"If We Burn, You Burn with Us": France’s Youth Ignite a Massive Revolt

 

PARIS — “Make sure you tell the Americans that trash cans aren’t the only things burning in France,” 16-year-old Ewen told Truthdig as protesters gathered on the Place de la République on Saturday. Tear gas canisters had been falling into the growing crowd for about an hour, and the teen struggled to make himself heard with his mask.

“Our future is burning, too,” Ewen added. Due to the repression and arrests by police, most protesters asked that only their first names be used.

In rapid succession, he listed everything he’d come to protest against: his rat-infested high school, the violent police repression of the student movement, but also the lack of hospital beds across the country, the cost of living, the saturated job market and the quickly forgotten fires that ravaged France this summer. During the country’s hottest summer on record this year, some 250,000 acres of forest burned...

Grabbing his three friends, Ewen then posed for a photo, holding up a sign that read: “If we burn, you burn with us!” “It’s a ‘Hunger Games’ reference,” Ewen explained, as though I were decidedly too ancient to get it on my own. “It means that we’re not just fighting for ourselves, but for you, too.”

Marine Champetier de Ribes, who teaches literature at a school in a Paris suburb, said she felt France’s youth had awakened something in the rest of society. “Us adults had collectively fallen into torpor,” she said. “They shook us out of it and reminded us all that we’re right to be angry.”

On Oct. 17, that torpor lifted in plain sight. Between 550,000 and 800,000 people marched across the country. Though much of the national and international coverage focused on the violence that marred the margins of Saturday’s protests, the lesson was elsewhere: In less than a month, the high schoolers’ movement managed to pull a tired, resigned country back into the streets. Students were joined by teachers, parents, doctors, nurses, lawyers, pensioners, Yellow Vests, farmers and firefighters in perhaps the most intersectional movement France has seen in decades.

“They write the rules, and we follow”

Champetier de Ribes, 34, and her colleagues across the education sector had been organizing for years but had been slowly losing steam. “No one was listening to us,” she lamented.

In her school alone, she cited “cockroach-infested walls, clogged toilets, rat droppings in the microwaves and boiling classrooms that have yet to cool down after this summer’s heat waves.” Champetier de Ribes said she has also been forced to fit 38 students into her 215-square-foot classroom, which never has enough chairs and desks: “I’ve had to insist that at least three of them be absent every week so I can teach the rest,” she said. Champetier de Ribes said teachers had become disillusioned. “We’d quite forgotten how to be angry, until, that is, our students began leading by example,” she said.

Starting on Sept. 17, high schoolers across the country began barricading their schools to demand better material conditions and equal education opportunities. The movement began in the Paris suburb of Créteil and it spread fast: By Oct. 1, the Interior Ministry reported that more than 1,000 of France’s 3,700 high schools had been affected, over 200 of them blockaded. 

The students’ demands are more specific than their critics let on: a 10-billion-euro investment plan for schools, and an end to Parcoursup, the national platform that manages university admissions, which is often compared to a “social sorting machine” and criticized for its lack of transparency.

They’re also asking for more teachers, Last year, students across France lost some 20 million hours worth of lessons because absent teachers were not replaced. The education shortfalls are a result of President Emmanuel Macron’s neoliberal approach to public education funding while simultaneously increasing defense spending.

Teachers, in turn, organized to support their pupils. “They write the rules and we follow,” Champetier de Ribes said. She and her colleagues created an Instagram account to share the students’ demands with a grown-up audience: “We have to speak their language,” she added with a laugh.

From the start, the movement was met with force. The government, which chose to label the movement not as a “school protest” but as “urban violence,” sent police riot squads directly into high schools and universities.

Eden, 14, had his jaw fractured and most of his teeth knocked after being struck in the face by a tear gas grenade in a Paris suburb, leaving him, according to his mother, barely able to eat through a straw in his hospital bed. A 15-year-old in the north had his hand torn off by a so-called anti-encirclement grenade. On Saturday, in the eastern town of Mulhouse, Maïssa, 17, was struck by a tear-gas canister and lost her left eye.

Some 6,773 minors have been taken into police custody since the protests began in mid-September. Complaints are currently being filed across the country for verbal and physical mistreatment of these high schoolers during their detention.

This level of violence gave teachers yet another cause for concern, Champetier de Ribes said. “We were, to put it plainly, terrified at the very idea of seeing our students face off with the police.” Five months pregnant, she herself cannot physically protect her students, as tear gas is highly toxic. But she did help her colleagues prepare emergency kits. Identified with a white armband, these teachers carry masks, saline solution, bandages, disinfectant, water and applesauce pouches, ready to assist their pupils should they need help.

“This generation shook us awake,” Champetier de Ribes said. “Now, we have to be there for them, and alongside them.”

Christophe, who teaches mathematics in a private Paris high school, joined the protest Saturday with a sign that read: “You should not have betrayed us. We’re here to take our future back.” He stated that, while his was not an underprivileged school, his students had nonetheless joined their peers on the street, demanding equality. “My students may not be the ones getting beat up, but they’re still children,” he said... . 

-Truthdig

'If We Burn, You Burn With Us': France’s Youth Ignite a Massive Revolt