Macron's token concessions fail French students fighting back
By Maya Ellison · Reporting from Detroit ·
Emmanuel Macron offered substitute teachers to quell nationwide school blockades, but this token gesture ignores the systemic gutting of public education and the brutality of the state.
I grew up in Flint, Michigan. I know what happens when a state decides some zip codes are disposable. I know the smell of a city being hollowed out while the people in charge tell you to be grateful for the crumbs. Now, I see that same cold logic in France. Emmanuel Macron is playing a game of optics while his government starves public schools. He is treating the education of millions like a budget line to be trimmed. This is not a "student movement" to be managed. It is a scream for survival from a generation that sees the state as an enemy.
The cost of a neoliberal classroom
The conditions in these schools are a disgrace. According to The New Yorker, students are fighting against rats, roaches, and puddles in their buildings. This is not a lack of funds. It is a choice. Violette, a student, noted that the government eliminated 4,000 teaching positions this year.
The result is a system in collapse. RFI English reports that 70% of lycée classes in France have more than 30 students. Last year, middle- and high-school students lost as many as 20 million class hours due to staff shortages.
This is the neoliberal playbook. You gut the public square and then act surprised when it burns. The Chilean student protests share the same mechanism here: students organizing against the neoliberal gutting of public education to demand that the state treat learning as a right rather than a commodity.
A state that prefers bruises to books
When students block their school doors with trash cans, the state does not send negotiators. It sends the police. Thousands have been arrested since the protests began, and most of those detained are minors.
The violence is targeted and brutal. A police officer in northern France threw a tear-gas grenade into a 14-year-old's face, shattering his jaw. Another child lost a hand after picking up a police-launched stun grenade.
This is a pattern of escalation. We saw it during the French pension reform protests in 2023, where "intermediate weapons" were used to silence workers. The state is now using those same weapons on children. This brutality is not an accident. It is a feature of a security apparatus that is increasingly aligned with the far-right. In the 2024 French legislative elections, 67% of police and military employees voted for the Rassemblement National.
The lie of the "slacker"
The ruling class loves to frame this as a matter of discipline. Center-right deputy Philippe Juvin told students to "get back to work" like their "little friends in China." Marion Maréchal called them "slackers."
This is the same rhetoric used against the Gilets Jaunes in 2018. The state calls the marginalized "slackers" to avoid talking about the systemic underfunding of public services. It is a lie. These students are not lazy. They are fighting for the basic right to a teacher and a dry floor.
The government claims the movement is just "urban violence" orchestrated by the far-left. This is a ghost story told to distract the public. It echoes the 2005 French riots, where the state criminalized the banlieues instead of fixing the poverty that drove the anger. But this time, the fire has spread. The blockades have hit elite private schools like the École Alsacienne. This is not a "far-left maneuver." It is a logical response to a state that subsidizes private Catholic schools while public classrooms crumble.
Crumbs are not a victory
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu and Education Minister Édouard Geffray have tried to buy peace with tokens. Geffray promised 3,000 substitute teachers.
These concessions are a joke. The 3,000 teachers are a band-aid on a severed limb.
The students are not fooled. They are demanding the overhaul of Parcoursup, the widely loathed college-admissions system.
The state thinks it can manage this with a few televised promises. But the long record of French history tells a different story. From May 1968 to today, when the state ignores the precarity of the young, the streets eventually answer.
The Macron government is the "president of the rich" in every sense. He has spent a decade deepening the divide between the elite and the working class. He believes that a few substitute teachers and a "duty to take young people seriously" will stop a generation that has nothing left to lose. He is wrong. If the state continues to weaponize police against minors and offer crumbs instead of structural change, these blockades will not end. They will evolve into a general strike that paralyzes the nation. Justice is not a substitute teacher; it is a fully funded public system where a student's future is not decided by an algorithm or a police grenade.