2026 French Protests

This week we talk about schools, riots, and police violence.
We also discuss Le Pen, Macron, and international reporting.
Recommended Book: This Is for Everyone by Tim Berners-Lee
Transcript
On October 17, 2026, hundreds of thousands of people marched in cities across France. Many were protesting the price of fuel, groceries, and other necessities. Others were high-school students, parents, teachers, and union members demanding better schools and public services.
Most of those marches were peaceful. But in several cities, there were clashes with police, shops broken into and looted, and public buildings attacked. The town hall in Limoges caught fire. In Paris, images of burning vehicles and smashed storefronts made headline news, often without clear context, explaining where the peaceful marches ended and the violence began.
Those two realities, peaceful protests on one hand, violence and widespread theft and destruction on the other, have since competed to define this story. Many people who marched, and in some cases continue to march, are concerned that their demands will become inextricably associated with all that widely shared footage of rioting. For shopkeepers and residents whose neighborhoods were damaged, that footage represents a real event with real costs. And for politicians facing a presidential election next spring, the unrest has become a test of who can speak to both protestor grievances and concerns about public safety.
What I’d like to talk about today is how these protests started, why a movement about schools became entangled with a cost-of-living crisis and, then, serious disorder, and what all of this might mean for French politics; especially for Marine Le Pen, the far-right politician who’s leading the race to succeed President Emmanuel Macron.
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The current protest wave began in September, at a high school in Créteil, outside Paris, where students were angry about unfilled staff positions. Walkouts and blockades spread to other schools, then to other parts of the country.
The specific complaints varied by school, but the broad list was fairly consistent: teaching roles remaining unfilled, crowded classrooms, aging buildings, and school days that can stretch from eight in the morning to six in the evening. Some students also object to Parcoursup, the government system that sorts students who apply for higher education into schools, which students say adds uncertainty and a lot of pressure to the tail-end of their high school experience.
These are not just complaints about aesthetics or convenience. If a student loses weeks of instruction before an exam, or has to spend a winter in a poorly heated classroom, that can affect what they learn and what opportunities they have later. And the experience isn’t evenly distributed. France’s national education system is meant, in part, to make citizenship and opportunity less dependent on where someone was born. Yet the OECD has found that students’ socioeconomic background remains strongly associated with their educational outcomes, despite these attempts at establishing opportunity equality.
The French education ministry has pointed to investments it has made and improvements in filling teaching posts. But national spending and staffing figures don’t guarantee that the right teacher is available in the right classroom on Monday morning. A vacant specialized post, a long absence without a substitute, or a building whose repairs are delayed can still shape a student’s educational experience for an entire year.
The government’s early response to these demonstrations mixed acknowledgment with policing the protestors. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu promised work on teacher replacements, building repairs, and schedules. Authorities also moved to clear blockades and arrest people accused of vandalism or attacking police and school staff. As the confrontations continued, teenagers suffered severe injuries attributed to police crowd-control weapons, including one yo...