Striking Sixth-Formers: When Jul and Aya Nakamura Close Ranks, Who Speaks for Common Sense?

According to Le Monde, figures of popular culture, from Jul to Aya Nakamura by way of Lena Situations and Tibo InShape, have stepped forward to encourage the lycéen movement (France's school-leavers' protest movement, roughly the equivalent of sixth-form or college students). The daily speaks of "unprecedented" support and an emerging counter-culture that would constitute a stake in the 2027 presidential election. What exactly this support consists of, its form, its precise demands, the dispatch does not tell us. The rest is our reading.

Let us begin with the framing, because it is already a programme. When the headline makes these artists a "stake for 2027", the rebellious youth becomes an electorate to be captured, rather than a subject that speaks. The common sense of political journalism is at work here: all anger must convert into voting intentions, or else it does not exist. Who plays the reasonable adult in this scene? The one who calculates, obviously.

Gramsci called hegemony that moment when the worldview of a ruling class becomes everyone's common sense: the order seems normal, even advantageous to those who endure it. The media, the school, civil society are its trenches, in a "war of position" where one advances slowly, metre by metre. Counter-hegemony, for its part, requires inventing one's own ideas, one's own venues and one's own intellectuals, drawn from the group they express. Yet a rapper with millions of streams or an influencer followed by teenagers bears a strong resemblance to what Gramsci might have called organic intellectuals: they have no chair, but they manufacture meaning where young people live, on screens and in earphones.

Caution nonetheless. The list cited is heterogeneous, and the word "counter-culture" does a great deal of work. A counter-culture that travels through platforms owned by a handful of private companies, and through well-established music industries, remains caught in the property relations that organise cultural production. Those who own the means of material production tend also to control the means of mental production: even rebellion circulates with their algorithm as toll. This does not make it false or useless; it reminds us that a viral endorsement is not an organisation.

The opposite trap would be to treat these artists as infantry of the opposing camp, or as opportunists. We know nothing of the kind, and the visible individuals are not the subject. The subject is the terrain. If popular culture becomes a field where rival common senses clash, the parties dreaming of "recovering" this energy would do well to ask why they were not its spokespeople.

What the students themselves will make of it remains to be seen. A movement is not an audience; it endures through its assemblies, its slogans and its digested failures. As for 2027, the press is already thinking about it. It is for young people to decide whether they wish to be a stake or an actor.