Everybody’s Riot But Theirs

France’s schoolchildren asked for teachers and toilet paper. They got a presidential campaign instead.

I watched a French lycée burn on a phone screen the size of a playing card, sitting outside a cave in rural Spain with the day’s heat still coming off the rock behind me. By the time the footage reached me, it had already been watched by millions, and it had picked up three or four different captions along the way. Each one was certain, each one was furious, and each one seemed to be describing a different country. That, more than the flames, is what made me put the kettle on and start reading properly.

Because the fire was real, the arrests were real. The injured police officers, the teacher who was hit, the head teacher struck by a firework mortar… all real. What wasn’t real, or at least wasn’t proven, was almost everything anyone told me about what it meant. And when every faction in a country can look at the same burning school and see its own enemy in the smoke, that’s usually a sign the story worth telling is the one nobody is bothering to tell.

It started with some bins

Most things that end badly start with something small and reasonable, and this one is almost comically on brand. At Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, on the south-eastern edge of Paris, a few pupils decided to block the entrance with wheelie bins in protest at cancelled lessons and classes left without supervision. That’s it. That’s the opening act. Not a manifesto, not a march, just teenagers who’d noticed that the adults responsible for educating them weren’t turning up, and who had access to bins.

Videos of the blockade spread across Snapchat and TikTok within hours, and around thirty schools in Seine-Saint-Denis, Essonne and Val-de-Marne followed suit almost at once. The main pupils’ union, the Union syndicale lycéenne, then called for blockades in every lycée in the country on 29 September, citing a chronic shortage of teachers and supervisors. A local gripe had become a national movement in about a week, which is roughly how long it takes a government to schedule a meeting about scheduling a meeting.

And then it went the way these things go. By 1 October the Interior Ministry was reporting 1,949 arrests nationwide in a single day, with 305 police officers and gendarmes injured since the unrest began. In Nantes, the entrance hall of the Nelson Mandela lycée was gutted by fire during the morning blockade. In Marseille, staff at Lycée Victor Hugo had petrol thrown over them, and a fire engine was driven out and torched. By the second week, roughly 3,000 pupils aged between 15 and 18 had been detained, and more than a thousand of France’s 3,700 or so lycées had been caught up in it.

I want to be clear about something before going any further, because the rest of this piece is going to be critical of nearly everyone with a microphone. Throwing petrol over school staff is not a protest. Setting fire to the building you’re demanding more investment in is not activism; it’s a self-own with a body count waiting to happen. The Education Minister, Édouard Geffray, said at least ten staff and several pupils had been hurt, including a teacher who was assaulted and a head teacher injured by a firework mortar. None of that should be softened, and I won’t. But condemning the violence is the easy part. Everyone’s done it. It’s the part after the condemnation, where people explain what the violence means, that’s gone badly wrong.

Pick your story

If you followed this through official channels, you were told it was politics. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said the blockades weren’t ordinary protest movements at all, but looked more like “violences urbaines”, urban violence. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu accused France Unbowed politicians of reckless one-upmanship for urging the movement to spread, while Jean-Luc Mélenchon accused the government of ordering a crackdown. Valérie Pécresse, head of the Île-de-France region, went further and called LFI “les pompiers pyromanes”, the arsonist firefighters, which is a genuinely good line, and I’m annoyed I didn’t think of it first.

If you followed it through LFI, you were told it was state repression of children with legitimate grievances. If you followed it on X, you were told something else entirely: that this was the banlieues, the “new French”, immigrant youth looting and burning while a cowardly legacy press hid the truth behind words like “students” and “protesters”. Some American outlets didn’t bother hiding the thesis at all. One RedState piece argued that France had spent decades importing the population of its suburbs and that burning schools were what open borders look like once the children are old enough to riot.

And if you followed it through the kids themselves, which almost nobody did, you got this. A 17-year-old girl at Lycée Paul Éluard in Saint-Denis told Reuters that the canteen was too expensive and that there was no toilet paper, so pupils had to go and ask supervisors for it. Others described lycées that had gone without philosophy or French teachers during the years pupils sit the bac. Imagine sitting the exam that determines your future without a teacher for the subject, then being told your protest is really about Mélenchon.

Four stories, one set of footage. The government’s story makes it a policing problem. LFI’s story makes it a government problem. X’s story makes it an immigration problem. Only the pupils’ story makes it an education problem, which is the one problem nobody running for anything seems keen to own.

The number nobody keeps

Here’s where I think the X crowd have stumbled onto something real, even if they’ve drawn the wrong conclusion from it.

They’re right that the mainstream coverage doesn’t tell you who was arrested. No breakdown by background, by origin, by anything. And they read that silence as a cover-up, the press protecting a narrative. But the truth is duller and, in its way, more troubling. France largely doesn’t collect ethnic statistics at all. Its data protection law has, since 1978, broadly prohibited recording people’s racial or ethnic origin, and when a government tried to loosen that for research surveys in 2007, the Constitutional Council struck it down. The Republic officially sees citizens, not communities. On top of that, almost everyone arrested here is a minor, and French law protects the identities of minors with considerable ferocity.

So when someone on X demands to know why the BBC won’t publish the demographics of those detained, the honest answer is that the French state mostly doesn’t know, or won’t say, and the BBC can’t invent it. That doesn’t make the X claim false. It makes it unfalsifiable, which is worse. A false claim can be corrected. An unfalsifiable one just sits there, absorbing whatever anyone wants to pour into it.

Geography doesn’t help. The lycées at the heart of the trouble have been concentrated in poorer suburbs, and Saint-Denis, one of the most deprived areas in France, has been the epicentre around Paris. In those places immigration, poverty, underfunded schools, overcrowded classrooms and decades of political neglect all sit on top of each other like a badly packed lorry. Point at any one of them and you can claim it explains the fire. You can’t be proven wrong, because the data that might prove you wrong was never gathered.

I wrote recently about what I called the Soup Problem, how a real institutional failure gets stirred into a pot with conspiracy and grievance until nobody can taste the original ingredients anymore. This is the Soup Problem with a fire under it. There is a genuine story here about whether France’s colour-blind principles have left it unable to see what’s happening in its own suburbs. That’s a serious question, one worth asking honestly. But it’s being drowned out by people who’ve already decided the answer and just need the footage.

What “urban violence” sounds like from inside the helmet

I spent a large part of my working life on the other side of the line in these situations, first in the RAF Police and later in senior security management, where crowds stopped being people and became a line on a risk register. So I’ll tell you what struck me about the minister’s choice of words, because it’s not neutral, and I don’t think it was meant to be.

In French policing language, “violences urbaines” isn’t a description; it’s a category. It’s the vocabulary of the estates, of 2005 and of the Nahel riots in 2023, of the banlieue as a security problem rather than a social one. When a minister reaches for that phrase about schoolchildren protesting a lack of teachers, he’s quietly moving the whole event out of politics and into public order. Protest is something you negotiate with. Urban violence is something you suppress. And here’s the bit that should make everyone uncomfortable… the minister’s phrase and the X caption are much closer cousins than either side would admit. One says “urban violence” in a suit. The other says the same thing in capital letters. Both have stopped talking about schools.

Anyone who’s policed a crowd will tell you how they work. There’s a small core who come for trouble, and they bring the fireworks and the petrol. Then there’s a much larger ring of people who are there because their mates are there, because it’s more interesting than double maths with a supply teacher who doesn’t know their names, because it’s on TikTok and they want to be in it. Mass arrests don’t discriminate between those groups particularly well. Nuñez said 440 people were detained on 29 September alone, mostly minors. He also said he didn’t believe for a moment that the police response had been disproportionate.

Maybe it wasn’t. I wasn’t there, and I’m not going to second-guess officers dealing with mortars and petrol from a cave in Spain. But three thousand teenagers have now been through a police station. Some of them deserved it. Many of them, statistically, were the outer ring. And a fifteen-year-old who goes in angry about a missing philosophy teacher and comes out with a record has just been taught a lesson the education system failed to provide… that the state only notices you when you’re on fire.

Seven months to go

None of this is happening in a vacuum, and nobody pretends otherwise. The student unrest turned political with the presidential election seven months away. Every party has a reason to make this about something other than toilet paper. The government wants it to be about the far left. The far left wants it to be about the government. The online right wants it to be about immigration.

The oddest note, actually, came from where you’d least expect it. Sébastien Chenu of the Rassemblement National condemned the violence on France Inter but argued for an approach built on dialogue and looking at the underlying problems. The party you’d expect to bang the drum loudest played it almost statesmanlike. I could be generous and call that maturity. I could be cynical and say they didn’t need to shout, because the footage was already doing their campaigning for free on every phone in the country. I’ll leave you to decide which, though I suspect you know which way I lean.

The lesson nobody’s learning

Here’s the bit that keeps nagging at me. The Nelson Mandela lycée in Nantes will now be shut for a month. The pupils who started all this by protesting cancelled lessons have now got a month of cancelled lessons, courtesy of their own side. The government gets its law and order moment. LFI gets its martyrs. X gets its clips. And somewhere in Saint-Denis, a seventeen-year-old is presumably still walking up to a supervisor to ask for toilet roll, because nobody has announced a budget for that.

Out here I fetch my own water, and I know exactly how much I’ve got, because I count it. Not because I’m virtuous, but because if I don’t count it, I run out, and there’s nobody to blame but me. I keep thinking about that. A state that refuses to count certain things can’t fix them. A state that only counts arrests will keep finding more arrests to count. And a public that’s handed no numbers at all will happily make its own up, and fight about them online, while the building burns.

I don’t know who threw the petrol in Marseille. I don’t know who lit the bins that took the front off a school named after Nelson Mandela, which is an irony so heavy-handed that a novelist would cut it. Neither, if they’re honest, does anyone posting about it with complete certainty. What I do know is that the children asked for teachers, and what they got was everyone else’s argument.

Until Next Time