on their shoulders,” Rachid said. He joined the movement on Oct. 6, alongside his daughter.

He is not alone in that. Champetier de Ribes has noticed a similar shift. “There’s a realization, even among people who initially disapproved of the movement. They saw the level of violence, saw how far the government was prepared to go to repress this movement, and decided to put themselves on the line, too,” she said.

Rachid attended Saturday’s protest in his white coat, emblazoned with the words, “Firefighters and healthcare workers stand in solidarity.”

This was not Rachid’s first protest. As the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the healthcare sector, he marched alongside thousands of colleagues — those the entire country had applauded night after night — in 2020. They asked for more beds, more ventilators, more money and better training. “But no matter how hard we tried, our movement remained confined to the healthcare sector,” he said.

For years, each grievance has produced its own constituency, its own demonstration, its own cycle of exhaustion. French hospital workers marched for funding, teachers protested cuts and education reforms, retirees took to the street to protect their pensions, farmers blocked roads to protest rising costs of production, Yellow Vests swarmed the Champs Élysées to demand lower gas prices. Time and time again, crowds gathered, the political class attempted to respond, and the country moved on.

The oft-aspired to “convergence des luttes” (convergence of struggles) never materialized. Until, that is, students disrupted that routine.

“This,” Rachid said as a young kilt-clad protester dressed the bronze statue of Marianne, personifying the French Republic, in a yellow vest, “is a different kind of beast entirely.”

The students’ insistence that their own futures are at stake has helped make connections between movements visible. In the presence of teenagers who refuse to accept that their future must be worse than their parents’ present, older demonstrators have found it harder to justify their own resignation.

“What we have here is a convergence not of struggles, but of anger,” Rachid said.

“Solidarité”

“We are very angry,” 18-year-old Juliette G. told Truthdig. A first-year student in political science at Sciences Po Paris, she deplored the “small-mindedness” of her elders, who balked at the intersectionality of the students’ demands.

“This is a student movement,” she said. “It’s also a feminist one, an anti-racist one, an ecologist one.” The variety of the students’ demands does not make them weaker, but stronger, she said. “Just because we’re doing things differently does not mean we are wrong.”

Her demands for intersectionality were echoed by Julie, a 27-year-old engineer Truthdig met on Saturday. “I’m glad we’ve not left them to protest alone,” she said as a group of youth set a car on fire at the far corner of the square. But said she was concerned that their wide-ranging demands for a better future would get lost if “adults” began framing the movement in terms not of justice, but of violence.

 “The youth are sick of being oldsplained,” her sign read.

Behind her, Truthdig met two Latin American immigrants who had come to march in defense of democracy. Damien, 56, from Chile, carried a sign likening Macron’s repression of the youth movement to Augusto Pinochet’s in the 1970s in his country. “We’ve lived through this before,” he said. Carmen, 58, from Brazil, carried a heart-covered sign that read: “Let our children protest.”

“We’re here for Lula, too,” Carmen told Truthdig, referring to Brazil’s left-leaning President Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva, who is currently running against a Donald Trump-backed, far-right candidate.  

Damien voiced his opposition to Chile’s José Antonio Kast and Argentina’s Javier Milei. “I may not be French, but I raised my daughter here, and I know your republic’s motto: ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.’ We have to show the world that we stand with these kids,” Carmen said.

“Sorry for the inconvenience”

Down the street, Lucie, 15, who attends a private Paris high school, held up a sign that read: “Sorry for the inconvenience, we’re trying to save our future.”

Champetier de Ribes told Truthdig she was “gobsmacked” to see privileged youth join the movement en masse. “The macronie [Macron’s political caste] is built on division and has been getting away with taking from some because they give to others,” she said. But this “doesn’t seem to work on young people — they’re not duped by efforts to divide them. They are fully aware that it’s absolute bullshit.”

“I’m incredibly proud of my students,” she said.