I often apprecaite the way Agnès Poirier writes for a British readership (The Times).
It started peacefully. On September 18, pupils at the Lycée Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, southeast of Paris, joined their teachers striking over unfilled posts, overcrowded classes and crumbling buildings. Perfectly legitimate grievances expressed without trouble.
Within days, two young MPs from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left party, France Unbowed, turned up to cheer them on and filmed themselves doing it. One of their TikTok videos, in which one of the MPs directly addressed President Macron and accused him of “looking down on the youth”, was viewed 1.5 million times. It worked a treat. The blockades spread like wildfire across France, reaching even the most elite Parisian lycées such as Henri-IV, where pupils, perched on a pyramid of bins, held up banners declaring: “Privileged but revolted.”
Less than three weeks later, the toll is stark. Hundreds of lycées have been blockaded, 24 set on fire and “severely damaged” by youngsters. A headteacher was doused in petrol in Marseille, a passer-by burnt by a makeshift flamethrower when she tried to intervene; another, pelted with stones by youths wearing balaclavas, lost an eye. As of Monday evening, 715 policemen and gendarmes, 215 pupils and 85 school staff, including 34 head teachers, had been injured. More than 5,000 people have been taken into custody, 85 per cent of them minors. Tuesday’s national day of action, when police fired teargas at teenagers in Paris as pupils across France marched alongside university students, trade unions and even farmers, will have added to the toll.
It only took a few political pyromaniacs to set this alight, and it is hard to see it dying down any time soon. Jérôme Fourquet, France’s most-read pollster and head of opinion research at Ifop, helps explain why. In Homo Occidentalis: What have we become?, published this month with the clinical psychologist Ruben Rabinovitch, he describes an anthropological shift under way and a new mental climate. He calls it décivilisation, “this reduced ability to manage our emotions and frustration, and a growing propensity for insults, antisocial behaviour and physical violence”.
“Today, we live in a horizontal, disinhibited society centred on self-fulfilment,” Fourquet says, and collective frustrations no longer find their outlet in organised politics; they spill straight into the streets. Hence the changing electoral landscape and the rise of both political extremes, Marine Le Pen's far right and Mélenchon’s far left, whom some polls pair as the likely finalists in next spring’s presidential election.
In another recent survey among teachers and the wider population, Fourquet points to the failure at the heart of France’s education system. In just 40 years the baccalauréat, the end-of-lycée exam, has become a largely devalued diploma. In 1985, just 29 per cent of school-leavers obtained it; about 80 per cent do so today.
This has had two consequences. According to 71 per cent of teachers, it has led to “a collapse in overall educational standards”, which is indeed apparent in the findings of the OECD’s latest Pisa international assessment, in which France recorded its lowest results yet in mathematics, reading and science. Competition and selection have been postponed to higher education, where students pile up degrees to prove their worth — only to discover that the job market does not necessarily value their aspirations. The result is a nation of overabundant and frustrated graduates and a culture of resentment that populists on both extremes exploit.
Money is not even the problem. France spends 6.8 per cent of its GDP on education, and even after deducting pensions for retired teachers it is still spending the OECD average. The failure is management rather than means. More deeply, however, the problem is cultural: in going out of its way to continually spare pupils, France has abandoned the pursuit of excellence. Restoring it would require a cultural revolution.
In the meantime, the French government cannot buy either time or peace. It has resorted to “magic money” so often that markets have grown very edgy. The French are deeply resistant to reform. They are so attached to early retirement that the current government has had to suspend the timid 2023 pension reform simply to survive, freezing retirement age at 62. Pensions swallow a quarter of France’s public spending and yet any government asking the French to confront the demographic arithmetic and work longer risks being toppled. So this government, with no majority in parliament, can only absorb the blows, praying hard there are no deaths in the streets and that the markets do not pull the plug.
With a national debt of €3.6trn, at 119 per cent of GDP, far above the eurozone average, the French are living a dangerous lie. And the candidates most likely to get through to the second round of the presidential election spook the markets. Mélenchon wants to cancel outright the French debt held by the ECB. As for Le Pen, who unveiled her economic programme on Tuesday, she promises to lower — yes lower — the retirement age and slash VAT on energy and food.
The markets may not wait for next year’s election to deliver their verdict. The lesson will come, cold and hard, and not even post-Marxist tactics will soften the reckoning. Unless the French decide to burn their house down. They have done it before.