A Teacher in Front of the Class: The Lycéen Movement and the Moral Economy of Public Education
This essay was first published in The 13/13 Essays, Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, on 15 October 2026. The opening is below; the full essay is on the 13/13 site.
On 16 September 2026, teachers at Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, a public high school with approximately 1,500 students in the eastern suburbs of Paris, went on strike to protest teaching positions that remained unfilled three weeks into the school year. The next morning, their students blocked the gates. Their leaflet cited staff shortages, overcrowded classrooms, and, in some rooms, an insufficient number of tables to accommodate everyone. Within two weeks, amplified by videos shared on social media and a call from the Union syndicale lycéenne, the blockade had developed into a national movement. By the first week of October, classes were suspended in 400 to 500 lycées, more than a third of the public high schools of the Paris region were closed for the day, and more than 5,000 people had been taken into police custody. Riot police cleared the entrance to the Lycée Hélène-Boucher in Paris. In Lens, a teenager lost a hand to a grenade on the margins of a blockade. How it happened is still disputed. Thousands took to the streets in Nantes, Marseille and Lyon. University students joined them, followed by students from Belgian lycées. On Tuesday 13 October, for the fifth ‘act’ of the movement, which numbers its days of action as the Gilets jaunes did, the student and lycéen unions counted 480,000 marchers in some ten cities, against 450,000 the Tuesday before. These are the organizers’ figures, and that morning the education minister interpreted them as a sign that the movement was ebbing. But after three weeks of blockades, and just days before the autumn holidays, the protests still had not stopped.
And the students’ demand? Not an end to schooling, but more of it. The demands they reiterated assembly after assembly are notably modest and precise: absent teachers should be replaced, and class sizes should be limited to thirty-five pupils. Buildings should be maintained and kept at a comfortable temperature during periods of hot weather. Timetables should be organized to avoid extended gaps that require students to remain at school from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. The anxiety caused by Parcoursup, the national platform that ranks applicants for university admission, should also be taken seriously. The primary request on every list is the most straightforward: a teacher in front of the classroom.
This is the puzzle I want to consider: France is witnessing a mass movement of adolescents, met with riot police and thousands of arrests, whose central demand is to be taught.
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