Protesters occupy the Statue de la Republique during a demonstration at Place de la Republique in Paris, France on November 14, 2026 [Benoit Tessier/Reuters]Liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, fraternity). Every French child learns the motto long before learning what it means to live up to it. It is a powerful promise. So is France’s habit of breaking it.
France has spent more than two centuries struggling to fulfil the French Republic’s founding principles of equality, liberty and fraternity. All citizens are supposed to be equal before the law, and public institutions are meant to serve the common good, regardless of origin or social background.
So, when students at under-resourced schools in Parisian suburbs or rural areas protest against missing teachers, deteriorating conditions in school buildings and years of neglect, their grievances extend beyond the classroom. They are challenging a system that promises equal opportunity while leaving many young people to pursue it with fewer resources than others.
As the movement attracted support from workers, unions and other protesters, it has become part of a broader confrontation over the cost of living, the dismantlement of public services and the state’s retreat from its social responsibilities.
The constitutional promise is explicit. The 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen establishes equality in rights, while the Preamble to the 1946 French Constitution makes public education at every level a duty of the state.
A republic cannot indefinitely tolerate schools whose quality depends on where children live and what their families can afford. When equality exists in constitutional texts but recedes from everyday life, the state loses credibility as the guarantor of l’intérêt general (general interest).
There is a historical reason this contradiction carries particular weight in France. The Revolution of 1789 challenged a social order in which privilege was attached to birth. The Third Estate, encompassing the vast majority of the population, carried much of the country’s economic burden while the nobility and clergy enjoyed advantages denied to ordinary people. The French Revolution abolished the legal foundations of this system and established equal citizenship as a founding principle.
More than two centuries later, there is something of a déjà vu. The French government is not the Ancien Régime, and today’s students are not a new Third Estate. Yet the question that animated 1789 has never entirely disappeared: what does equality mean when opportunity remains so dependent on the circumstances into which someone is born?
Hereditary privilege has been abolished as a legal principle, but social privilege can reproduce itself through family wealth, geography, access to good schools and professional networks. The mechanisms might have changed, but the problem has not disappeared.
This is what makes the school central to the current movement. Public schools form citizens; they should enable social mobility and should make merit more important than birth. When students protest because their schools lack teachers and adequate facilities, they are confronting the failure of an institution supposedly designed to make equality real. A system that tells young people their future depends on their effort cannot reasonably hold them responsible for failing to succeed in schools it has failed to equip.
While protest has deep roots in French history, it should not be reduced to a cultural stereotype. It is a recurring struggle over the authority of a centralised state that claims to represent the general interest. In May 1968, student unrest expanded into a nationwide crisis involving millions of striking workers. The movement did not overthrow the state, but it demonstrated how a conflict within universities could expose wider questions about hierarchy, work and political authority.
In 2018, the Yellow Vests movement expressed a different, heterogeneous revolt against decisions perceived to impose disproportionate costs on ordinary households. These movements are not interchangeable. What connects them is the recurring demand that institutions justify their authority and honour their promises.
Today, while voicing their demands, student protesters have developed a distinct cultural language during protests. Anime, manga, memes and social media have become ways of expressing solidarity and defiance. References to One, Dragon Ball, the Avengers, Batman and other fictional worlds have also appeared in demonstrations, alongside creative slogans, costumes and visual jokes.
These types of symbols allow young demonstrators to recognise one another, communicate across schools and cities, and express a collective identity that does not depend on traditional political organisations.
However, their humour should not be mistaken for political shallowness. It is one way of making abstract ideas about injustice, freedom and solidarity tangible and visible both in France and beyond its borders.
Students’ legitimate grievances have met a state increasingly inclined to treat protests as a problem of security and to use violence as a response, rather than a warning about the condition of public institutions.
Security and public order have become an excuse for suppressing dissent. France’s experience after the 2015 terrorist attacks illustrates how exceptional powers can outlast the circumstances used to justify them: some measures associated with the state of emergency were incorporated into ordinary law in 2017. A government risks undermining its own legitimacy when it appears more capable of containing the consequences of institutional failure by force than of correcting them.
France keeps returning to its revolutionary ideals not because nothing has changed. It returns to them because their meaning remains contested.
The republic abolished privilege as a legal principle more than two centuries ago. It has yet to eliminate every way in which privilege reproduces itself. The students are forcing that unfinished question back into public life. And when they do, the state appears more capable of containing the consequences of its failures with brutality, rather than of repairing them. That is the contradiction at the heart of this movement, and the test it poses for the French Republic.
Many of the students in the streets will be among the voters in the April 2027 presidential elections. If history is any guide, the condescending response by Macron and his government will only harden student determination to participate in the election process. A higher youth turnout could benefit the left. However, it is up to the left to seize this opportunity, reconnect with younger generations and fill the political vacuum with a solid alternative.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
