Carrot or stick? How the French government is responding to the student protests

Hey, I’m Jack, a software developer at Datawrapper based in Lyon, France. This week, let’s talk about the French protests that have been going on.

By Sunday morning, you had probably seen the images from October 17 in France: Hundreds of shops looted in many major cities. The burned 143-year-old town hall in Limoges. Rioters getting into the town hall in Marseille. In Lyon, where I live, the 1852 tourist office on place Bellecour was set ablaze. The government counts at least 3,000 businesses hit across the country.

The scale of the damage and looting hadn’t been seen since the riots following the killing of Nahel Merzouk in 2023. And much like back then, media coverage and public attention focused mainly on the damage and drew attention away from the original reasons for the mobilization and the protesters’ demands.

You wouldn’t necessarily think so from what the news is saying, but the protests didn’t start last Saturday. Lycéens (high-school students), their parents, and their teachers have been demanding better conditions since the end of August. In the Lycée du Nord in Mayotte, a French overseas department, they talk of “undignified” conditions since Cyclone Chido in December 2024: “overcrowded classrooms, lack of safety, no cafeteria, poor sanitary conditions”. The school’s teachers went on strike, then parents joined and blockaded the lycée in protest two days later. Through the first half of September, their lead was followed by other lycées in French Guiana and mainland France.

On the 17th of September, following the same pattern, teachers went on strike demanding more funding and faculty in Créteil’s Lycée Saint-Exupéry in the suburbs of Paris, and a group of students blockaded the school in support of the strike the next day.

Five days later, the blockades spread to tens of schools across Île-de-France. By the 28th, the movement had spread across France.

After almost a month of national mobilization, the movement has been joined by university student unions, teachers' unions, the student-parents’ federation FCPE, and now the gilets jaunes.

Since the start of the protests, the only concessions made by the government were deploying 3,000 supply teachers (while the 2027 budget cuts almost half that number in permanent teaching posts) and organizing a half-day of “internal democracy” – which the headteachers' union criticized because schools were given no notice. Every other decision has been pushed back to the 26th of October, and abolishing Parcoursup (the online platform used to apply to university) was refused.

Here’s a timeline of the government’s response to the protests, if you want to know more. As a disclaimer: I used AI to scrape the data and create the table.

Policing, on the other hand, was immediate and kept increasing throughout the movement. As of the 9th of October, 6,877 people had been held in custody with 86% of them being minors. After that came the “urban violence” doctrine, curfews, soldiers, and protest bans.

In his speech on the 18th of October, President Macron said "we must neither confuse legitimate demands with violence, nor let violence prevent those demands being heard." Here's hoping the legitimate demands get some real answers on Monday.

That’s it for this time! Come back next week for a new Weekly Chart by Ceren from our Support team.