41 high schools blockaded: the young organise, the state stalls

According to France 24, 41 lycées (sixth-form colleges, the French secondary schools for pupils aged 15 to 18) were blockaded this Monday 2 November at 9.30 a.m., or 1% of the country's roughly 3,700 establishments, according to the Education Ministry. Still according to the channel, no disruption was recorded in three quarters of the departments, while the sometimes heavy-handed police interventions continue. That is what we know. The rest is our reading.

First remark: this "1%" is a ministry figure, snapped at one precise hour on a Monday back-to-school morning. It tells us what can be counted, not what cannot: the general assemblies, the corridor discussions, the schools where people are still hesitating. We do not know, at this stage, how many pupils took part, nor how much of the blockading was decided collectively. The dispatch is thin on this point, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

Second remark: the police. That teenagers outside their school should meet "heavy-handed" interventions says a great deal about how the state handles dissent when it does not go through the channels provided. Police, budgets, circulars: these are not neutral referees. Faced with a young generation that blocks, the apparatus responds first with order, and then, perhaps, with concession. And concession, as everyone knows, is an art of delay.

This is where the essentials lie. A reform wrung out of power is not socialism in a kit: what is given in November can be taken back in March, when the assemblies have emptied. The real question is whether a measure strengthens the confidence and power of those who won it, or whether it sends them home with a press release declaring victory. Ten demands carried by the Union syndicale lycéenne (the national school student union) make a programme; they are not yet a force.

It will be objected that 1% is not much. But mass movements rarely arise where we expect them, from a spark that looks tiny, and they educate faster than any cadre school. A pupil who votes for a blockade in an assembly learns in a single morning what ten civics lessons do not teach: that a collective decision carries weight, and that power responds to it. What remains to be seen is whether this anger becomes a lasting organisation, with elected, recallable committees that decide the next steps themselves rather than delegating them to a general staff or a ministry.

This is the classic trap: negotiating over the heads of the rank and file, trading momentum for a round table. The government knows this, and is counting on fatigue. It falls to the young to remind it that a march, unlike a timetable of consultations, does not need permission to start moving again.