Inside France’s Fiery Protests: ‘We Feel Completely Lost’

BORDEAUX, FRANCE — France’s student-led protest movement, which generated shocking scenes of violence and destruction and at least partially inspired a wave of similar civil unrest in other parts of Europe, shows few signs of abating.

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators turned out in cities across France for the third straight weekend, despite a massive mobilization of police and security services aimed at quashing riots and looting that broke out after previous protests. At its peak last weekend, organizers said a million people had taken to the streets.

The movement has drawn in a broad coalition of student groups, trade unions, and political activists. While the students who began the demonstrations have specific grievances about the French education system, the protests are becoming a generational cri de coeur about fading economic prospects and quality of life across Europe.

“Whether we’re from the suburbs, the countryside or the big city, we don’t know what future to imagine for ourselves,” says Mathys Le Coz Ndzié, a 17-year-old Parisian. “The current government hasn’t managed to give us a clear picture of the future, or the world we’re heading into. So we feel completely lost.”

“Will our degrees still be worth anything when we’re 30, long after we’ve finished our studies?” the student asks. “We haven’t been prepared for the world that’s coming. The one they’ve prepared us for no longer exists.”

Le Coz Ndzié is among the tens of thousands of high-schoolers who joined the protests in recent weeks, demanding more funding, more teachers and better educational facilities.

“We’ve all seen the images shared by our fellow students in the banlieues, showing dilapidated buildings, crumbling classrooms. The conditions in which we’re studying are just shameful,” Le Coz Ndzié says. His own school in Paris has few major problems, he says. But he joined the protests in solidarity with students elsewhere. 

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While anger over France’s chronically underfunded education system may have been the catalyst for the protests, they have spiraled into a much broader economic movement.

“We have a supposedly rich country, yet wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few. What we’re seeing is deteriorating living and working conditions, and deteriorating public services,” Diane Derrien, a 31-year-old labor attorney, tells Rolling Stone. “For me, it’s like May ‘68. Students started the movement, but ultimately it revealed very deep failings in society, affecting both students and the rest of the population.”

Regardless of the motivations and demands of protesters, it is the rioting and looting accompanying them which have caught the attention of politicians in France.

“The demands and complaints of the demonstrators could not be heard over the sound of destroyed storefronts, looted shelves, and burnt down infrastructure,” Thomas Cazenave, the mayor of Bordeaux, says.

The intensity and scale of the unrest caught the government of President Emmanuel Macron off-guard.

Sophie Brocas is prefect of Gironde, a department in a region of southwestern France known for its beaches and its wine, and is no stranger to emergencies. She spent the summer overseeing the evacuation of residents and tourists in the face of the region’s worst wildfires in decades.

Last week, the 65-year-old political appointee — a prefect is a kind of unelected governor — oversaw the evacuation of her own official residence in Bordeaux when rioting protesters stormed the building, looting it.

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The protesters were only dissipated when RAID — an elite French counterterror force —was dispatched to liberate the residence. 

“We were overwhelmed for several hours,” Brocas says. Describing the rioters, she says: “I believe their profile is quite varied. Forty percent are minors, and there are plenty of people with no criminal record, who are not habitual offenders but are what we call ‘opportunistic offenders.’”

“It’s looting for personal gain — either for personal profit, to resell, or because some of them simply get swept up in the action,” she says.

Bordeaux is just one of the many cities across France where protests devolved into mayhem and chaos, prompting Macron to respond with a draconian crackdown. More than 70,000 police, gendarmes, and soldiers have now been deployed in an effort to rein in violence.

“Nothing justifies it, nothing explains it, nothing excuses it,” Macron said in a televised address on Oct. 18, after large riots first broke out in Paris and Marseilles. “Tonight, we all feel anger and shame.”

Thousands of protesters and rioters have now been arrested, with several deaths. Macron, an increasingly unpopular leader in the final year of his presidency, has resisted declaring a state of emergency — as demanded by politicians on the far-right.

“The state has lost control of everything,” declared Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally party. Le Pen is widely considered a top contender for the presidential election set for May. She vowed that if elected to power, her party “would restore order.”

But the election is still seven months away. For now, Macron’s government is seeking to neutralize the protests much the same way as it did the Gilet Jaunes, or “Yellow Vests,” protests that began in the first year of his presidency: with a combination of concessions, dialogue, and a no-nonsense police response.

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, in a meeting with student leaders on Monday, promised an end to a controversial university admissions system, increased funding, more teachers, and more investment in schools. But the students say it is not enough, and have vowed to continue nationwide protests. Critics of the government note that although France’s senate quickly passed a bill aimed at increasing punishment for rioters in the immediate wake of the violence, they have not acted with equal urgency on education reforms. 

The violence in France has also attracted the attention of American politicians. 

“You’re destroying your country,” President Donald Trump said, in a broadside aimed at Macron.

Trump has sought to connect the protests to the upcoming U.S. midterm elections, telling a rally in Kansas that they would see similar unrest if Republicans did not win.

“We’re not going to let that happen to this country,” he said, continuing with a portmanteau he uses for Democrats. “When you see burning steeples and raging fires in ⁠France, just remember that is what the radical Dumocrats want to do to America.”

Trump was referencing a video that became a viral sensation online, of the burning spire of the Limoges town hall clock tower. While the truth was dramatic enough — rioters used a battering ram to break down the town hall’s doors before setting the building alight — numerous right-wing commentators portrayed the spire as a “steeple,” implying that rioters were burning down churches across France.

Far-right activists like Elon Musk, who habitually trade in “great replacement” and other white supremacist ideologies, routinely portray Europe as being overrun by Muslim immigrants. As rioting peaked, they sought to portray the unrest as a budding sectarian race war, in which a horde of Muslim immigrants was violently sweeping aside the increasingly outnumbered vestiges of European Christian civilization.

Such blatantly racist fear-mongering about barbarian hordes knocking at the gates of Europe have a long history, and meshes well with nativist anti-immigrant populism in the U.S. But aside from the presence of keffiyeh and Palestinian flags — which in many quarters have become an almost generic symbol of leftist resistance detached from their original context, like portraits of Che Guevara — there is little evidence to support the idea that the riots in France are motivated by a unified ideology, Islamist or otherwise.

There are, however, signs that the protests and their attendant unrest are manifestations of a broader anti-establishment sentiment, which became apparent as similar civil unrest spread across a range of European cities over the past two weeks.

In Italy, thousands marched in Milan and Rome against increased military spending and the war in Gaza. In Belgium, people rallied in Brussels against rising education costs. In Spain, citizens took to the streets of Madrid and Barcelona, protesting rising housing prices and rent. In Albania, a cycle of protests and crackdowns took on new life, as students gathered in Tirana against government corruption. In Serbia, a nearly two-year long student-led anti-corruption protest movement culminated in a victory party on Oct. 25th, with the ouster of Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić in an election.

Across 14 European nations, protests began or took on new life in October. While it may be too soon to say whether the movement in France is the harbinger of a spreading spirit of revolution across the continent, the fact is that almost all of the protests had something in common: they were largely initiated by Gen-Z students, and they all spread into wider complaints about cost-of-living.

The war in Ukraine has forced governments across Europe to boost defense spending, embarking on a major rearmament as they contemplate a direct confrontation with Russia. The war in Iran, meanwhile, has added to global instability and jacked up fuel prices around the world, affecting nearly every corner of economic activity.

Aurélien Boudon, a 36-year-old vocational high-school teacher in the Parisian suburb Saint-Denis, is national secretary of Solidaires, a French federation of trade unions. He says that students he talks to aren’t just complaining about the education system, “they were also talking about their parents, who can no longer afford to fill the gas tank or stock the fridge.” 

The economic pressure is only adding to a general anxiety about the future not felt in decades now permeates across most European societies, as does a feeling of helplessness.

“What people are asking is: What do we have to do to be heard?” asks Boudon. “They feel as though they’ve tried everything: petitions, demonstrations. Even when huge numbers turn out, even when everything happens peacefully — perhaps especially when everything happens peacefully — they aren’t heard.” 

With few solutions offered by the mainstream political establishment, people instead look elsewhere for answers. Civil discourse gives way to extremist politics in a kind of ideological parallel to the protests themselves: the often idealistic and well-meaning student demonstrators of the day give way to the anarchists, thieves, and casseurs — the “wreckers” or hooligans — of the night.

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