High school students in revolt: the blockade comeback, and the question of what comes next

According to Le Monde, lycée and student organisations have called for schools to be blockaded from Monday, or Tuesday, despite commitments made by the government. The paper notes that the pressure of the baccalauréat (the national exit exam that decides university access) and of Parcoursup (the French university admissions platform) is growing, and that some pupils are asking themselves what comes next. The mobilised young, for their part, want to "maintain the pressure". What the dispatch does not say, we will not invent: the details of the government's commitments, the number of institutions concerned, and the real extent of the hesitation are unknown here.

That is the facts. The rest is our reading.

Is pupils hesitating to block a sign of weakness in the movement? We see instead its first real debate. A blockade decided from above, by communiqué, asks nothing of anyone. A blockade that has to be defended in front of worried classmates who are anxious about their Parcoursup file forces people to argue, to vote, to persuade. It is there, in the lycée assemblies, that political learning happens, far more than in civics classes. Luxemburg said of the mass strike that it was a living school: you learn by doing, not by waiting until you are ready.

For waiting until you are ready is the natural slope of the cautious. She already mocked those who demanded perfect organisation and a full strike fund before moving; events, she reminded them, never leave that time. Lycée students have no strike fund. They have something better, perhaps: a date, a school calendar, and the sense of having been played.

That is the heart of the matter. The government has made commitments, and young people do not believe them enough to go quietly back to class. They are right to be wary. A concession wrested from power is never an achievement so long as the force that won it scatters: power takes it back when the arithmetic suits it. The only useful question, faced with a promise, is therefore this: does it strengthen the trust and organisation of those who won it, or does it send them home, reassured and disarmed? A reform that demobilises is not a victory; it is a sedative.

Then there is the honest objection, that of the pupils who doubt. The baccalauréat is not postponed, and Parcoursup does not apologise. It would be cynical to lecture them from an editorial desk. But that is precisely why pressure cannot rest on blocking the gate alone: there need to be committees that decide together, links with students, parents and teachers, and forms of action that everyone can sustain without sacrificing their year. A movement that lives only on morning picket lines burns out; a movement that organises itself outgrows its own instructions.

The government, for its part, is counting on fatigue and on the calendar. It falls to the young to remind it that a new school year can also be the moment to refuse to learn obedience.