France: The Social Anger of the Young. Interview with Laurence De Cock – 5 October 2026

In this interview conducted by Stéfanie Prezioso for Marx21, Laurence De Cock analyses the ongoing mobilisation of young people in France, its rapid spread and the solidarities it is giving rise to. Behind the demands for replacement teachers and better study conditions in the high schools, she invites us to pay attention to the everyday experience of inequality, racism and class contempt. She also discusses the brutality of police repression and forms of politicisation specific to young people. She situates these struggles within the history of high-school student movements and emancipatory pedagogies, and asks what responsibilities fall to adults, trade unions and the left. How can we support young people’s autonomy and build with them a project of an egalitarian and democratic public school?

S.P.: How would you describe what is happening: is this the beginning of a major movement? What is new compared with the student and teacher mobilisations of recent years?

LdC: I would say that in a fortnight we have gone from revolts to a movement. There was indeed something of the sudden surge and scattering that is typical of popular revolts: a spark that reignites a blaze that only seemed to be out and awakens a shared anger. Over the past few days this has taken shape as a movement, with the presence of trade-union and political organisations. Its historical singularity is the speed of its spread and its geographical reach: starting in Seine-Saint-Denis, the revolts now touch every territory, including the overseas territories, urban and rural areas, small, medium-sized and large towns. Within a few days it has become impossible to paint a portrait of the typical high-school student taking part in the movement. Students from every social background are involved, and one hears comparable slogans and demands. What stands out above all is the solidarity developing among them, for example when the prestigious Lycée Henri IV demands resources for the high schools of Seine-Saint-Denis. One can see this as posturing, as the editorialists do, but I prefer to see in it a shared awareness of the violence suffered by young people as a whole.

To understand the speed of its spread, one can of course think of the effects of social media, but I would be more cautious, because social media have existed for a long time and have not always had this effect. I think high-school students have been steeped in anger, both among peers and in their family environments. It is hard to imagine that their parents were not angered by this summer’s heatwave, for example, which their children had to endure; likewise, the students can see their parents’ material difficulties in the current context of inflation. The whole French population is fuming, and this is very fertile ground for a general conflagration. I think the high-school students know they are supported, and that is a very important aspect of the movement’s solidity. We cannot predict what comes next, of course, but they have already obtained more than more traditional social movements: the government’s retreat on the decision to make BTS courses (Brevets de techniciens supérieurs, higher technical diplomas) fee-paying, a guarantee on the replacement of teachers (which cannot be kept) and, as a corollary, Emmanuel Macron’s promises on lowering the price of fuel. This convergence of announcements leads me to think that the government is well aware of how explosive the situation is and of how likely it is to spread to other sections of society if nothing is done. Indeed, let us not forget that the Yellow Vests have already announced actions for 17 October and are getting ready.

S.P.: The repression of these young people is extremely violent, as the images circulating show. How should we understand the response of the Macronist state? What does it tell us about what some are already calling the preparation of the far right for power?

LdC: The repression is completely in line with the doctrine of law enforcement put in place with the 2016 labour law, that is, under a Socialist government. Moreover, during that movement some high schools had mobilised, and we discovered with horror images of police officers beating and gassing fifteen-year-olds indiscriminately at the Paris blockades. All specialists on the subject agree that we are seeing a return to openly embraced police brutality after an interlude in the 1990s (following the death of Malik Oussekine in 1986) and the 2000s. Emmanuel Macron has extended and hardened the doctrine, notably with Paris Police Prefect Didier Lallement (2019–2022). Today people are afraid to go to demonstrations in France, so permanent a feature has police repression become, even at the most institutionalised and peaceable demonstrations, such as those on 1 May. The ferocity of the repression is accompanied by a systematic focus by the dominant media on the violence that punctuates demonstrations, essentially the destruction of public property or of symbols of triumphant capitalism, as under the Yellow Vests (2018–2019): McDonald’s, banks, luxury shops.

We also know that undercover plain-clothes police officers take it upon themselves to raise tensions. The images in circulation are always those of pitched battles between young people worked up to a white heat and a militarised police force that hunts them down indiscriminately when it is not shooting at them. Basically, we are seeing an extension of the police brutality hitherto reserved for working-class neighbourhoods. Indeed, this police behaviour is very worrying and bears witness to a creeping fascisation. Young people from working-class neighbourhoods have long borne the brunt of it through racist identity checks based on appearance, but we now see that young people as a whole are being brutalised. It is the fulfilment of the far-right logic of bringing young people into line, the better to domesticate and indoctrinate them. It is not so much a denial of childhood, as I have sometimes read; it is on the contrary an appropriation of childhood, in order to put it in the only place they consider fit for it, namely one of regimented submission. The images from Mantes-la-Jolie in 2018 are the starkest symbol of this: held at gunpoint, kneeling, facing a wall, the high-school students were kept there for hours, made to endure the officers’ sarcasm.

In the Hauts-de-Seine, the prefect addressed parents in a thoroughly Pétainist tone to ask them to stop their children from demonstrating: “I am writing to you directly to share with you two principles, as Prefect of the Hauts-de-Seine, but also as a father,” he writes, emphasising in his letter only “acts of pure violence”.

S.P.: In your columns for Politis, you describe a school that “classifies, sorts, separates”, from Parcoursup (the university admissions platform) to ability groups. The high-school students blocking their schools are demanding, first of all, very concrete things, such as replacement teachers. Do you see in these material demands an awareness of this sorting, or should we guard against projecting onto them a politicisation that is not there?

LdC: High-school students from working-class neighbourhoods feel this sorting in their very flesh. It is hard to imagine the material state of some high schools: prefabricated buildings that become permanent although they were supposed to be temporary, no curtains, windows that no longer close, rats, cockroaches, appalling toilets, too few tables and chairs, some of them broken, exposed electrical wires, water leaking into classrooms… It is often said that schools in priority education are better funded, but that is false. At the national level they do indeed receive a higher allocation than other schools, but this allocation is calculated according to a ratio of teaching hours to number of students and has nothing to do with the school buildings, which are financed by the local authorities.

The Île-de-France region, led by Valérie Pécresse (Les Républicains), over-funds private and elite schools, as left-wing elected officials regularly point out. A great many high schools in Seine-Saint-Denis struggle to obtain funding for the slightest repair. Above all, the government is taking advantage of the demographic decline to close classes. Being in overcrowded classes in a working-class setting makes learning much harder than in bourgeois neighbourhoods. Finally, material conditions are sometimes so difficult so difficult that teachers reach breaking point. Students also see clearly that their schools are being shunned. There may be no prior politicisation in the theoretical sense, but there is a politicisation in situ, because the only explanation for these relegations is racism and class contempt.

As for the revolts, the question of their politicisation is always raised. In 2005 it even became a debate among sociologists. For me, who worked for sixteen years in working-class neighbourhoods and have been teaching for a very long time, this is a bad way of posing the question. We mostly project our own schemas of politicisation in order to diagnose its absence or presence. But we often forget that young people’s words are no longer ours and that they have their own analytical frameworks. They do not necessarily rank things as we do; they mobilise their bodies (dances, “aura battles”), music, humour and so on. Above all, the peer community is a space where the political is made. Teenagers are constantly describing what they live through; they get indignant, cry, shout, call out to one another and comment on absolutely everything, not only on social media. Mobilisations speed all this up and are thus intense moments of politicisation, which news commentators, who make ironic remarks about the jumbled nature of the demands, often fail to understand. They really must know nothing at all about teenagers.

S.P.: As a historian of education, how do you situate this mobilisation in relation to the great past high-school movements, such as 1986, 2005, 2010 or 2018 against Parcoursup? What allowed these movements to win, or prevented them from winning?

LdC: First of all there is a factor common to all high-school movements: the difficulty of being recognised as a social movement in the first place. This is down to the contempt for and disqualification of young people in this country, who are always written off as immature. They are constantly subjected to mockery and sarcasm in the media. Their way of speaking and their demands are ridiculed, and they are said to be manipulated. In 2010, for example, the movement joined the one against the pension reform, and the editorialists made fun of the fact that young people who did not yet work could be concerned with old people’s problems. In general, one observes an absence of tenderness and generosity towards the young people of this country, all the more so towards those from working-class neighbourhoods. The revolts of November 2005 bore witness to this; they received an outpouring of racism, the same that we found again nearly twenty years later with the murder of Nahel in Nanterre. Racism is sometimes so strong that the death of a child no longer moves many people.

Each of the movements also has its own singularity. In 1986, against the Devaquet law, it was first the university students who rose up against the plan to introduce selection at university. They were then joined by high-school students, and even middle-school students. There was the death of Malik Oussekine, which mobilised a very structured and powerful anti-racist movement. It was in the face of this convergence that the government retreated.

In 1990, a powerful high-school movement led to a vast funding plan. The demands were broadly comparable to those of today. There were up to 200,000 young people on the streets. At that time the Socialists were in power. Mitterrand received them and bypassed his Prime Minister, Michel Rocard. The colour of the government is not an insignificant factor.

Against Parcoursup the mobilisation was ultimately rather weak, and my hypothesis is that the absence of massive support from university academics had deleterious effects. In reality, many of them rallied to the idea that selecting students in L1 (the first year of the undergraduate degree) was not such a bad idea. Arguing from the first-year failure rate, they managed to dress this up as social justice, which it is not, on the grounds that it spares young people from losing a year. But in so doing they perverted the principle of the democratisation of the university and embraced the idea that university study must meet a test of economic rationality. When what was needed was to demand resources, and to think about bridges and more inclusive university pedagogies for students from the working classes, they preferred to exclude them. High-school teachers and students found themselves quite alone. This is another criterion of a movement’s success: its capacity to aggregate sectoral and cross-sectoral support.

It also goes without saying that the limitations on the right to demonstrate since Emmanuel Macron came to power, police violence and the succession of failures of social movements deter many people, even though we know the anger is there.

It seems to me that the current movement is starting very strongly and that the conditions are in place for it to be joined and not to run out of steam so quickly. But there are conditions, of course: the support of parents and a constant adult presence alongside the young people mobilised on the streets; accompaniment at the right distance by political and trade-union organisations, which must take care not to co-opt the demands for their own organisational gain and be ready to let high-school students come to them, without making themselves their official spokespeople — a frequent mistake which, in a context of deep distrust of politics, can be counterproductive. We must succeed in linking the mobilisations together so as to make them complementary and prepare the convergences that will be necessary. We need to meet, discuss together and coordinate in order to broaden the movement progressively. I see this as an immense chain of solidarities leaving each the necessary autonomy and the choice of their forms of action.

S.P.: Your work on Célestin and Élise Freinet shows a pedagogy in which pupils organise themselves, debate and decide collectively. Are today’s high-school assemblies and blockades, in their own way, a form of political education that the institution refuses to recognise?

LdC: Élise and Célestin Freinet’s pupils were much younger, but there is indeed in Freinet pedagogy a political thought that begins with the trust placed in children and the concern to educate them in the practice of democracy.

Today we are far from that, because the institution is totally ambivalent, even schizophrenic, on the subject. On the one hand it multiplies texts on the necessary learning of critical thinking and on encouraging students’ “engagement”; on the other it punishes any thought that sticks out, churns out unworkable curricula that leave no room to breathe, and takes students on a continuous race for academic success that is not conducive to collective reflection. Moreover, as the high-school students all stress, there is no real space for discussion reserved for students.

The CVLs (comités de vie lycéenne, high-school life committees) are not uninteresting, but adults are often present, they meet only rarely and have no decision-making power. It is sleepy and routine, and few students get involved. On school governing boards, the interest shown in student representatives depends on the head teacher. Spatially, apart from a student common room (which does not always exist), there is no space devoted to democratic practice, and timetables are so constraining that young people want only one thing: to go home. High schools are not places of community life, and that is an enormous task still to be tackled.

It is therefore logical that students look for other spaces and forms of organisation. The blockade has become the most common action. It is no doubt a way of asserting themselves as the masters and mistresses of the place, which says a lot about their exclusion. They take possession of the place of knowledge (hence of the productive space) and decide who goes in and out; it is a seizure of power and an inversion of the balance of power between adults and students. In so doing, they also open the high school to the outside, talk with passers-by and occupy the street, hence public space. Thus the blockade is also a way of turning the high school towards an unconstrained space, the street, and of breaking with the sanctuarised logic of the temple of knowledge. That too is very Freinet-compatible.

S.P.: You have written that we must “change the job so as not to have to change jobs”, in the face of a devalued, underpaid and deserted teaching profession. The common pay scale on which the salary of all civil servants rests has been frozen since 2023, and the government has just announced that it will remain so in 2027. With inflation, this amounts to a real-terms pay cut year after year. Was the strike of 29 September merely a pay battle? Or did it say something deeper about what teachers, employees and users of public services expect of the state today?

LdC: The pay question is central, but it is not the only prerequisite for the transformation of the job that I hope to see. The profession, like every public service, is being eaten away by neoliberal logic and New Public Management (NPM). As the researcher Frédéric Grimaud puts it, we are seeing a proletarianisation of the profession. Not only in terms of standard of living, but in its tasks. NPM dispossesses teachers of their expertise. Assessment grids are churned out elsewhere in order to evaluate at every turn, streamline and quantify effectiveness.

Just as health care institutions reduce the time devoted to care, the school reduces the attention it can give to children as individuals, certainly, but also as members of a collectivity, the class. All of a teacher’s work consists of a permanent dialectic between the individual and the collective. In place of that, NPM breaks all collectives, teachers’ and students’, and turns the teacher into someone who simply carries out a task they did not choose, a task placed in the service of sorting, which is labelled for the occasion “individualised support”. Many teachers chose this job out of a concern for “social utility” (an expression that comes up often) and can no longer identify with the institution, which asks them only to be “useful”, full stop.

The strike of 29 September was necessary and falls within the responsibility of the trade unions. This work of making demands must continue, but broader projects of transforming the profession must be launched, and teachers must be educated about it.

S.P.: In École publique et émancipation sociale [Public School and Social Emancipation], you advocate a school that forms autonomous agents capable of understanding and transforming the world. What happens when students take it up themselves by mobilising alongside their teachers?

LdC: In this book (which, by the way, is being updated and reissued next January), I advocate, above all, the idea of emancipation as the only condition of access to democratic practice and to a better world. The teacher is neither guru, nor model, nor the equivalent of the student. It is he (or above all she) who catalyses the process of emancipation by contributing knowledge. Students who mobilise alongside their teachers out of political mimicry would hardly be emancipated; the opposite is more interesting, when colleagues join the young people. I insist on this because the government increasingly lambasts activist teachers — the famous “Islamo-leftists” — accusing them of manipulating their students. An accusation the Freinets also had to face almost a century ago.

We know very well that the point, for the government, is to camouflage the only indoctrination enterprise currently under way, which is its own, but I think we also have to reflect on our position of authority within the institution. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and author of the famous Pedagogy of the Oppressed, issues this warning about the relationship of domination between teacher and learner. He is often read as the theorist of the critical consciousness of the oppressed, but we forget that the dominant must also develop it. This work of reflexivity regarding the pedagogical relationship is essential, because it is the necessary condition for emancipation. Emancipation means taking the risk that the student will not think as one does oneself, and will think for and by themselves. I believe we have there a fine definition of enlightened citizenship.

S.P.: Your recent columns speak of a school “brought into line” and call for making it a “common horizon”. A few months before the presidential election, and with the far right still at the gates of power, what project for the school should the left and the social movement carry in order not to remain on the defensive?

LdC: We must begin by accepting that the school is a fundamentally political question and by putting an end to the idea that it should reconcile everyone because it concerns children. The project of the republican school was born in the womb of the French Revolution, and not for nothing. The question of the education of youth is necessarily divisive, because it puts the future of a society at stake. Is there a more political question?

Once we have admitted that, we must, it seems to me, start from the end of the chain: what society do we want? And what school would allow us to take part in building it?

The social project of a radical left is that of a just, egalitarian society, hostile to all forms of discrimination, freed from alienations, peaceful and concerned for the planet and the living world. That is a fine programme for thinking about a new curriculum and the place of a desirable public school in this project.

At the same time we must deconstruct the harmful, freedom-destroying, racist, selective project of the far right and brandish our common project of a regenerated public school (to borrow a revolutionary concept).

High-school students are in the process of putting their own words to it; they are opening paths, so let us take them.

Laurence De Cock is a historian, a history and geography teacher with the agrégation, and holds a doctorate in education sciences. She works on the teaching of history and on the political stakes of schooling. Her books include ‘École publique et émancipation sociale’ [Public School and Social Emancipation] (2021) and ‘Une journée fasciste : Célestin et Élise Freinet, pédagogues et militants’ [A Fascist Day: Célestin and Élise Freinet, Educators and Activists] (2022). She defends an education that gives everyone the means to understand the world and to act on it.

The French original of this interview, conducted by Stéfanie Prezioso, first appeared on Marx21 and is translated and republished here with permission. Translation by Daniel Mang.

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