The Protests in France

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Stephen Nessen (0:40)

It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Stephen Nessen, the transit reporter in the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom sitting in for Brian today.

Now we'll turn to the student protests in France, where high schoolers who are fed up with teacher shortages, crowded classes and rundown buildings have been blockading their schools and marching through cities across the country. The protests have not only left hundreds injured in clashes with police, but also shaken a government that's just six months out from a presidential election. Joining us now to give us a closer look at the protests, the government's response and what it means for French politics is Jon Henley, Europe correspondent for The Guardian based in Paris. Jon, welcome to WNYC.

Jon Henley (1:20)

Thanks very much. Great to be here.

Stephen Nessen (1:22)

Start us off at the beginning. How did these protests get going?

Jon Henley (1:27)

They started about two weeks ago, now a little over two weeks ago, in a suburb of Paris called Créter, quite a depressed, kind of deprived suburb, with school, with students at just one high school, one local high school who are really fed up with precisely the problems that you mentioned, you know, really overcrowded classes, teachers not being replaced, and, you know, crumbling and dilapidated buildings. There are, you know, complaints that the, you know, some classes literally don't have enough chairs in them. Students have to carry chairs from one classroom to the next. There are leaking ceilings and kind of crumbling walls, as photos and footage has been circulating online, on social networks of, you know, rats in the corridors, cockroaches. And yeah, so it started in just one high school, and it snowballed really, really quickly, within about three or four days at the peak. So kind of like middle of this week, there were more than 500 high schools across France that were completely blockaded. Many more were kind of severely disrupted.

And we had, you know, marches in a dozen or more cities around France, which drew at the kind of the big national day of protest was on Tuesday, depending on whether you believe the organizers or the interior ministry, between 260,000 and 400,000 people taking part, not just, I should say, not just school high school students, but also parents and trade unionists and teachers, who are kind of obviously equally impacted by the kind of successive budget cuts that have been going on over the last few years in the French education system.

Stephen Nessen (3:20)

Can I ask, how has this protest gotten so snowballed? How has it grown so big? What kind of organizing is happening? These are 15 to 18 year olds, right?

Jon Henley (3:31)

Yeah, but you know, France being France, you know, I mean, this is France, right? So there is a long and noble tradition of kind of street protest in France, very well organized. So there are, although these are high school students, there are three or four different kind of national and regional high school associations and student unions that organize this. It's also been backed on the political side by a radical left political party here called La France Insoumise, which is roughly translated, I suppose, as something like Unbowed or, yeah, Unbowed France.

Their representatives, their MPs, parliamentarians have been out on the barricades with the students, their national leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon was another big demonstration yesterday in the Place de la Bastille in central Paris. And yeah, it doesn't take much to get a demonstration or a kind of a national protest movement rolling in France.

Stephen Nessen (4:45)

I think anyone that's traveled to France and had their train disrupted, I think understands that.

Jon Henley (4:50)

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

Stephen Nessen (4:52)

Can I jump in real quick? Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Jon Henley (4:55)

No, I was just going to say, you know, that the sort of flip side of that coin of this, of the scale and the speed with which demonstrations can gather pace in France and a whole movement can kind of snowball. The flip side of that is that they are often quite violent, and they are also often quite violently repressed by the police and by riot police, who deploy tactics, kind of baton charges and tear gas and stun grenades, that, you know, appear quite shocking to countries that aren't used to this level of street violence. I mean, I think it's just worth saying, as always with France, you know, it's a republic, the republic was born in a revolution in 1789, which, you know, which guillotined the royal family and the nobility that the street in France can be quite a violent place.