The Current - Why are students in France protesting?

Episode Date: October 7, 2026

More than 250,000 students, teachers and parents are protesting across France over the conditions in the country’s high schools. Some demonstrations have turned violent, with police using tear gas and water canisters against protesters. Sophie Pedder, Paris Bureau Chief at the Economist, talks about what students are calling for. 

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. High school students in France are fed up, and the country's student protests are widening. Around 250,000 people marched through the streets of various French cities yesterday, protesting what they say is a crumbling school system. We want governments to invest more in public school. because the schools are falling apart. There can be leaked in the ceilings. The condition in which we work is very poor.

We have buildings that are like the roof just fell on the students. A lot of floods in the buildings, a lot of rats. This is the third week of student protests, and some of those protests have turned violent. Police have fired tear gas and water cannons at protesters. Demonstrators have had garbage cans on fire, destroyed bus shelters. And all of this is happening at a time when,

France faces a fiscal crisis and political instability. Sophie Petter is the Paris Bureau Chief for the Economist. Sophie, hello. Hi, nice to join you. Good to have you here. What's the mood like in Paris today? Well, it remains tense. I mean, yesterday was obviously a big day because it was a planned one-day demonstration. So you had a lot of people out on the streets joining those protests. Today we're back to present to demonstrations outside particular schools and some of those have spread to a number of universities as well. But there's a sort of tension in the air because I think that people are finding difficult to see how this comes to a satisfactory end, as you pointed out. Budget to squeeze, there isn't more money to sort of throw out the problem, and the students

aren't about to have their demands met in the short run. So it's a very, very difficult situation for the government to manage. You've been speaking with some of the students taking part in the protests. What are they calling for from their government? What do they want? Well, it was very interesting yesterday when I joined the protests on the streets in Paris because I felt that there were a really quite varied array of demands. I mean, one of them is, as the your excerpts have just pointed out, some of them are to do with the buildings, lack of repairs, some of them to do with school timetables. There's been a reform of the school leaving exam, the baccalaurean.

That has made timetables more heavy. So these are very sort of specific school-related demands. But there are also people who want the government to fall. They are calling on Emmanuel Macron the president to resign. And then there are other people I spoke to who said that their real worry is that Marine Le Pen might win the election next year. So you have both the very specific related to schools, and you have much broader political demands, which just express, I think, a sense of frustration and real uncertainty about what's going to happen in France in the coming months. In a piece that you wrote for the economist, you say that there was a comment made by one of the heads of

the high school union saying that his union had received many complaints from final year pupils, and this is something, as you say, that perhaps could only be uttered in France, about the lack of philosophy teachers. Well, philosophy is compulsory in the French school leaving exam, as you probably imagine it would be. But this means that if you don't have philosophy teachers, you are available to teach you during your final year. You're liable to fail the exam at the end, and that will penalize your results and therefore narrow your choices about going to university. So So it is, you know, you could sort of smile at the situation and suggest it's very French, which it is in one way. But it is also quite serious for the pupils.

There have been a lot of teachers with burnout, with issues that have meant that they had to, they haven't been in the classroom. And that has been difficult for the pupils. How has the government responded to this? Well, it's interesting in one respect, because the government has accused the far left of making the violence. fanning the violence by getting involved and infiltrating the student protest. I did hear some students saying that. So in a way, it's trying to deflect, the government's trying to deflect the blame by saying that it's the Jean-Luquesne enchant on the far left, sorry, who is trying to exploit this anger for electoral ends. He's very popular among young people and he's running for the presidency

next year. But the government, it can't increase the budget. It's held a few crisis meetings. It's tried to mediate. It's now our schools to help. hold half-day consultations with their own pupils in order to try and find a way to resolve things at a very local level. But it's very difficult and certainly the students are very angry at the police tactics being used. And the left wing has accused the government of ordering a repressive crackdown. So you've got accusations flying on each side and a government without a budget to be able to sort of solve the problem that way. It's going to have to rely on mediation and then half term, which comes up at the end of the month. People could joke that protesting is a bit of a national pastime in France, and there have been very large protests in past.

How is, is this different from, you know, the yellow vests protests or what we've seen recently? I mean, it's less, the numbers are lower than the yellow vests at the moment, which went on for a long time. And the violence, certainly the violence and the vandalism was extreme during that time. We had to have, we had motorized, you know, armed vehicles on the streets of Paris. We haven't seen that. We've just seen riot police. an ordinary sort of law and order vehicles. But it is, as you said, it's a way of protesting in France.

It's considered very legitimate. You know, there are lots of union protests, and these are always organised in connection with the police so that they follow routes that have been agreed in advance, and often they use their own security to try and keep them under control. And I would say, you know, there have been a lot of violence on the streets, and yesterday was violent. But it was also, at the beginning of the afternoon,

there was a lot of cheerful, kind of festive atmosphere as some of the young people turned up to take part. So it is considered almost a rite of passage, I think, for students to take part in demos. The difficulty is when they turn violent. And the difficulty is also when there are troublemakers, cassero as they're known, who come along and see this as an excuse to make things worse. So it can always be a sort of tinderbox situation. I need to let you go, but just very briefly, you described the mood in France in some ways as Fibrelle, like that it's about to erupt in some ways. What's the context that these protests are happening in? And what does that say about where they may go? Well, I think there are two things.

One is that we're six months ahead of a presidential election. And after 10 years of under Emmanuel Macron, the president, there's a real sense of uncertainty. Nobody knows what's going to happen. Marine Le Pen on the far left, far right, sorry, should, could win. So there's a sense of anxiety about that. But there's also economic pressure. You have very high. cost of living at the moment. You have petrol prices at the pump which are very high, and you have a government with terrible public finances that is trying to squeeze budgets

all over the place. So it's a tense time economically people feel the budget to squeeze, but they also feel that their future is very uncertain because of this election next year. Sophie, thank you very much for this. Pleasure. Sophie Petter is the Paris Bureau Chief for the Economist, and she was in Paris.

You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more cBC podcasts go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts