For several weeks now, many high schools across France have been erupting in anger.

It all began on September 21 in Créteil. Students demanded teachers. Then blockades multiplied in the Paris region, as in the whole country. At the beginning of October, hundreds of high schools were disrupted. On October 6, the movement took to the streets as well as several universities.

On October 17, 24 and 31, the movement joined the demonstrations against the high cost of living: 550,000, then 410,000, then 320,000 people, according to the Ministry of the Interior. And on November 2, despite the All Saints’ Day holidays and the few concessions announced, several high schools were still blocked.

At the beginning, the demands were simple: teachers present or well-organized replacements, less crowded classes, decent or even more hygienic buildings, a less anxiety-provoking and more effective after-school orientation.

These are not revolutionary demands.
They are, after all, the minimum that a developed country should be able to guarantee to its children.

That said, the protest ended up going beyond the school setting. And how can we be surprised?!

These young people observe their parents. They see the bills piling up, the groceries getting smaller, the gas fill-ups only trickling up, the little pleasures disappearing. They also understand that finding a job, and then finding a place to live, will be extremely difficult for them. They grow up in a country that constantly talks to them about crises, sacrifices, and war, but less and less about the future… and no longer about dreams at all.

So, the images have changed.

The placards were followed by the burning of garbage cans, broken windows, looted shops, attacks on the police, and injured young demonstrators.

None of this is defensible. Destroying a school in the name of the school, robbing a shopkeeper in the name of social justice: these are contradictions that should revolt everyone. But who is acting like this?!

Of course, some violent groups have taken advantage of the demonstrations: radical activists, gangs from the suburbs, young people who are not really students or workers.

One question must be asked, however, in the face of the many videos broadcast on social networks: what is the place of young foreigners or young people from immigrant backgrounds among these authors? It is not doing anyone any favours by prohibiting the question.

Thus, Bruno Retailleau, former Minister of the Interior and candidate for the 2027 presidential election, explained: “Yes, there is a link between massive immigration that creates security disorder and what happened on Saturday. Yes, I say it, I affirm it.” And if the current Minister of the Interior admits that 30% of the arrests were foreigners, (30%! That’s already huge!) He says nothing about the proportion of dual nationals in the remaining 70%…

This is not the only blind spot of this crisis.

Because one question is not asked by the various commentators: why are so many French people at the end of their rope?…

The figures speak for themselves. In October, inflation reached 3.4% year-on-year; energy prices soared, heating and getting around became very difficult. Unemployment rose to 8.3% in the second quarter. And household confidence fell to its lowest level in thirteen years.

This is the real country: Workers who count their pennies as closely as possible, parents who worry more and more, and young people who no longer believe in promises.

Of course, this distress should not be confused with the right to ransack everything. Poverty justifies neither theft nor violence. Although… Our historians and politicians like to discourse on the legitimacy of popular violence under the Revolutionary Terror… Let’s move on.

The violence can probably be broken. But despair will not be extinguished on the orders of the CRS or the Prefect of Police.

And as long as we do not address the many causes of the despair of the French, anger will find other faces, other streets, other opportunities to explode and other tragedies.

What should worry the government is not only that the youth is demonstrating, nor that it is now joined by a growing part of the French, as this new day of November 5 shows.

It is rather that the majority of them no longer even believe that a government can satisfy them.