[UNPAYWALLED] The French Protests, Explained

[UNPAYWALLED] The French Protests, Explained

Context behind the footage flooding your feed right now

shit you should care about

Oct 20, 2026

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Over the weekend, you probably saw footage from France.

If you follow young people or left-leaning creators, you would have seen hundreds of thousands of people marching peacefully through French cities, teenagers singing the Marseillaise, someone draping a yellow vest over Marianne (the great stone statue of the French Republic at Place de la République) and crowds singing ‘The Hanging Tree.”

If you follow news accounts, you probably saw burning cars, smashed storefronts, and masked figures hurling paving stones at riot police.

If you follow nobody in particular, you probably saw a fifteen-second clip with no context and scrolled on.

As someone who fits into both of those top categories, let me give you the context ◡̈

Where did this all start?

On September 17, students at a high school in Créteil, a suburb of Paris, blocked the entrance to their school in protest. The school had been chronically underfunded for years: crumbling facilities, a shortage of teachers - it was a system declining while the government looked elsewhere.

Within two weeks, hundreds of schools had followed.

And over the next month, 6,700 children were taken into police custody between mid-September and mid-October, most of them minors, most released without charge. By October, teachers, parents, and trade unions had joined. Then came the Yellow Vests (a working-class movement that first erupted in 2018 over fuel taxes and has never fully gone away), climate activists, and farmers.

What were students demanding?

More teachers - hundreds of classrooms across France had been running without qualified teachers for months, with students left in study halls or sent home

Better facilities - they were dealing with schools that had broken heating (and cooling), leaking roofs, and toilets that didn’t work.

Smaller class sizes -some classes had ballooned to 35 or 40 students with no solution in sight.

An end to the Choc des Savoirs reforms - these are a set of education policies introduced by the Macron government that basically fast-track high achievers and quietly write off everyone else.

And of course, the usual: A lower cost of living, public services that actually work, and to be treated like people and not problems.

What happened on October 17th?

October 17 was designated as a national day of action,

bringing all of these groups together for what would end up being the biggest mobilisation France had seen in years.

Between 550,000 and 800,000 people took to the streets, and in most cities, it was exactly what the students had asked for. Peaceful, loud, and impossible to ignore.

In Paris, shop windows were smashed, and cars were set on fire. In Marseille, groups forced their way into city hall and looted dozens of shops. In Lille, an Apple store was stripped bare. In Lyon, a tourism office was set ablaze.

By the end of the night, 1,800 arrests had been made nationwide and around 1,500 businesses were damaged.

Student leaders were quick to condemn this, but the interior minister called the whole thing “extremely violent,” blaming radical far-left groups,” so by the next morning, the headlines were about burning cars rather than the half a million people who had shown up to demand a better country.

Who was actually rioting?

Spoiler: it was not the students.

Al Jazeera has reported that it was largely a group called the black bloc, who are groups of masked, black-clad activists who use large peaceful protests as cover to cause targeted destruction. Reporters watched them smashing shop windows with golf clubs and fleeing with stolen goods. This is an organised tactic, not spontaneous chaos.

It was also opportunistic looters (people who showed up not for the protest but for the opportunity.) These are the people in the Apple Store footage.

A few other things worth noting:

87% of people arrested since the protests began were minors, and most of those were students caught at blockades and marches, not looting.

French authorities explicitly said they did not link immigrants to the rioting, which matters because Trump posted “France is burning!” on Truth Social and tried to make it about immigration. French police pushed back on that directly.

The students condemned the violence.

The government used the black bloc footage to talk about law and order instead of the crumbling schools that started all of this.

Why does this matter beyond France?

Because the conditions driving these protests (rising food and energy prices, crumbling public services, a generation of young people who feel they are inheriting a broken system while being blamed for it), are not French conditions.

They are the conditions of most wealthy democracies right now.

But what

is

French is the response. France has a centuries-long tradition of taking to the streets when the government stops listening. The Yellow Vests, the 1968 student uprising, the Revolution itself: France has always believed that when the system fails you, you go outside and make noise about it.

So they did.

What next?

As you would expect, Macron addressed the nation on Sunday, condemned the destruction, and vowed to prosecute those responsible (he leaves office in six months, so we’ll see what happens there.) Oh, and Americans are telling each other to take notes (whether this is a good or bad thing, I’m not sure.)

As of Sunday night, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu gave local authorities the power to impose overnight curfews, and they did. Paris: 11pm to 6am. Nice imposed a curfew specifically targeting young people. Lyon and Lille followed. In a statement, Lecornu said: “We will not be dictated and ruled by the breakers, by the thieves, by the thugs.” He also blamed “ultra-left radical groups” for trying to create chaos before the 2027 elections. The government’s response, in other words, is more curfews and more arrests, not more teachers.

I wanted to write this so that the next time footage from France floods your feed (and it will), you’ll know what you’re looking at.

Luce x

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