The Lycée Blockade: Twenty Years of Truancy as Politics

According to Le Monde, which publishes a column by historian Frédérick Genevée, the blocking of schools is a relatively recent practice in the history of youth mobilisation. Yet it has imposed itself over the past twenty years or so as a central form of action for lycée movements, despite the disagreements it provoked at the outset. That, in substance, is what the daily reports. We do not, at this stage, have the detail of the historian's argument, nor any precise figures or examples: what follows is our reading, not his.

What can be said is that the initial quarrel over the blockade is an old acquaintance. It resembles the one Rosa Luxemburg described about the mass strike: the learned denounce its recklessness, and then practice catches up with them. The lycée students did not wait for someone to hand them a manual, a well-stocked strike fund or a party ready to supervise them. They blockaded, debated, sometimes voted by show of hands in the entrance hall, and learned from their mistakes. The Gazette's notes sum it up thus: mass movements teach faster than any cadre school. Here is a school that played truant in order to learn better.

But honesty requires looking at the other side. The blockade raises questions that the column, going by its summary, probably does not exhaust. What becomes of the legitimacy of a blockade when a minority decides for a majority? How does a general assembly remain genuinely democratic, rather than a theatre of megaphones? And above all: what is the response of the authorities? A minor lycée student who blocks his school risks disciplinary sanctions and, at times, legal proceedings, and the state apparatus knows how to make the weight of the rulebook felt by anyone who protests. We have no specific cases to hand here, and we will not invent any; but any celebration of the blockade that forgot this risk would be nothing more than a compliment at no cost.

There remains the old debate between spontaneity and organisation. Twenty years of blockades are proof that teenage anger knows how to give itself a form, even a tradition. It is also the awkward question: does this form produce staying power, collectives that outlast the mobilisation, or merely flare-ups that are snuffed out by the following September? The test, to borrow the Luxemburgist criterion applied to reforms, is simple: does the action increase the confidence and power of those who carry it out, or does it exhaust them?

Politicians love to salute the "engaged youth" so long as it stays within the bounds of a sham parliamentary debate. The blockade, for its part, has the impertinence to do politics where we have learned not to. That it took twenty years for some to agree to look it in the face says less about the lycée students than about the sluggishness of their elders: the gate of a playground always opens faster than that of a ministry.