Lycéens en garde à vue : l'État traite la jeunesse en ennemie intérieure

According to Mediapart, in a single month of school-student mobilisation, the number of gardes à vue (police custody detentions) has already overtaken that of the Gilets jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement, which nonetheless lasted eight months. The site devotes an interview to what it describes as an unprecedented judicial crackdown on the social movement under way, under a headline that lands like a premonition: "Ils vont arrêter tout le monde" ("They're going to arrest everyone").

That is what we know, and it is more or less all of it. Mediapart's summary gives us neither the exact figure, nor the cities concerned, nor the share of minors, nor the number of prosecutions actually brought after these custody detentions. We will not make them up. A garde à vue is not a conviction, and that is precisely what makes the statistic interesting: you can detain someone for a few hours without ever having to prove anything.

From here on, this is our reading. The myth has it that police and justice are impartial referees standing above the fray. The Marxist tradition sees something else: institutions shaped by property relations and tasked, in the last instance, with protecting them. The state has its margins, its contradictions, its judges who push back; it remains a terrain of struggle. But when a youth of fifteen or seventeen sets itself in motion, the machine quickly reveals where its limits lie. It does not manage disorder; it manages contagion.

For that is what the comparison with the Gilets jaunes suggests. Surpassing in four weeks the tally of eight months is less a measure of the violence of a movement than of the nervousness of those facing it. The custody stamp has a pedagogical function: it teaches every schoolchild that the street has a price, it places on families the fear of a criminal record, it isolates. This is demobilisation administered at the counter.

Cautious reformists will tell us to talk, negotiate, and wait for the next parliamentary cycle. They forget that concessions won by struggle are clawed back as soon as order demands it, and that the only real question is whether a measure strengthens the confidence and collective strength of those below, or sends them back home. Mass repression poses the question the wrong way round: it bets on fear.

It may lose that bet. A movement is not learned from textbooks but in the ordeal, and a generation that discovers the police station at the age when one discovers the world will draw lessons its ministers did not foresee. In wanting to arrest everyone, the state risks above all manufacturing an age group that now knows exactly whom it is dealing with.