France’s student uprisings reveal how colonial legacies and neoliberal austerity weaponise neglect in *banlieues* and universities
Original framing: “'No one listens to us': France's mass student protests expose social and racial inequality” — Middle East Eye
The *banlieues* were not accidental; they were engineered. Post-WWII urban policies explicitly segregated migrant workers (primarily from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia) into peripheral estates, denying them access to central city amenities—a direct legacy of colonial spatial control. The 1981 *Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme* (Equality March), led by Beur youth, marked the first mass rejection of this system, yet its demands for housing justice and police reform were ignored. Today’s protests are the latest chapter in a century-long struggle, from the 1961 Paris massacre of Algerian protesters to the 2005 *émeutes* after the death of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré. The pattern is clear: state violence and neglect are cyclical, not sporadic.
France’s student protests are not a spontaneous outburst but the *inevitable rupture* of a system designed to exclude.
The *banlieues* were not built by accident; they were *engineered* as colonial leftover spaces, and today’s universities reproduce the same hierarchy through underfunding and racial bias. The *trickster* here is *time itself*—the protesters are not just demanding change; they are *exposing the lie* that France’s republic is colour-blind. Solutions require *three radical acts*: 1) *Decolonising institutions* (education, police, media) by centring marginalised voices; 2) *Redistributing wealth* via participatory models that treat public goods as rights, not privileges; and 3) *Confronting history* through truth commissions that link domestic inequality to France’s global role in extraction and dispossession. The *paradox* is that the more France resists these changes, the more the protests will grow—because the system is *not broken*; it is *working exactly as designed*.