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. — 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 young protester who lost a hand. Officers and school staff have been injured, too. These injuries and all that pushback intensified an existing dispute over whether forceful policing was preventing violence, contributing to it, or doing both in different places at different times. That question does not have a single answer, but it does help explain why some parents and students who were originally focused on school conditions began talking about policing as well: the police response to those protests blended that existing conversation and its associated complaints with those related to schooling in the country. Meanwhile, another source of anger was building well beyond the schools. France has been hit by an energy-price surge connected to the broader disruption of oil and gas markets in the Middle East. Its statistics agency reported that consumer prices were up 3.1% in September compared with a year earlier, but energy prices were up more than 21%. Diesel was up more than 44%, and gasoline more than 25%. Fresh food prices also spiked pretty dramatically, partly because of shortages caused by summer heatwaves. Calls circulated online to revive the “yellow vest” movement, which began in 2018 over fuel prices and grew into a much broader protest about living standards and political representation. Unions, including the CGT, backed a new day of action. Student groups urged their supporters to join. By October 17, these strands had converged, though they didn’t all share the same priorities or protest methods. The Interior Ministry estimated about 550,000 people demonstrated on that single day, though organizers have said the number was higher. Either way it was a very large mobilization. And reporters saw peaceful crowds carrying flags and singing, alongside far smaller groups throwing projectiles, setting fires, breaking windows, and looting. Reuters reported roughly 2,400 arrests on the first day, when hundreds of businesses were damaged. One demonstrator died after suffering a cardiac arrest. In the aftermath, there were additional clashes and localized curfews. As tends to be the case in these situations, some people may have joined one of these demonstrations intending to commit violence. Others may have taken advantage of confusion once violence began around them. Some protesters may also have committed crimes. Investigators still have to establish who did what in each individual case, though a survey by the pollster Elabe found that 70% of respondents believed those involved in the violence were mainly people who showed up specifically to cause it, which suggests that many French people distinguish the protests from the looting—something not all reports on these demonstrations have clearly done. That same survey found that 91% of respondents condemned the violence, while 93% considered the cost-of-living demands legitimate and 82% considered the students’ demands legitimate. In other words, a person can think a demonstration is justified but the destruction around it isn’t. So why did all of these issues come to a head, and become so combustible, now? Persistent school problems over a long period of time, followed by a sudden rise in fuel and other prices, gets us partway to an explanation. But more fundamentally, many French voters expect the state to provide reliable education, transportation, healthcare, and protection from sharp economic shocks. Those expectations are pretty central to France’s social model, but the government hasn’t kept up their end of the bargain, and has little spare money with which to address these issues, at the moment. At the end of June 2026, public debt stood at about 119% of the country’s annual economic output, according to France’s statistics agency. High debt doesn’t mean the government will run out of money tomorrow, but it does mean that large new spending promises come with questions about long-term borrowing costs, taxes, and what would have to be cut in the tradeoff. France has also struggled to pass budgets through a parliament with no governing majority since Macron’s snap election in 2024. That creates a sort of trap for the people in office. A modest, fiscally responsible repair plan can come across as insulting to families dealing with broken facilities and missing teachers. A large spending package, in contrast, might make investors and monetary watchdogs more nervous. A hard police response may reassure people frightened by looting while alienating students already angry about injured classmates. A softer response could invite accusations that the government has lost control, allowing the mob to do whatever it wants. None of those choices is cost-free for the politicians making them, and Macron is approaching the end of his second term without the option of running for a third consecutive one, so his powers are even more limited than they normally would be, in some regards. French protest history also matters here, and in France and elsewhere, street mobilization has often been a way to force negotiations when people believe government institutions aren’t listening. The yellow vests won policy concessions with their efforts. The pension protests of 2023 put millions on the streets even though the government proceeded with raising the retirement age. All that history of mass demonstration gives current French organizers examples of the power and the limitations of mass action. It also gives political actors a familiar vocabulary for arguing and assigning blame. The government has pointed its finger at ultra-left groups and opportunistic criminals for the October violence, and it has accused Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise party of inflaming tensions. Mélenchon’s party denies responsibility for the violence and says the government failed to meet students’ demands while policing them too aggressively. As usual with this sort of thing, there are also rumors about outside forces stoking violence in order to cause disorder, though also as usual, there’s no evidence of that in this case, as of the day I’m recording this. Now that said, it’s no surprise wild speculation and conspiracies abound here, because the politics surrounding all this are especially consequential; France’s presidential election is only months away, after all. Marine Le Pen, the candidate of the far-right National Rally, was already the first-round frontrunner before the worst weekend of violence. Her message combines criticism of the cost of living with a promise to restore order. After the riots, she described the government as unable to control the country and called for tougher action against people who attacked police or looted businesses. That is a favorable issue for her. In separate post-violence surveys, Elabe and Odoxa found Le Pen ahead of other named politicians when respondents were asked whom they trusted or considered capable of restoring order. Odoxa found that 47% chose her on that question, which is well ahead of the next person, though still short of a majority. Interestingly, though, an Ipsos survey conducted before October 17 found that Le Pen and National Rally president Jordan Bardella remained among France’s best-regarded potential presidents, but that favorable views of both had actually fallen from the previous month. A later presidential poll put Le Pen in the mid-thirties for the first round, roughly where other surveys had placed her before the riots. That suggests she was already popular before the riots, and the unrest may be strengthening an argument she was already making, but haven’t served as a kingmaker, as some pundits have suggested. Le Pen’s legal position is also worth noting here. Her conviction for misusing European Parliament funds was upheld in July, but an appeals court shortened her electoral ban, clearing a path for her to run in 2027. She has taken the case to France’s highest court, so legal questions haven’t entirely disappeared, but she’s being polled as a candidate, and the general assumption is that those legal questions won’t hinder her current political ambitions. Elsewhere on the French political spectrum, leftist candidate Mélenchon has embraced the students’ grievances and criticized the policing while condemning looting. That may help him among younger or angrier voters, but it also exposes him to attacks that he has been too close to the unrest. Centrists and center-right candidates, including former prime minister Édouard Philippe, are trying to show that they can restore order without abandoning the school and cost-of-living issues. France’s two-round system means the identity of the candidate who reaches an eventual runoff against Le Pen matters enormously, as leading the first round is not the same as having won the presidency. Following the October 17 violence, officials imposed local curfews and restricted some planned gatherings. Museums and businesses announced temporary closures, and the government prepared a much larger police deployment for the next nationwide protest day. Those steps were intended to prevent damage, but broad protest bans and aggressive crowd control have their own costs, particularly if peaceful demonstrators conclude that their complaints can only be heard when these demonstrations go off the rails. The government has also been trying to secure additional fuel supplies, while promising to respond to students’ concerns. Neither a shipment of diesel nor a ministerial plan can immediately restore trust, of course, but both are more directly connected to the origins of this crisis than another argument about which party benefits from television footage of fires and looting. The next few months will show whether the different groups that marched together can sustain a common movement, whether the authorities can protect both public safety and the right to protest, and whether any party can offer a credible answer to people who want better services without ignoring the country’s financial constraints. It’s tempting to tell this as one story about France descending into chaos, or as one story about a justified popular uprising. Neither fully captures what’s actually happening. A great many people went out to demand functioning schools and affordable lives. Other people committed serious crimes, and some police responses have left young people with life-changing injuries. Those facts on the ground all coexist. The electoral question, following all that, is not just who can use the unrest most effectively in a campaign: it’s whether French voters come to believe that anyone can address the conditions that brought people into the streets in the first place, while ensuring that the streets remain safe for those who are just trying to go about their day. Show Notes https://apnews.com/article/france-school-protests-what-to-know-4e3bea86a5be39904c90f15ee96e3a24 https://apnews.com/article/france-school-protests-yellow-vest-44b9d3ba91ffad4029f975dced7e31cb https://www.investing.com/news/world-news/france-faces-aftermath-of-worst-unrest-in-years-4955857 https://apnews.com/article/france-protests-riots-police-tactics-weapons-fb1ef68656834db394c535c034feb05a https://apnews.com/article/paris-protests-france-art-basel-0208e62321f811e3003460f71b7fcc89 https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/9080263 https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/9057140 https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/fichier/9011484/ndc-juin-2026-ecl-chocs-petrolier-eng.pdf https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/oecd-economic-surveys-france-2024_bd96e2ed-en/full-report/component-8.html https://www.education.gouv.fr/lyceennes-lyceens-vous-avez-la-parole-506143 https://elabe.fr/manifestations-17-octobre/ https://www.odoxa.fr/sondage/une-forte-demande-dordre-et-de-fermete-sur-fond-de-defiance-envers-les-responsables-politiques/ https://www.ipsos.com/fr-fr/barometre-politique-ipsos-bva-la-tribune-dimanche https://www.odoxa.fr/sondage/melenchon-est-passe-devant-philippe-au-premier-tour-marine-le-pen-est-plus-que-jamais-la-grande-favorite-pour-2027-a-la-fois-au-premier-et-au-second-tour/ https://www.marketscreener.com/news/how-will-marine-le-pen-s-legal-problems-affect-her-presidential-campaign-ce7f5eded98ef521 https://apnews.com/article/france-riots-protests-macron-presidential-campaign-bfc6c3326bdd019f3184fd1a5126e228 https://apnews.com/article/france-macron-trump-comments-protests-b46829a8161a4d152124642fd275f595 This is a public episode. 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