Source: The Conversation – France
KEY TAKEAWAYS
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The French high schooler-led uprising is not a sign of a generational struggle pitting the young against baby boomers.
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The uprisings indicate a state of discontentment reflecting three grievances: failings within the education system, eco-anxiety and concerns over employment in the age of AI.
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Far from demanding a break with the established order, young protesters are simply asking for the right to live a good and fair life… like their predecessors before them.
Rarely has Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents seemed so relevant to the times in which we are living. Although the discontents we are currently witnessing do not necessarily affect society as a whole, they are certainly impacting an entire generation born in the 21st century, as well as their parents and their social environment. Admittedly, we know that generations are not homogeneous and that any attempt to generalise is an oversimplification. Nevertheless, the high schoolers that are taking to the streets to protest in this day and age belong to a relatively homogeneous age cohort.
You would be forgiven for thinking that the current unrest is the result of a clash of generations. From the outside, it is often viewed as a generational tug of war between a struggling young population and the rest: an aging but relatively prosperous Europe. Criticism is, without doubt, being directed at “baby-boomers” or those born during the thirty years following World War II (which were marked by economic prosperity and low unemployment, conditions that now seem a world away today).
The problem lies elsewhere
Nevertheless, this is not a generational conflict, and the fact that a substantial proportion of parents, as well as the majority of the population, share the students’ demands shows that the problem lies elsewhere. These demands are nothing new, and they help explain why many parents joined their children during the first demonstrations, along with teachers, to show their support over deteriorating conditions in high schools.
The students and their initial demands were hijacked by more politically radical movements, some even revolutionary or anarchist, as well as opportunistic groups that took advantage of the disorder to loot shops and businesses, without any tangible political agenda. According to an official report dated October 14, 2026, “937 law enforcement officers, 248 students and 149 members of educational staff have been injured since the beginning of the high school student movement.” The demonstrations on October 18 resulted in more than 1,800 arrests. The proliferation of various groups with overlapping demands muddles the student movements’ original message, leaving us with little more than the smouldering remnants of a battlefield. Nevertheless, it is the central concerns of these students that I wish to explore here. Ultimately, this movement appears to lie at the intersection of several anxiety-inducing issues. Rather than speaking of a convergence of struggles, we should speak of a convergence of anxieties.
Three sources of anxiety
The movement appears to reflect the convergence of three factors that are also sources of concern:
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the perceived deterioration of public education
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ecological anxiety
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the new difficulties young people face in the labour market, particularly those associated with the development of artificial intelligence (AI).
These three factors provide fertile ground for psychosocial anxiety.
The high school students’ main demands appear legitimate and concern improving working conditions: replacing absent teachers, shortening excessively long school days, reducing the number of students per class, repairing and maintaining infrastructure, and improving or abolishing Parcoursup, the widely criticised higher education admissions platform that is often difficult to understand.
These demands echo the broader perception that conditions in the French school system have deteriorated and that the system is relatively inefficient compared with those of neighbouring countries. This is confirmed year after year by the PISA survey: over a period of 25 years, France has fallen from 12th to 29th place in the overall rankings, with declining performance in every area measured: reading, mathematics, and science. Admittedly, the number of countries participating in the survey has increased, but the scores themselves clearly demonstrate a deterioration in student performance, in a context in which results across OECD countries have been stagnating for several years.
Yet this is not due to a lack of time spent in the classroom. French high school students spend 34 hours a week in class, compared with 18.8 hours in Finland, whose students achieve considerably better results than their French counterparts (Finland ranks 12th overall, compared with France in 29th place). The traditional French ideal of a free, public, and compulsory education system rested on the basic assumption that the quality of its teaching would lead to a future in which good academic results would be rewarded.
Today, however, confidence in the education system has eroded considerably, and no favourable alternative has emerged. As the French sociologist François Dubet aptly puts it,
“There is no future outside school, and school cannot guarantee any future.”
Combined with a sense of social injustice experienced in many disadvantaged neighbourhoods, this exasperation at the decline of what is perceived as the only avenue for social mobility is seen as a betrayal of France’s republican ideal.
The relatively new phenomenon of widespread eco-anxiety, is also another underlying issue which appears to be affecting a significant proportion of young people. In 2025, the French Agency for Ecological Transition (ADEME), a highly respected public agency, estimated that “16.6 million French people exhibit symptoms of psychological distress related to the environment,” a phenomenon that appears to affect young people and those aged 25–34, in particular. The unusually hot summer we have just experienced is hardly likely to alleviate these anxieties. In much public discourse, global warming is largely attributed to the postwar capitalist production system. The convergence of these educational and ecological concerns is illustrated, for example, by the highly publicised visit of Swedish activist Greta Thunberg to show her support at a high school in the Paris region.
Against this already bleak backdrop, concerns about unemployment have recently emerged as well, since young people aged 15–24 are the group most affected by unemployment, with a rate of 19.8%, compared with a national average of 7.7%. The new reality of AI adds another dimension, echoing the much criticised Parcoursup algorithm and giving rise to a new and augmented form of digital anxiety, this time by calling into question the promise of future employment. Thus, faced with a university system that no longer delivers on its promises and an increasingly degraded ecological environment, young people find that the world of work itself is slipping out of their reach…
A desire to take control of their destiny and live a decent life
Interviews with high school students, along with their stated demands, regularly reveal a desire to be heard and to have “a say in the matter”. These demonstrations can be understood as an expression of the desire to take control of one’s own destiny and to be insoumis or unbowed or unwilling to submit a term borrowed from the name of France’s far left political party (La France insoumise) that has become increasingly popular among young people. A changing social and economic landscape is perceived to be going in the wrong direction and governed by out-of-touch older generations whose track record to date undermines their legitimacy to govern.
Let us hypothesise that, in a social space permeated by social media, occupying educational institutions serves two purposes: it provides an opportunity, however briefly and even if only in an illusory way, to reclaim spaces dedicated to learning and everyday work, and it also makes it possible to forge genuine social bonds. In contrast to the “linear time” of everyday life, which scatters individuals behind their screens, social media plays the role of an intermediary institution between the individual and society. This civil uprising provides an opportunity to put human relationships at the centre, and reaffirm solidarity in numbers, i.e. groups, which come together in this way to challenge the established order and vent its woes. Such movements have an element of “celebration” to them, which can be seen in the humour displayed on many protest banners and in the music accompanying the marches. But, as French sociologist Roger Caillois already reminded us in the Man and the Sacred (1939), modern celebration can also take the form of war, like group affirmation via violent outbreaks…
The uprisings in France bring together anxieties that extend beyond the high schoolers’ realm and concern the world of work in the broadest sense. Once again, the students who took part in the initial demonstrations are not fighting to work less, but to be able to do meaningful and satisfying work under satisfactory conditions, in other words, to have a good and fair life.
Thanks to MM Gabriel Lomellini and Magwyer Grimes for their comments on this article.
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Jean-Philippe Bouilloud teaches ar ESCP Business School and l’Université de Paris Cité.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/28/france-three-overlapping-woes-are-fuelling-a-generation-of-discontent/