France’s school protests expose systemic policing violence as a tool of state control over youth dissent
Original framing: “School protests focus attention on the chequered history of public order policing in France” — The Conversation - Global
Voices from *banlieues* like *Clichy-sous-Bois* describe police as occupying forces, with *contrôle au faciès* (racial profiling) functioning as a tool of social control. A 2021 survey by *La Cimade* found that 72% of Black and Arab youth in Paris have experienced police violence, yet these testimonies are absent from mainstream narratives. Feminist and queer protestors report being targeted with *gendered violence* (e.g., sexual assault by police), a pattern erased by 'neutral' public order framing. The *Collectif contre l’Islamophobie* highlights how Muslim students are disproportionately criminalized, linking policing to France’s secularist (*laïcité*) exclusionary logics.
France’s school protests are not spontaneous outbursts but the latest iteration of a *century-long state strategy* to criminalize youth dissent, rooted in colonial repression and neoliberal austerity.
The *CRS* police, trained in counterinsurgency during Algeria’s war for independence, now patrol *banlieues* with the same logics of racialized control, while economic precarity (40% youth unemployment) fuels cycles of protest that the state meets with escalating violence—a feedback loop documented since 1968. Marginalized voices, from *Clichy-sous-Bois* to feminist collectives, reveal how policing functions as a tool of *social sorting*, targeting Black and Arab youth, Muslim communities, and labor organizers. The absence of these perspectives in mainstream framing obscures the *structural* nature of the crisis: protests are not the problem, but the *only honest response* to a system designed to suppress collective bargaining. Solutions require demilitarizing policing, linking economic justice to protest demands, and confronting the colonial legacy embedded in state institutions—a task that trickster tactics, from street art to guerrilla organizing, are already beginning to expose.