Youth: anxiety about the future

Now that thousands of French teenagers have taken to the streets to protest, the (quite comfortable) temptation has arisen to discuss the most spectacular images of the demonstrations and to hastily interpret who these young people are and what their protest means. We have seen it these days. The mobilizations are explained through the banlieues, immigration, the far-left or, directly, the racaille (which means scum, riffraff, but not only that, because it is a word with a specific political history in France, which returns periodically, when certain young people stop occupying the place that others have assigned to them).

Meanwhile, these young people are not protesting for anything exotic or that has to do with the margins. It all started at the end of September in a high school in Créteil, where missing teachers were not being replaced. In ten days, the mobilization had reached hundreds of centers. The complaints are extraordinarily mundane: overcrowded classrooms, lack of staff, exhausting schedules, and deteriorated buildings.

But reducing what is happening to a cry for more resources is also falling short. Added to the material conditions are constant reforms and enormous anxiety about the future.

Here we find the most interesting point of the protests: how a generation of young people begins to express discomforts they understood to be individual problems, and discovers that their experience is shared. I know this world a little from another side: I teach at a French university and live part of the year in France. My students are older, but many conversations I hear around me are similar: they study hard without knowing what future awaits them, and to this are added impossible rents, precariousness, deteriorated public services... In short: they live in a system that demands they constantly prove their merits while offering fewer and fewer certainties. This is how a protest that starts because a teacher is missing ends up expressing something much bigger.

And how does the state respond? By October 5th, more than 5,000 people had passed through the police station, 4,400 of them minors. A 15-year-old boy has lost a hand to a police grenade. Another 16-year-old has lost the vision in one eye. This police violence does not happen for no reason. A 2017 law expanded the circumstances under which police and gendarmes can use their weapons. In 2023, a policeman killed 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk during a traffic stop. And this year the National Assembly has approved in first reading a reform that introduces a presumption of legitimate use of weapons by police and gendarmes, which many have dubbed a license to kill The current reaction follows a known logic. Before asking itself what causes the unrest, it is easier for the state to turn the protests into a security issue and look for who is manipulating the young people.

There is something unsettlingly familiar about the reading we can make of the French conflict from our own home. The housing mobilizations these days are not just about rents being too high either. Thousands of people have taken to the streets and a general strike is even being prepared. Housing, like education, concentrates many things: you work and you cannot become independent, you fulfill a good part of what for decades defined a normal adult life and you discover that you cannot have that life. That is why a protest about housing can quickly become a protest about the political system. "The time for politicians is over, it is the time for the street,” they say. Perhaps it would be advisable to try to understand what this outcry hides before getting indignant about what its literal meaning implies.

Let's talk about political contradictions. Part of the political spectrum says it represents those who have difficulties making ends meet, becoming emancipated, or studying in decent conditions. But when these people organize outside of the established channels, too often they are looked at with suspicion or paternalism: the French youth are manipulated, the Spanish tenants are too radical. This is how the forms that unrest takes are delegitimized without talking about what causes it.

France and Spain express the same underlying malaise in different ways: more and more people are discovering that what they have lived for years as an individual failure responds to a system that deteriorates public services, makes housing more expensive, makes work precarious, and reduces future expectations. These are not separate problems, but rather part of the same experience of insecurity and abandonment.

When so many people reach this conclusion, perhaps the question should not be how to ensure that they protest in a more comfortable way, without affecting those who do not want to join the demonstrations, but rather why, in order to be heard, so many people have had to take to the streets.