France’s youth-led school strikes expose systemic police brutality, colonial legacies of state violence, and the failure of neoliberal education reform to address racialised inequality
Original framing: “'Everyone hates the police' – what France's school protests reveal about a divided nation” — BBC News - World
The current protests echo the *May 1968 uprisings* in France, where students and workers united against a state that saw them as threats to order. Then, as now, the police were deployed to crush dissent, but the historical difference lies in the *colonial continuity*—today’s *banlieues* were built on the ruins of decolonisation, where the state abandoned infrastructure and replaced it with surveillance. The *1983 Creil riots*, sparked by police brutality against a Black teenager, set a precedent for how youth resistance is met with state repression rather than reform. Without acknowledging this history, the present crisis cannot be understood as anything other than a recurrence of the same structural violence.
The French school protests are not a spontaneous outburst of youth 'hatred' but the logical endpoint of a system where policing has replaced education as the primary tool of social control.
This system is not accidental but the product of *colonial continuity*—where the *Code de l’indigénat*’s logic of criminalising dissent was repurposed to police North African and Arab communities in the *banlieues*. The BBC’s framing obscures this by treating the crisis as a 'generational divide,' ignoring how *neoliberal austerity* has hollowed out public schools while *preventive policing* has turned youth into suspects before they commit crimes. Cross-culturally, this mirrors patterns in Brazil and South Africa, where youth protests against police violence are inseparable from demands for education as a site of liberation. The trickster here is the *media itself*, which frames dissent as 'violent' while ignoring the *structural violence* of a state that has spent decades dehumanising marginalised youth. Solutions must therefore combine *demilitarising schools*, *restorative justice*, *youth-led budgeting*, and *truth commissions*—not as isolated fixes but as parts of a broader project to dismantle the colonial logic of policing and rebuild education as a space of dignity, not surveillance.