How Did Local High School Blockades Start Nationwide Protests in France?
France has had a long history of large-scale protests and public demonstrations, which have played a significant role in shaping its current political and social life. The demonstrations that began on 18 September 2026 reflect this larger pattern as thousands of high school students took to the streets to address various insufficiencies and inequalities of the current French educational system.
Students across France had been facing deteriorating and increasingly dysfunctional educational environments. In Saint-Denis, students reported collapsed ceilings, water damage in walls, and rat infestations in school buildings and classrooms. Others talked about an entire academic year without any teacher available for certain subjects. A 15-year-old student, told CBS News that “for a whole year, [they] didn’t have a science teacher” and that they “don’t have any textbooks.”
One of the earliest demonstrations was reported to be in the Lycée Saint-Exupéry high school in Créteil, a suburb southeast of Paris. In a week, the protest resulted in multiple local demonstrations, spreading across 60 different schools in the Paris region. These local demonstrations were later organized into nationwide blockades by the Union Syndicale Lycéenne (USL), a high school student union. By October 17, the movement had expanded into broader nationwide demonstrations, with an estimated 550,000 to 800,000 people participating in approximately 110 marches across France, according to the Associated Press.
The protests quickly gained momentum, spreading beyond the Paris region to reach major cities, including Lyon, Marseille, and Bordeaux. According to CBS News, “Union Syndicale Lycéenne said two thousand high schools were at a standstill, and all universities were mobilized.” On October 17, the movement expanded dramatically as students, trade unions, and the Yellow Vest movement, a French movement previously established in 2018 against economic inequality, came together to form nationwide demonstrations.
The demonstrations were met with violent confrontations from the police, who utilized tear gas, rubber bullets, and stun grenades, resulting in numerous injuries. French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez reported the number of injured students to be approximately two hundred.
According to Reuters, a 14-year-old’s jaw was shattered after being struck by a tear-gas container, while another student lost his hand to a police grenade while trying to throw it away. Although French law permits such weapons under strict necessity and proportionality requirements, whether the use of such measures by the police was proportional to the protests reported as “overwhelmingly peaceful” by the Human Rights Watch remains a question of debate.
The criticism these extreme measures sparked was not restricted to that of French citizens. Such measures were also met with widespread disapproval from the international community. Subsequently, the government suspended the use of stun grenades despite defending the legitimacy of police intervention against violent demonstrators.
Through these protests, students address teacher shortages and deteriorating educational standards as they demand smaller class sizes, shorter school days, an increase in educational funding, and the necessary amendments to Parcoursup, the university admissions portal of France, which has been perpetuating bias toward financially and socially disadvantaged students.
As a response, Education Minister Édouard Geffray announced three thousand substitute teachers would be deployed to approximately a hundred schools while recruiting several hundred additional teachers. However, student union president Ryad Rani criticized this response since there had been “no concrete measures [toward these goals] whatsoever.” According to the Reuters, President Emmanuel Macron condemned the violence accompanying the protests and pledged to hold those responsible while maintaining public order. Currently, the unrest continues as the demonstrations have not come to an end.
These demonstrations in France, in addition to being representative of France’s background for large protests, are parallel to student demonstrations in Türkiye. During the 2021 Boğaziçi University protests and the nationwide demonstrations of March 2025, Turkish authorities and forces used violent crowd-control equipment against students. Amnesty International highlights the use of “tear gas, pepper spray, kinetic impact projectiles, and water cannons against students exercising their right” during the 2025 protests. Similar to the situation in France, the Turkish government also faced criticism over the use of such extreme equipment.
Student movements around the world are rooted in different reasons and circumstances; however, they have raised similar concerns from the public regarding the proportionality of police intervention, and the preservation and applicability of the right to peaceful assembly.
Sources: AP News, CBS News, Jurist, Human Rights Watch, Reuters, Al Jazeera, Anadolu Agency, Amnesty International
Written by: Kaan Aker
Edited by: Cemre Sanlav
