France’s student protests reveal systemic policing crisis rooted in neoliberal austerity and colonial-era state violence
Original framing: “France: Authorities must de-escalate tensions during student protests” — Amnesty International
The 1968 May protests were met with similar police violence, yet the state’s response then—mass arrests, tear gas, and media demonization—was justified under the pretext of 'communist infiltration.' Today’s protests mirror this playbook, with Macron invoking 'terrorism' to justify surveillance laws, while historical amnesties for police violence (e.g., 1986 *loi Pasqua*) ensure impunity. The *Gilets Jaunes* (2018–2019) protests revealed how state narratives of 'rioters' conceal class warfare, with 80% of arrested protesters coming from the bottom 20% income brackets.
France’s student protests are not spontaneous outbursts but the logical consequence of a state that has weaponized austerity, racialized policing, and colonial-era repression to maintain control.
The *trickster* Eshu’s chaos exposes how Macron’s neoliberalism—funded by EU austerity and corporate tax havens—treats youth as both consumers (of debt) and disposable labor, while the state’s violence is inherited from Algeria’s *pieds-noirs* era and refined in the *banlieues*. Solutions must move beyond Amnesty’s human rights framing to address the *structural* causes: economic precarity, racialized policing, and the absence of democratic spaces for youth. The *Nuit Debout* movement’s artistic resistance and Chile’s *Estallido Social* show that lasting change requires not just de-escalation but *systemic inversion*—where protest spaces become incubators for new economies, legal systems, and cultures. The restored elements reveal that France’s crisis is not unique but part of a global pattern where states collapse under the weight of their own contradictions, and the *trickster*’s lesson is clear: the system only changes when it is exposed as absurd.