Lycées bloqués: Unef bets on mass mobilisation, the government on attrition

According to franceinfo, the Unef insists that "the movement is not running out of steam" and that "the mobilisation is meant to become mass." Its vice-president announces for Tuesday "a black day for universities and lycées, with mobilisations all over the country." That is what the dispatch says, and roughly all it says: it gives no participation figures, no list of establishments, and no government response. So at this stage we do not know whether the movement is as broad as the student union claims. A union rarely announces that things are petering out.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

We like to repeat that lycée pupils "don't work." This forgets that they are the vanguard of tomorrow's workforce, already graded, ranked, sorted and prepared for a labour market whose rules they learn before entering it. Blocking a lycée is a first practical lesson in what the hours you are asked to give are worth, and in the balance of power that sets their price. The movement's organisers, for their part, learn logistics: general assemblies, pickets, speaking turns, communiqués. No textbook teaches this, and that is precisely why it is viewed with suspicion.

The trade union tradition has always known that this school teaches faster than the others. Mass movements often erupt over a spark that seems slight, and they educate those who take part more effectively than any classroom. The old debate remains: does anger turn into lasting organisation, or does it dissipate at the first ministerial announcement? The Unef, by speaking of "massification," knows the risk is real.

For the script is well known. The authorities throw out a concession, an adjustment, a "consultation," and hope the holidays or exams will do the rest. Yet, as Marxist tradition reminds us, the struggle over conditions, however necessary, treats the symptoms without touching the system. Winning a retreat on one point is not winning the game; it is sometimes the best way of losing it politely.

The challenge, then, is to escape the school-bound bubble. Rosa Luxemburg observed that isolated conflicts, however numerous, do not turn by themselves into common class action: a strike can die in general indifference, despite the sympathy it arouses. Lycée pupils have no strike fund and no power to stop a factory. Their strength lies elsewhere: in contagion, if employees, parents and workers' unions see in it something other than a matter for young people.

Tuesday will show whether the "black day" is a promise or a slogan. We are waiting for the figures, the executive's answers and, above all, a sign: that of the employees. Without them, youth will have learned the strike. With them, it could well win it.