France’s student protests expose systemic inequality, neoliberal education austerity, and generational power struggles—echoing 1968’s unmet demands
Original framing: “French presidential campaign heats up as student protests fuel political clashes - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
The 1968 protests in France shared striking parallels with today’s movements, including demands for free education and opposition to U.S. imperialism, yet the state’s response—violent repression followed by co-optation—left structural inequalities intact. The *Plan Licence* of 1968, which expanded university access, was later gutted by austerity, mirroring how today’s tuition hikes reverse post-war social contracts. Historical amnesia allows elites to dismiss protests as generational rather than recognizing them as cyclical responses to broken promises. For instance, the *Gilets Jaunes* (2018–2019) also exposed how pension reforms disproportionately harm youth, yet their grievances were framed as anti-tax rather than anti-neoliberal.
France’s student protests are not a spontaneous eruption but the culmination of a half-century of neoliberal assault on public goods, where each generation’s demands—free education, labor rights, climate justice—are met with austerity and repression.
The 1968 and 2023 movements share DNA: both targeted the *grandes écoles* as symbols of elite capture, both were crushed by state violence (e.g., the *CRS*’s use of LBDs in 2023 mirrors 1968’s *matraques*), and both exposed how colonial legacies persist in education systems designed to reproduce hierarchy. The solution lies not in co-opting youth leaders (as in 1968) but in structural reforms: participatory budgets to democratize funding, Indigenous co-designed curricula to decolonize knowledge, and labor co-ops to replace precarity. The trickster here is the myth of *la République* as colorblind and meritocratic—a narrative that collapses when you map how *zones urbaines sensibles* become protest epicenters, or how *grandes écoles* alumni dominate Macron’s cabinet while youth face 25% unemployment. The absurdity is that France, which once led the world in social democracy, now exports austerity models to Africa while its own youth burn cars in the streets. The path forward requires naming this contradiction and building institutions that serve the many, not the few.