When young people protest : equal opportunity, inequity and the violence of the response

A promise no one broke and no one keeps

On October 5th, outside a lycée in Lens, a fifteen-year-old lost a hand during a police operation. The investigation will say exactly how. A boy of fifteen. A hand.

Since then the country has watched the same images on loop : schools on fire, broken windows, lines of police, teenagers running. By mid-October, the Prime Minister was counting nearly a thousand injured police officers and gendarmes, and hundreds of injured pupils and school staff.

On October 17th, more than half a million people marched and some protesters forced the door of Marseille's town hall.

And yet it all began with something far smaller and far more ordinary: classes that are too full, toilets with no running water, teachers who fall ill and are never replaced.

We want to hold together two things the debate keeps pulling apart. The students have a cause and on what they say about their schools, they are right. And the way this has unfolded deserves scrutiny on both sides : protesters who burn and hit must answer for it, and so must a State that answers teenagers with weapons whose use investigations will now have to judge. You can condemn both without contradicting yourself. What worries us more is that these two kinds of violence have become an alibi. As long as we argue about who threw the first stone, nobody asks why fifteen-year-olds are sitting in classrooms where, they say, it reaches forty degrees.

Our thesis fits in one sentence. Equal opportunity is a promise that no one decided to break and that no one keeps, and that is exactly why kids ended up demanding it in the street.

What they are actually saying

Listen to them first, before the images. Ask a lycée student what they want and the list is almost touching in how ordinary it is: teachers replaced when they are absent, fewer pupils in a room, buildings you can work in during the summer, a nurse and a psychologist in the school, someone to help the kids who struggle, a less crushing day, and a fairer way into university than Parcoursup, the national admissions platform. Student unions have turned this into ten emergency measures. Even the UNI union, which opposes the blockades in the name of the freedom to study, says it understands the demands.

It is tempting to file all this under teenage exaggeration. The State's own auditors make that hard. The Cour des comptes, the national audit office, found in a report last December that roughly one teaching hour in eleven goes missing in public collèges, and that the loss falls hardest on those who already have the least: more hours disappear in priority education than elsewhere. In the Créteil district, where the movement started, replacements work less well than in Paris. And a senator's report says the number of unreplaced days of long absence has nearly doubled in six years.

Think about what that means in an ordinary week. A teacher is away, nobody comes and the hour simply vanishes. It is not the playground that loses. It is the maths or French hour of a teenager who may have nobody at home to go through it again with them. The students did not invent this problem. They live it every day, in the very places where the audit office has measured it.

The promise

Equal opportunity is the finest sentence of the republican school: everyone starts from the same line and what comes next depends on effort.

Nobody has abolished it. No law stops a worker's child from entering a preparatory class; no rule reserves the grandes écoles for the children of managers. That is why the promise seems intact and why it is so awkward to question it without sounding like a grouch.

Then you look at where children actually end up. Already at three, in the first year of nursery school, children from very advantaged homes are far ahead of those from disadvantaged ones in language and in maths, according to Insee.

By fifteen the gap has widened, and France's is among the wider ones in the OECD. At the end of the road, the Observatoire des inégalités finds that workers' children make up almost a third of those in vocational CAP courses, and about two in a hundred of those in the écoles normales supérieures, where future researchers and teachers are trained. For managers' children the picture is the mirror image: very few in CAP, nearly two out of three in the ÉNS.

There are two ways to read this, and our vocabulary exists to tell them apart.

An injustice needs a rule, a violation of that rule, and someone to blame. An inequity is different : an inequality that could be avoided, produced by many collective choices that nobody coordinated, such as staffing levels, assignments, replacement budgets and school catchment maps, piled up over the years. Nobody wanted this gap. Nobody closed it either. And that is what makes inequity so comfortable : with no culprit there is no trial and without a trial we can go on reciting the promise.

The school did not create the starting line. It receives children at three, and it cannot erase the difference alone. But it is not innocent of what it does next. When more hours are lost in priority education, when replacements are missing most where pupils have the most to catch up on, the promise of equal opportunity becomes a sentence spoken over classrooms that do not apply it. That is what we call a false idea: not a lie someone stitched together, but a story we cling to all the more because it spares us from looking at the numbers.

How a suburban lycée becomes an angry country

It began in mid-September, in a lycée in the Paris suburbs. Within two weeks, more than a thousand schools had been affected, and by early October hundreds of thousands of people were in the streets. No single thing explains such speed. We see four, and we offer them as a reading, not a proof.

The first is that the grievances can be seen from inside every school. You do not need a theory to join a blockade when the toilets have no water. The second is that lycée students, mostly minors, cannot strike like employees and have no seat where budgets are decided. Their most visible lever is to block the door, so the conflict plays out at the school gates, where the police arrive, rather than around a table. The third is that the movement met other anger on its way: a public-sector strike against the budget, then unions and "gilets jaunes" furious about the cost of living and fuel prices. And the government has little room to move, with a deficit above 5% of GDP and a Parliament without a majority to pass an austerity budget.

The fourth reason is the most worrying, because it assumes bad faith in no one. A blockade calls for a closure, a closure for an intervention, an intervention for injuries, injuries for anger, anger for a harder response, and that hardening for new blockades. Each camp feels it is only answering the other. Nobody wanted the loop, it closes by itself. It is, in its way, an inequity of the conflict: an outcome nobody chose, produced by local decisions that nobody coordinates.

Then there is the question the government asks most often : who lit the fuse? The Prime Minister's office says intelligence services describe an "operation organised by LFI and its relays"; LFI's coordinator, Manuel Bompard, calls that "conspiracism".

We cannot settle it and we will not. We say only that even if a political force tried to use this movement, which is disputed, that would not explain why well over a hundred thousand people marched on October 13th, even by the authorities' own count. A fuse only lights what is already dry.

Two kinds of violence, one rule

Let us say it plainly : burning a school is not a demand. The Education Minister speaks of thirty-seven schools partly burned, and the Île-de-France region puts the damage above a million euros. Bottles, firecrackers and stones thrown at the police, windows smashed, a town hall forced, a police officer hit: these are offences, and those who commit them must answer for them. Some, even among elected officials, call this violence legitimate in the face of police brutality. We do not share that view. First, because it is the students themselves who pay for it, with closed schools and lost lessons. Second, because it hands a ready-made argument to those who would rather talk about order than about school. Amnesty International France says so in the same breath as everything else : the violence of some demonstrators is "unjustifiable".

But that firmness applies to the other side too and this is where we want to be demanding. According to the Justice Ministry, nearly nine in ten of those arrested are minors. In Lens, as we said, a fifteen-year-old lost a hand ; police sources say he picked up the grenade, and the inquiry must establish whether it struck him directly and whether the shot followed the rules. In Tours, a sixteen-year-old lost the use of an eye, which the prosecutor considers compatible with a shot from a rubber-ball launcher (LBD). In Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône, a fourteen-year-old was hit in the jaw after, according to the prosecutor, having struck a police officer. The Interior Minister says thirty-six inquiries are open, four of them for maiming injuries.

On October 7th, he suspended one model of stun grenade "for as long as it takes to understand what happened"; on October 16th, he said such grenades could be used again the next day in case of "serious urban violence". None of these cases has been judged, and we judge nothing either. We also know that police officers are hurt too, and that a union such as Alliance says it received "contradictory orders" and is preparing a complaint against the State for endangerment. Police officers are not adversaries. They too are exposed, on the ground, to a conflict they did not start.

What we are saying is that there is a rule and it is the same for everyone. Force is permitted only if absolutely necessary and proportionate, two warnings must come first except when violence is aimed at the forces of order, and a person's being a minor weighs on what counts as proportionate, as Professor Pierre Egéa of the Club des juristes reminds us, adding at once that it does not neutralise the State's response. A State that asks teenagers to respect the law has a duty to apply its own.

A pebble and a ball launcher do not go on the same scale: the first is thrown by an individual breaking the law, the second is held by an institution that was given the monopoly of force in exchange for rules. That is the rule the inquiries have to check, and we want to see it checked all the way, and in public.

What can be done

An inequity has no culprit to prosecute, so you do not fight it by hunting for someone to blame. You fight it by making it visible, by sending resources where the need is greatest, and by measuring what each decision changes. The government has begun to respond: five "workstreams" announced on October 2nd covering replacements, buildings, the length of the lycée day, a clearer Parcoursup and a stronger student voice in school councils, followed by the redeployment of several thousand substitute teachers and, according to the minister, a sharp fall in the number of schools in severe shortage. That is a beginning, and it should be acknowledged. But the official text of the five workstreams contains no figure and no amount, and the Union étudiante calls them "hollow announcements". A promise without a number is not yet a response. It is an intention, and we have heard many.

So we ask for three things, which are our own.

The first is to know. The country should be able to see, school by school and every quarter, how many teaching hours went unreplaced, how big the classes are and what state the buildings are in. The audit office measured the loss nationally and by district; we need to go down to the door of each lycée, because that is where inequality is lived, and where we can check that resources go first to the schools that lack them most.

The second is to count, for the street as for the State. A public, independent count should record the injuries, the weapons used and the outcome of every inquiry at demonstrations involving minors. The figures we have quoted change by hundreds depending on the day and the source. That blur serves everyone who wants to be right without having to prove it. An independent count would give the point to whoever is right, whatever their camp. On the weapons themselves the debate is open: Amnesty wants rubber-ball launchers suspended against lycée students, the Socialist group announces a bill to ban maiming weapons at demonstrations involving minors, and the government has suspended one grenade model and leaves the rest to the inquiries. We ask first that it be known.

The third is to evaluate before reforming, and after. Parcoursup is the example: the CGT says it deepens social selection, the government refuses to scrap it but is open to changes, and Insee found social segregation overall stable between 2017 and 2019, though that data stops there. We want a social evaluation published every year, by track and by territory, so that this debate rests on facts and not on convictions. It should accompany every reform of student orientation or school catchment.

These three demands are not free, and we have no costing for them. The rest, renovating buildings, hiring, the ten billion euros some students ask for, is a matter of political choice that we will not settle here. But anyone can act at their own scale: ask your children's school, or your own, for its replacement and class-size figures, bring them to the board of governors, and use the lycée life councils to insist that answers be published, with a date.

What will be objected

An engaged article that does not listen to the other side is a pamphlet, and we want to write something else. Here are the most serious objections, as their defenders would put them.

The first is about money. France runs a deficit above 5% of GDP, and it is not true that every demand, however fair, can be met at once: the billions some students ask for would have to come from somewhere. We have no costed answer to this, and we will not pretend to. We say only that deciding what to fund is a political choice, and that people choose better with school-by-school facts than with national averages.

The second is about the school itself. Social inequality is already there at age three, and it would be unfair to make the school alone carry what also belongs to families, neighbourhoods and housing. PISA scores, as the Observatoire des inégalités itself reminds us, capture only a small part of what pupils know. And on at least one measure, how often young adults earn a degree when their parents have one, France is no worse placed than the OECD average. We have not hidden this: there are nuances, and they sit alongside the harsher figures without cancelling them.

The third is about order. The government answers that far-left militants have infiltrated the movement, that police officers, teachers and pupils have been hurt, that schools have burned, and that the State has a duty to protect students who want to go to class, as the UNI union also says. According to Brut, the Interior Minister rejected any suggestion of a disproportionate intervention. These arguments are serious, and they do not contradict what we ask: if the force used was proportionate, a public count and inquiries pursued to the end will show it. Those who are sure of their right have nothing to fear from a count.

The fourth is about the majority who simply want to go to class. The UNI union says it speaks for students whom the blockades keep from studying, and its petition against them reportedly gathered tens of thousands of signatures. On the other side, a poll reported by Le Figaro, whose institute and date we do not know, would indicate that a majority of French people consider the movement justified, while an even larger share think La France insoumise is exploiting it for political ends. These two facts do not exclude each other, and we draw from them no more than they say.

Don't ask them to wait

We like to tell young people that they are the future. It is a convenient way of asking them to wait: to finish school, to earn a diploma, to finally get a voice.

These students have decided not to wait any longer, because the future we talk about begins in a room that is too hot, in front of a teacher who will not come.

We do not have to like all their methods. We have said what we think of those who burn and those who hit, and what we expect of a State that must account for the force it uses. But we refuse the comfort of judging the methods so as never to hear the demand. When a country spends weeks debating stones and grenades, and so little about the maths hour nobody taught, it has found an elegant way of not answering.

Equal opportunity is easy to say. We celebrate it at the start of every school year, in speeches, on the pediments of public buildings. What is missing is not the sentence but someone to keep it: someone who accepts that it has a cost, a date, a number and a name at the bottom of a document. A promise that no one broke and no one keeps is not repaired by better intentions. It is repaired when someone, somewhere, agrees to answer for it.

This concerns us, the readers. We are not all ministers and we are not all students. But we are parents, colleagues, voters, neighbours of a lycée. We can ask for the figures of the school down the road. We can refuse the indifference that stays indignant longer about a broken shop window than about a class with no teacher. We can demand that the investigations go all the way, for the injured on both sides.

These students are not asking us to agree with them on everything. They are asking us to look. And not to tell them, once again, to come back later.