French Studies

Visit the website: ⁠www.frenchpolitics.fr/protest⁠ to visually experience signs from this movement while listening, as well as to find our sources.

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A student slogan becomes the starting point for an urgent examination of France’s unfolding high-school protest movement: “Nous manquons les cours pour vous en faire une” in English: “We’re missing class to teach you one.”

Across France, lycée students are mobilizing around absent teachers, overcrowded classrooms, deteriorating buildings, unequal access to education, Parcoursup anxiety, and a public-school system shaped by deep territorial and social divides. But as their demands spread beyond the banlieues and into cities nationwide, the state’s response has increasingly centered on police intervention, arrests, surveillance, and the language of “urban violence.”

This episode asks what happens when young people are told that education is the Republic’s highest priority, yet experience the state through shortage, inequality, police custody, and force. It examines the political meaning of protest signs, the escalation trap of confrontational policing, the media narratives that make student demands disappear behind images of disorder, and the contradiction at the heart of official discourse: students are treated as dangerous enough to arrest, yet supposedly too immature to speak for themselves.

From le bac (baccalaureat) to the BAC (anti-crime police), from the promise of republican equality to the realities of unequal schools, this is an analysis of education, policing, political language, and who gets to define a movement while it is still being written.

French political discourse often frames the present conflict as a choice between two dangerous extremes: the far right on one side, the radical left on the other. In this narrative, the center presents itself not as one political choice among many, but as the reasonable, responsible, and supposedly non-ideological alternative, the only option capable of governing.

This episode begins a series that will critically examine France’s major political parties and currents across the spectrum. The purpose is not to claim that they are all the same, but to question their narratives, policies, and relationship to power: who benefits, who pays, who is heard, and who is treated as a problem to manage.

In this first episode, I examine Emmanuel Macron and Macronism through the idea of the far center, a concept I have been developing in a book project. The episode asks what happens when the political center turns its own program into “reality,” dismisses alternatives as irresponsible or extreme, and treats democratic conflict as a failure of public understanding rather than a legitimate disagreement. From labor reform and policing to immigration, pension reform, education, and the post-2024 political crisis, this is a critique of the myth of neutral power.