Outside a high school in Seine-St.-Denis, a working-class suburb north of Paris, a crowd of about 100 students milled in the street on Thursday afternoon, their shouts echoing through the towering apartment buildings. They were protesting overcrowded classrooms, crumbling facilities, and absent teachers.
“We’re skipping lessons so we can teach you one,” said a banner they had hung from the fence of Rosa Parks High School. Two dozen police officers looked on as the students chatted and chanted, though the officers largely kept their distance.
Seine-St.-Denis is at the center of a protest movement that has swept across France in the last week. Thousands of students have blockaded schools and clashed with police officers, resulting in 3,000 arrests as well as injuries to nearly 400 police officers and more than 230 school employees and students. On Thursday, Rosa Parks was one of more than 1,000 schools with protests; 220 were blockaded, according to the French Interior Ministry.
“Classrooms are not ventilated and we can barely open the windows,” said Issam Makhloufi, 15, a student at Rosa Parks, which named after the American civil rights icon.
There is an echo of that struggle in the protests in Seine-St.-Denis, where the hardships of its immigrant population — the highest per capita of any district in France — have long drawn accusations of discrimination and inequities in schooling and other social services.
The poverty rate in Seine-St.-Denis is twice as high as in France as a whole, according to a 2023 parliamentary report. Students in the district have worse results than those elsewhere, according to a national test for students entering middle school. The report recorded high rates of teacher absenteeism there and warned that too many teachers were young and inexperienced.
“We’re so underfunded that we never know when the spark will catch,” said Moustapha Saouré, who teaches law and economics at another local high school and turned out to support the students at Rosa Parks. “We are trying to mobilize young people to demand their rights.”
The department of the education ministry that oversees Rosa Parks did not reply to a request for comment about the students’ accusations regarding conditions at the school. But the government said it would set up an online platform for students to voice their demands and anxieties.
The French authorities said that the protests had mutated from a legitimate expression of student grievances into something more organized and dangerous. Noting that some people at blockades had shot off mortar-style fireworks, burned public buildings and looted shops, the Interior Ministry said in a statement that the unrest “now bears all the hallmarks of urban violence.”
French officials put the blame on a far-left party, France Unbowed, which they accused of whipping up the protests for political purposes. French voters will elect a new president in about eight months, and the far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is currently neck-and-neck in some polls with the leading centrist candidate, Édouard Philippe. Both trail the far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen.
“The duty of a republic’s elected official is to protect young people and call for calm,” Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said in a social media post this week. “Exploiting their anger for partisan purposes is a fault.”
France Unbowed has dismissed the accusations. On Thursday, Bally Bagayoko, a rising star of the party and the recently elected mayor of the city of St.-Denis, was in the thick of the protest at Rosa Parks, as he had been at others. This week he drew criticism for telling journalists that “violence at some point can be legitimate,” though “every time it can be avoided, that’s better.”
At Rosa Parks, Mr. Bagayoko talked with students and tried to prevent the gathering from tipping into disorder. When a handful of unruly people lit a small fire near an apartment building, he hurriedly stamped it out, to cheers from the crowd. He brandished a fire extinguisher to douse the residual sparks and calmed a noisy dispute between two students.
Mr. Bagayoko acknowledged in a brief interview that the students, “sometimes, in the heat of the mobilization, tip over the edge.” But he said the protests had erupted spontaneously because of what he said was a “considerable shortfall in the resources allocated for our children’s education.”
“Those who accuse are not those who are out on the field,” he said. “I’m a father above all, and the most important thing for me is to ensure that no children get hurt.” He pointed to other adults, including parents and teachers, who were on hand to prevent the situation from spiraling out of control.
At Rosa Parks and other nearby schools, the protesters have adopted a vocabulary of public protest familiar in France. Graffiti and banners hung on the buildings with slogans like “Gen Z is Communist” and “We Want le Bac, not la Bac” — a pun on the name of the French baccalaureate and that of a police unit that is often deployed to deal with street unrest.
“We’re not poorly educated, we’re just not listened to,” said a banner in front of another school in the area.
“We’re the heirs of May ’68,” said a banner outside a third school, referring to student-led protests in 1968 that nearly toppled the government and helped transform French society.
A handful of students lingered outside that school, Lycée Suger, where a large protest had taken place in the morning, watched warily by police officers in riot gear.
Two 17-year-old seniors, Aya Guetib and Mian Wahab, said their school lacked teachers and that the bathrooms were in dire condition, with no doors and faulty taps. It is also overcrowded, with 35 students in classrooms meant for 15. Conditions during a heat wave last June were “unlivable,” Ms. Guetib said.
“We’re blocking the school to try to make ourselves heard,” she said. Like other students, Ms. Guetib expressed frustration at what she felt was a double standard. “It’s not normal that, because we’re in the suburbs, our conditions are not as good as at high schools in Paris,” she said.
Anaïs Esnault, who had turned out at her son’s school to see what was happening, said she was surprised to see what she called the “TikTok generation” out protesting. “I always see them on their phones!” she said.
Tania Brun, the mother of a 16-year-old at Rosa Parks, estimated that her son had missed almost half of the English curriculum in his last year of middle school because of teacher absences. But she said the movement was about something deeper.
“There is a yearning for dignity,” Ms. Brun said. “There is a significant segment of the population that did not feel represented.”
The post Blockades, Fireworks and Tear Gas: Young Protesters Are Rattling France appeared first on New York Times.
