What distinguishes the current movement from the high school movements of the past three decades is the absence of any opposition to a bill or law that would have crystallised energies and rallied scattered forces.

Opposition to the Devaquet law in 1986, to the CIP in 1994, then to the CPE in 2006, and so on all involved a single object of refusal, clearly perceived by all, which constituted the movement's unity, its dynamic.¹ Admittedly, once the bill or law was either withdrawn or amended, this unitary coherence would sag; but there was a definite unity.

In recent weeks, no such unitary refusal has existed. The 'demands', which are not in fact designated as such and are somewhat reminiscent of the Cahiers de doléances,² are vague, indeterminate, disparate. Calls for fewer hours of class time have appeared alongside complaints about the dilapidated state of buildings (even though it was a brand-new lycée that burnt down) and about teachers not being replaced, and so on. This all-encompassing scope and heterogeneity of demands certainly pertain to conditions of work and life, but it is precisely this all-encompassing scope that makes the actions less perceptible, both from inside and from outside the unrest.

If the meaning of schoolwork is being raised, it is raised in terms of the quantity of class time, i.e., a demand for fewer hours. Add to this the fact that for the past fifteen or twenty years there has been no compulsory homework. We thus arrive at the cognitive loss widely observed and measured, without any qualitative signs of cognitive development emerging clearly.

As for calling the institution into question and criticising the pupil–teacher relationship, while such a political objective still made sense into the 1980s and 1990s, it no longer does today.

Like the other 'institutions' in every field, the state and social mediations of the traditional school institution have been reabsorbed to the point of becoming… evanescent.

Within the powerful and omnipotent dynamic of AI, what the teacher teaches tends to become superfluous; what they know is now merely one form of knowledge among others, compared with what is available on social media. This heightens their own sense of devaluation, which in turn colours the pupils' perception of them. Yet, contradictorily, this does not stop the latter from formally demanding more teachers or replacements, and from being rather opposed, like university students for that matter, to lessons organised 'remotely'. Teachers and pupils are thus brought together by a shared awareness of an indignity inflicted on schools in general and on those who teach or learn there.

Moreover, in the first forms of action in front of and inside the lycées, certain riotous dimensions can be observed that have caught the high school unions, a good many mobilised pupils and the schools' management off guard.

That accounts for the violence of the police response. Here too, there are significant differences from the high school movements of the past, which suffered from that violence more than they took part in it.

In 2006, at the time of the anti-CPE movement, we produced two pamphlets on the question of blockades in which we said that, compared with the previous generation of 'heirs',³ today's students are not recognised by capitalised society⁴ (this could be dated to 1994 and the moment of the CIP, from which the idea of a youth minimum wage emerged).

The slogan 'Neither CPE nor CDI', which surfaced only sporadically, implicitly suggests the movement's maximum radicality, which still included a critique of work, whereas today the political radicality being claimed seems to express itself in the terms of anti-fascism, sympathy for LFI⁵ or support for Palestine.

In a supplement to issue no. 14 reviewing the high school and student struggles between 1986 and 2006, we concluded: 'Because it included a dimension of "student commune" but quickly went beyond that single dimension, the revolutionary moment of May '68 has been a reference point for all the student and high school movements that have arisen since. But this reference has proved more symbolic than effective, since the two major interventions of the "student insurrection" of 1968, namely the critique of the university and the lycées as class institutions and the student–worker junction as a necessary revolutionary alliance, no longer constitute decisive political objectives either for high school students or for university students. The decomposition of the old class society and the crisis of its recomposition in capitalised society have emptied the university and productive labour of their substance. By confronting this historical contradiction concretely, the high school and student movements have enabled those who fight against domination not to mistake the era they are in, which explains the ambivalence of all these movements towards 1968.'

Despite everything one may read and hear, there is no continuity between May '68 and today; we are no longer in the same era, even if a memory of the revolutionary events still endures.

A few remarks on the movement

'Those moments when one becomes aware of belonging to a time greater than that of one's own life' Marine Atlan

• The high school movement started out from deteriorated conditions of study and life, not from the  rejection of a reform project; in this respect it is closer to the Yellow Vests movement than to its predecessors.

• The movement has raised the meaning of schoolwork, but without calling into question the institution, or even the teacher–pupil relationship, let alone the use of AI. All the demands seem to have been given the same status, like 'Cahiers de doléances' that had not, however, been formalised as such. Nevertheless, some writers speak of the qualitative character of the movement's demands. For example, Yannick Haenel, in Libération on 16 October 2026, shifts the traditional question put (or not) to the young – 'What do you want to do with your life?', that is, a question centred on doing, on achievement, formerly on work, and so on – towards a more existential question: 'What do you expect from your life?'
  

  In other words, he introduces a horizon of expectation for the young (here, high school students) that does not confine them to the present conditions that worry them: accessing income, not being limited in their immediate enjoyment or their future aspirations, the climate threat, wars, and so on.
  

  This shift is nonetheless reduced to the purely individual, subjective, particular dimension of young individuals taken in themselves. It is the question itself, 'What do you expect from your life?', that contains this solipsistic orientation and thus erases or cancels the collective dimensions of life.
  

  Haenel's subjectivism also shows in his citation of Hegel on the limited satisfaction of the individual who 'measures the extent of their loss'. Whereas for Hegel it is first of all a matter of historical dissatisfaction, Haenel collapses it into individual dissatisfaction.
  

  However, the more quantitative or concrete demands are numerous and in the end come close to those of teachers on the subject, a closeness which hardly generates any internal dynamic, since any link-up can only be made on the basis of the lowest common denominator and the predominance of teachers' doublespeak; a point we will come back to.

• The stress of being sorted through Parcoursup⁶ is patent, but few seem to grasp the cause-and-effect relationship between the near-absence of selection before Parcoursup and the sorting that takes place within it in the absence of a numerus clausus, which has long ceased to be a threat except in medicine. This is yet another example of false consciousness.

• The high school pupils’ reference to 'Acts'⁷ is clearly a nod to the Yellow Vests movement, even if their political positioning is scarcely any clearer. The left-wing atmosphere that can be observed is more the effect of a self-proclaimed vanguard and of the university students' imprint on the movement than of any real partisan positioning. The widespread presence of French national flags at demonstrations, some even with the circled A of anarchy, does nothing to clarify matters, while almost no red flags are in sight.

• The current high school agitation has revived a feature that had been noteworthy up to 1994 and the struggle against the Contrat d'insertion professionnelle (CIP), namely the alliance between the vocational lycées and the technical and general lycées.⁸ The breakdown of that alliance produced a territorial split to which the banlieue revolt of 2005 – left to its own devices by university students who went off to rise up on their own – and the blockades of 2006 seemed to have given near-permanent status. The practices of petty theft and racketeering between the two components of the youth revolt of the time had only made things worse, until the first signs of a turnaround in 2023, when a certain unity was recreated in protest after the killing of Nahel,⁹ but within the more general and apparently favourable context of the struggle over pensions.

• In spatial terms, the current revolt nevertheless initially retained a focus on schools in the immediate and outer, rural suburbs, where specific confrontations and actions take place. Without speaking of planning or coordination of the struggle, there are attempts at self-organisation, though without this emerging as a goal or taking a precise form. In city centres, the movement is less school-centred, owing to the greater sociological and geographical mixing of pupils. The blockade is thus only a starting point, sometimes preceded by a few general assemblies, and subsequently progressing towards the outside and a demonstration in the city centre. Abrupt police intervention to disperse pupils and lift the blockades reinforces this tendency for the struggle to be externalised, and moreover proves completely at odds with the ministerial idea of citizens' debates inside the schools. It has in fact just been announced that there will be a half-day per week of 'internal democracy', in the form of general assemblies, so that high school pupils can discuss their problems and formulate their proposals. The national headteachers' union has said that they 'no longer understand any of it' and that they refuse to organise it. What this immediately calls to mind are  the 'Grands débats' organised by Macron after the Yellow Vests episode.¹⁰
  

  But this pseudo-anticipation will of course come to nothing. It also says a lot about the feverish state in which 'the authorities' find themselves.

• It is hard to characterise the high school action and its nature as a movement with much precision. First, the demands put forward are numerous and sometimes contradictory (more or, on the contrary, fewer hours of class time, for example), because situations are not identical. Second, because only a small minority of pupils were initially involved before the police repression, the de facto high school vanguard and/or its pre-existing organisations imposed from the outset a blockade tactic that made it harder to organise internal general assemblies of the kind that existed, for instance, in 1994. This provided a launch pad for street demonstrations from the 'rear base' that the lycée represents, allowing the struggle to be organised both inside and outwards without being too exposed to intervention by the police, who rarely enter secondary schools.

If we look back at past experiences, we see that, except perhaps in 1968, when some discussions and reforms were sketched out – around school rules, the marking system and so on – lycées can crystallise a discontent, or a revolt and a rootedness, but without providing a rear base of the kind that universities and, naturally, factories have been. Going out therefore appears to be the only solution for collective self-expression, making the movement visible and also broadening it. Apart from a few 'wildcat' walkouts, the simplest thing in such a case is to head for the city centre.

This has considerable implications, since the absence of any coordination¹¹ born of the struggle sets up the pseudo-unions of high school pupils as those who dictate the strategy to be followed: a strategy of declared demonstrations with pre-planned routes, and of a convergence of struggles as half-hearted as it is artificial.

Blockades, from practice to ideology

In 2006, blockades appeared to be an adequate strategy of struggle, seeming to replace the general assemblies of 1986 and 1994, since the universities no longer provided the movement with a genuine rear base, owing to the absence of any genuine student life and also to the desertion of the campuses by the most radical elements, for example the insurrectionists. But what was a technique for paralysing the routine activity of the places where knowledge is transmitted quickly became an ideology and a mimetic practice, a palliative for the weakness of successive mobilisations since 2006. The blockade thus produced temporary closures, administrative closures and incidents at the gates, tending to overvalue the visibility afforded by the media coverage it generated.

Outside observers (no doubt on the left) note that a blockade is not in itself violence and would correspond to factory picket lines. Yet a factory blockade is most often accompanied by occupation, whereas a school blockade tends to empty the premises. In the case of universities and campuses, this even gives management and vice-chancellors the possibility of administrative closures that hinder the organisation of general assemblies or other forms of action.

The role of the university students

As we saw during the Yellow Vests movement, any political strategy of 'convergence of struggles' is in practice politicking or bureaucratic, in the sense of an inverted convergence: those who are not actually engaged in struggle converge with those who already are, but with the priorities reversed. All of this occurs on the basis of a completely abstract definition of struggle.¹²

As they have been in the habit of doing for several years, the university students, incapable of developing a movement of their own, have taken the lead at the central demonstrations, often relegating the high school students to the middle of the procession. As usual, too, their political slogans, which seem radical to them though they are simplistic and Pavlovian (ACAB, Siamo tutti antifascisti), have drowned out the few allusions by high school students and teachers to the living and study conditions of pupils (and of teachers, for that matter), which were conveyed more by individual placards, often inventive, and relevant to the matter at hand. The virulence of the repression also enabled a unification of slogans in this anti-cop direction, and many high school students, as soon as they left the lycée for the street, swapped their placards voicing demands or inventive ideas  to proclaim their hatred of the police.

Teachers joining with pupils, or protecting them as parents?

In the current morass, the majority of adults, at any rate, seemed happy to warm themselves a little – indeed, in the sunshine – though there was something protective, more than paternalistic, about their solidarity, as if they had no real grounds to be angry themselves. The fact is that there is no, or no longer any, 'school community' as could still be claimed before the 2000s. For one to exist at a minimum, there must be an exchange of rights and duties, however unequal, and trust rather than reciprocal mistrust – the latter also produced by doublespeak and by the real violence that runs through an institution in deep crisis. Teachers are, moreover, historically wary of any contact on an equal footing in struggle, since it necessarily calls into question, even temporarily, the founding inequality of knowledge. The teacher can therefore support the pupils' struggle, but only a tiny, insignificant minority has actually ever taken part in it, in any era. In a situation of acute crisis in the reproduction of institutions, even teachers who are sometimes bled white by the deterioration of the institution contradictorily make themselves its guarantors because, as is well known, you mustn’t saw off the branch you’re sitting on. They are therefore very divided over blockades, since they affect the functioning of the institution, and more in favour of action directed outwards, provided it is respectful and organised, since most pupils are minors. But this runs up against the state's response, which is anything but respectful, and here too the legacy of the past is large and striking, such as the humiliation suffered by pupils in Mantes-la-Jolie in 2018 (mass arrest, on their knees, hands on heads),¹³ which fuelled the nascent Yellow Vests movement.

Under these conditions, the savage repression turned many teachers into parents or grandparents who feared for their children and for children in general, with the sudden impression that many pupils were only children – to whom one nevertheless speaks more and more often as to adults, and from whom one demands work, effort and even a project and – why not – a career plan. There was indeed solidarity, though at times with paternalistic overtones.

A French exception?

Could France constitute a general counter-example, quite apart from the question of youth, marked by continuous disorder, protest and repression over the past ten years, but also through its possible references, regularly invoked (to the French Revolution and its Article 35 on the legitimacy of revolt,¹⁴ to the Canuts who would rather die standing than live on their knees,¹⁵ to the Gavroche of 1832 anticipating 1848, to the pétroleuses of the Commune, to May '68 and its barricades¹⁶ )? What is reassuring is that, though the red thread of historical class struggles has been severed, the memory of the revolutionary periods of our history endures, even as we have, from a theoretical standpoint, pronounced the completion of historical and dialectical time.¹⁷ The French Revolution, as well as events such as 1848 and the Commune, seem more connected to the idea of the people's struggle than to that of class struggle, but, by contrast with the right-wing identitarians, without the reference to a 'French' people being invoked as a discriminating factor. In any case, it breaks with the dominant presentism and with the absence of the kind of alternative projection that could still appear until the end of the 1970s.

On the Sunday 18 October edition of C politique on France 5, devoted to legitimate violence in the face of high school violence, a specialist in these questions, Sebastian Roché, pointed out that the French police were the only ones in Europe to behave in this way, while being subject only to internal oversight by the IGPN¹⁸ – as the Council of Europe has also pointed out. But as the saying goes: which came first, the chicken or the egg? What is certain is that, apart from a few mortar rounds¹⁹ and limited acts of violence, the high school students, the university students and even the Black Blocs or their like now faced the police unarmed – unlike the situation in May '68, when many demonstrators came equipped – and face Robocops far better outfitted now than they were at the time.

This constant of repression does not only concern the media's much-vaunted Gen Z, far from it, since during the battle over pensions trade union officials were attacked by police on 1 May,²⁰ and the Yellow Vests, finally, cannot be assigned to Gen Z. Indeed, the gatherings of 17 October brought together people of different ages, origins and milieus, in the manner of the Yellow Vests but within a broader framework that went beyond the half-hearted side of 'Tous Yellow Vests' ['All Yellow Vests'], though without having either its force or its dynamic.

What is new is the label of 'urban violence' applied to high school pupils, which denies their revolt any categorial specificity or legitimacy, unlike in 1968, 1986, 1994 and 2006, even though in their demands they very often ask only for what is owed to them within the framework of the public education service.

But there is indeed a constant in the repressive strategy against school-age youth. During the demonstrations of 1986, there were numerous injuries and one death (Malik Oussekine), with the use of the voltigeurs;²¹ . Implicated in the death of the young Malik Oussekine on the night of 5–6 December 1986, during the student protests in Paris against the Devaquet law, these baton-wielding brigades were dissolved and later replaced by the BRAV-M, created in 2019 following the Yellow Vests movement.] in 1994 in Nantes and Lyon, riotous tendencies were already present and the police hit back hard. The difference is that today, and ever since the Yellow Vests, police violence has become the systematic response and, above all, certain lethal weapons are used that were not before.

But today, use of the 'urban violence' label seems overdetermined by the fact that ‘civil disorder’ had hitherto been primarily confined to the immediate and outer suburbs, recalling the pattern of the 2005 revolt and a fortiori the revolts of the 1980s in Vaulx-en-Velin and Les Minguettes in Vénissieux. Today, when this type of action spreads, it is from the periphery to the centre, in an entirely different configuration from 2005 – first with the Yellow Vests movement in 2018, then with the protest movement over the death of Nahel in 2023.

That being said, centring demonstrations on repression or violence leads nowhere politically. Experience shows that when this aspect prevails over everything else, once the peak of mobilisation has passed, there is a sharp fall-off, unless relief comes from outside, as in May '68 with the general strike – a possibility today, but only if the graft were to take, and with sufficient  breadth and intensity.

We maintain the historical distinction between an insurrection and a riot. The future of a riot is another riot, no doubt meant to show once again that state power is weak and the insurgents are strong, or quite simply that they exist. This insurrectionist hypothesis implies that the upholders of the established order will in the end be so demoralised by repeated 'insurrections' that they will desert their institutions. But, a priori, it is rather far-fetched to suppose that the latter will throw in the towel out of discouragement merely in the face of fires and smashed shop windows.

The media response

The media treatment of this high school movement is heavily marked by a presentist bias. In this respect, their reference to 1968 is not the recognition of a historical filiation of today's movements with the Comités d'action lycéens (CAL) of 1968 or with the demands of that era, but on the contrary a way of effacing a certain constancy in the anger and agitation that has animated high school struggles, some of which have been plainly blotted out – such as that of 1973 against the revocation of military deferments under the Debré law²² – just as the powerful high school movement of 1994 against the Contrat d'insertion professionnelle (CIP) has also been blotted out. What matters to the media is to create buzz around the present and therefore, as a first step, to isolate it. The same goes for the level of damage or violence: they forget that of the 2005 banlieue revolt; the torching of the prefecture in Le Puy-en-Velay during the Yellow Vests movement, a prelude to that of the Limoges town hall. Finally, the looting is said to be on an unprecedented scale, whereas a whole section of the shops behind and along the Champs-Élysées were devastated – such as Le Fouquet's, a luxury restaurant – during Act XVIII on 16 March 2019, and could not reopen until July. Many Yellow Vests were in fact arrested with their arms full of goods, but more as a Parisian souvenir for Yellow Vests from the provinces or the countryside than as selfish or commercial appropriation.

The media have another string to their bow when they play up the generational and international aspect of Gen Z, making it the sign of a generational conflict, as they had already tried to do in the years after 1968. There is admittedly an international dimension, but the movement of the squares in Spain, the umbrella movement in Hong Kong, the Yellow Vests in France, the struggle against the federal immigration police (ICE) in Minneapolis, the Baltimore riot of 2015, the struggle against the mega-basins or against the TAV in the Aosta Valley²³ are not specific to Gen Z. What these revolts and actions have in common is not so much the age of their protagonists as the absence of established leaders, the use of social and encrypted networks, a feeling of anger and a demand for justice and equality. Even without any clear desire for revolution, and above all without any perspective, one can feel revolutionary emotions vibrating in them.²⁴

Multitude

Despite media talk of convergence, because some Yellow Vests and the unions called on people to join the high school movement, there is no real convergence. We have already explained why the student pole of the demonstrators was not converging with but absorbing the high school movement. For the other components, it was more a matter of calls for individual presence than calls from groups or constituted forces, especially in the big cities, where the Yellow Vests no longer carry any weight as such, whereas they may still count for something in small towns and at a few roundabouts. Far be it from us to advertise a concept of Hardt and Negri's – the 'multitude', a notion we criticised in 'From national sovereignty to "Empire". Presentation and critical remarks on the book Empire by M. Hardt and A. Negri'²⁵ – but for the moment we can see no word more adequate to the situation of the 17th than this one. This is a multitude that observes itself, seeks to understand itself, and within which individualisation is at its height, even if an affinity more sentimental than political also plays its part and has, moreover, been what has bound the high school pupils together from the start.

But the number of high school students remains small relative to the demonstrators as a whole, and they do not play a driving role in the demonstrations, since they do not take the lead and do not demonstrate as collectives. One might welcome this absence of identity-based expression, but not if it means melting into the multitude under the leadership of university students who are no doubt in movement but do not form a movement, content, it seems, to lead the demonstrations on bases more ideological than the high school students' demands, which struggle to make themselves heard – not only by the government, but by the other demonstrators. There is no longer any need for the high school students' voice to be confiscated by the union and political organisations, since it already has been by the relative anti-cop and antifa consensus of the partisans of the entre-soi.²⁶

In addition, despite the momentary outrage over violence against very young demonstrators, it is highly unlikely that 'ACAB' and 'Everybody hates the police' will spread into the world of work, or even among a large part of the residents of the 'quartiers',²⁷ who are calling, among other things, for more community policing and more public services.

Once again, the insurrectionist temptation

Ritchie T, from the depths of his prison cell, in Lundi matin of 20 October 2026,²⁸ speaks of 'trickle-down' in action for the day of the 17th. The image is politically good, since it hijacks liberal theory, but it stays at the level of imagery because here the difference is that there was a lot of opportunistic looting, due to the police not intervening, or intervening poorly or insufficiently, and that, unlike with the Yellow Vests, there was no real objective; the city centre was simply occupied, and to that extent the opportunity to loot was completely disconnected from any confrontation with the police.

The passivity, or at least the lack of political initiative, of what can only be called the 'occupiers' of Lyon's Presqu'île, for example, rather than 'demonstrators', also showed in the absence of any attack on a bank, which has nonetheless been a recurrent feature of most demonstrations over the past ten years. The term 'looting' is, moreover, debatable: there was some when things burned, in the case of certain large chains, but most of the time it was more a matter of individual and collective appropriation for ends that were certainly not the destruction of the world of consumption. If we may venture a historical comparison, in what was called the 'looting' of the Latin Quarter in Paris in June 1971, the contents of shop windows were distributed to those around or left lying on the ground. Likewise, though wrapped in populist Maoist ideology, there was a raid on the luxury food shop Fauchon in Paris by militants of the Gauche prolétarienne.²⁹

What is unquestionable is that the strategy of pre-emptive kettling by the cops, replicated in several cities including Paris and Lyon, was a failure. The explanation for the weak police mobilisation and action in the provinces cannot, however, explain it in Paris, where – as on 24 May 1968, for that matter – the bulk of the national police forces were concentrated.

Revolt, riots and insurrections

In our article 'A moment of riotous revolt', in Lundi matin, no. 392, 4 August 2023, we noted: 'First of all, an essential point about the semantic shift that occurred between 2005 and 2023, including in Temps critiques. Thus, whereas in our article in no. 14 ("La part du feu", 2005) we reported on a banlieue revolt that few of us at the time were willing to salute without mythologising it, today – including, then, within the journal, if some letters and oral discussions are to be believed – it would seem that the question of revolt has receded into the background or even been hidden from view by a new emphasis on the phenomenon of the "riot", as if it overdetermined or concentrated everything there is to say on the subject. Yet a riot is only a concrete expression, in a particular form, of that primary revolt based on anger and emotions that no longer find any political transcription.' But since 2023, the latest events have confirmed us in our critique of the idea expressed by Joshua Clover³⁰ of 'the riot prime' (cf. 'Une thèse émeutiste' in Temps critiques no. 19, autumn 2018) as a strategy, whereas if the riot does take primacy, for us that is a limit.³¹ Recall that for Marx, at this period of his work, 'the human essence is the true community of men'; for him, therefore, the individual is not separable from the human community (Gemeinwesen). Yet in the riot the individual is shut up in their individuality, in their subjectivity as a rioter, seeking to draw from their action the greatest profit for themselves; no solidarity, of any kind, can manifest itself. In the riot, the human-community pole of the individual/community relation is absent. The riotous act is a nihilistic act sui generis.]

Insurrectionist tendencies of all kinds – stemming from 'autonomia' as much as from the 'Invisible Committee' and its offshoots – which make up the hard core of activists for what they consider 'legitimate revolutionary violence', trap themselves, since the best they can do in terms of insurrection is to settle for a riot. We have been saying so in recent years, insisting on 'the insurrection that is (not) coming'.³²

Now, a riot is closed in on itself; it is an immediate action, of the instant; it has no past and no future. The future of a riot… is another riot and strictly nothing else. The high school revolt thus finds itself encompassed, dissolved, in two activisms without exit:

On the one hand, that of the 'convergence of struggles', which admittedly brought people together on Saturday 17 October, but whose artificiality and half-hearted side we have criticised (cf. above).

On the other hand, the strong riotous surge that gets the upper hand over everything else and procures at least a feeling of existing and, in return, a form of recognition from a power that gives no sign of it.³³

We will simply add, by way of conclusion, that from a historical point of view an insurrection aims at obtaining something other than material damage, which for its part can be reduced to its purely symbolic value.