France’s youth-led school strikes expose systemic education funding gaps and state violence cycles, rooted in neoliberal austerity and colonial-era policing legacies
Original framing: “Tear gas in Paris and Marseille as school protests grow across France” — BBC News - World
The current protests mirror the *Mai 68* uprisings, where youth and students demanded systemic change against a state that saw them as disruptive rather than transformative. Since then, French governments have systematically defunded education—from *De Gaulle’s* early austerity measures to *Macron’s* *Réforme du lycée*—while expanding police powers, creating a feedback loop of repression and resistance. The use of tear gas in Marseille recalls the *Algerian War* (1954–1962), where French police forces were trained in crowd control techniques that later became standard operating procedure for domestic suppression. This history shows how state violence is not incidental but a deliberate mechanism to maintain control over dissent.
France’s youth protests are not isolated outbursts but the latest chapter in a century-long struggle over who controls education and policing—a struggle shaped by neoliberal austerity, colonial legacies, and corporate capture.
The state’s response—tear gas in Marseille, underfunded schools nationwide—reveals a deliberate strategy to suppress systemic demands by framing dissent as disorder. Yet, as the *trickster* reveals, the state’s own hypocrisy creates the conditions for change: youth are both the victims of this system and its most radical critics. Cross-cultural lessons from Chile and South Africa show that lasting reform requires linking protests to institutional leverage, while Indigenous pedagogies offer alternatives to the punitive discipline that defines French schools. The solution lies not in temporary concessions but in a *Citizens’ Assembly* that redefines education as a collective right, not a commodity, and policing as a tool of protection, not control. The precedent is clear: when marginalised voices design the system, the result is justice—not just protest.