Why Protesting is at the Heart of French Culture

Why do the French take politics to the streets?

After Alastair and Michael Gove discussed the widespread school protests in France and many of you wrote in with strong opinions, we’re examining the French tradition of protest, where it comes from – and why Britain has never seen students, especially school pupils, demonstrate on the same scale.

For two weeks, thousands of teenagers across France have taken to the streets to protest overcrowded classrooms, a lack of teachers and crumbling facilities.

School protests on this scale – with nearly 2,000 lycées (high schools) across the country blockaded or closed, occasional violent clashes and 6,000 arrests – would, Michael Gove told Alastair in the main episode, never happen in the UK. “The hoary old Tory in me feels that these things are unsettling eruptions into the body politic which rarely end well,” Gove said. 

Many of you wrote in to disagree. 

“My students in the 6th Arrondissement have been protesting out of solidarity with the ‘banlieue’ and holding signs saying things such as: ‘We are privileged, but we want to share’,” one French teacher said. “Michael Gove says he likes order on the streets, the kids here are asking for order in their schools.”

For this newsletter, we spoke to Professor Emile Chabal, a leading specialist on contemporary French history at the University of Edinburgh, and Professor Sarah Pickard, an expert in youth politics at the Society at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. 

“There’s a tendency, particularly in Britain, to cast the French as continuously out on the street protesting,” Professor Chabal notes.

Part of this is cliché and prejudice, he says, but equally, “in France, you see much more the politics of opposition and the politics of the street than you do the politics of the boardroom.”

There three main reasons the French, old and young, take to the streets as often as they do, says Chabal, who has spent decades studying French political practices.

It’s a ‘noble pursuit’

“The origins of protest in France go back a very long way,” Chabal explains, “certainly, to the French Revolution, if not beyond.”

In the 250 years since the storming of the Bastille, through La Résistance under the Nazis to May 1968, Chabal says, a “mythology” has been built up around protesting: a set of symbols, rallying cries and stories, from barricades to cheers of “Sous les pavés, la plage!” [Below the paving stones, the beach!] – a slogan coined in 1968.

The events of May 1968 – which saw the worst rioting since the Popular Front era of the 1930s – began with a protest by university students in Paris, in part against dormitory rules and overcrowding, but also against the French state more broadly.

The violent tactics used by police against the students, in an event that would later become known as the ‘Night of the Barricades’, shocked the public and led to a nationwide general strike involving 10 million workers.

“There's a symbolic power to protest in France, which mobilises students and makes it feel like they're not just protesting now in 2026, but actually they belong to a much longer tradition of protest,” Chabal says.

Chabal points to a young lycée student taking part in the marches who, in his defence of the current protests, referenced “la gauche de rupture”, a 20th century slogan used by protesters in calls for a radical, structural break with capitalism.

“It feeds into present-day imaginations,” Chabal says, “It makes your protest much more meaningful if you feel like you're the latest generation to have complained about something.”

For the past ten years, in the early days of any protest, the French public has generally been supportive, polling shows. In 2019, eight days into strikes over planned pension reforms that paralysed France’s rail system, 68% of those polled said the action was justified. Likewise, almost 90% of people supported the 2024 farmers’ protests, where farmers across Europe took to the streets in a stand against red tape and EU agricultural rules.

“What that tells you is that a large number of French people identify with the act of protesting, that they feel that this is noble, worthwhile,” Chabal says.

In contrast, in the UK, protests are often unpopular. When Insulate Britain, an environmental activist group founded by members of Extinction Rebellion, blocked the M25 in 2021, only 25% of people were in favour. 

Likewise, only 37% supported the rail strikes in June 2022, which saw 40,000 rail staff, as well as over 10,000 workers from London Underground, walk out in protest over pay and planned changes to working practices, leading to widespread disruption.

This is largely because, Chabal says, “it's virtually impossible, certainly in England, for people to imagine that actually a protest might lead to a fundamental change in the British constitution.”

The gap in how much faith people have that a protest will work comes, he explains, from “fundamental differences” in how French and British politics operate.

‘Weak Unions and See-What-Happens Government’

France has the lowest union membership rate in Western Europe, only one in ten French employees belongs to a union, compared with roughly one in four in Britain. 

“This is one of the great misconceptions about France,” Chabal says. “Rates of unionisation are and have been for several decades, significantly lower than places like Britain or the Nordic countries or Germany, or even Italy.”

The low membership levels means that unions are “generally weaker” in France than the rest of Europe, Chabal says.

“[In Germany] all it takes is a trade union to say: ‘Look, we're going to go on strike’, and that gets everybody back around the table, and negotiations begin to happen about pay or work conditions, whatever it is,” he explains. 

But in France, where unions threatening to strike doesn’t carry the same weight, protest often becomes the most viable option for change.

While in the UK, ministers will often carry out a long period of consultation before announcing new policies, the French government, Chabal says, “tends to have a strategy of announcing a policy and then seeing how much opposition there is to it.” 

If the backlash is great enough, the policy will then be withdrawn, Chabal says. He points to the government’s retraction of a 1984 proposal to overhaul how private schools were funded, as well their decision to abandon the introduction of a controversial academic selection process for university in 1986, as examples.

This dynamic “creates a slightly pathological situation,” Chabal explains, “that reinforces the logic of protest because it looks as if protest is actually achieving something.” 

“In France, the idea that your protest might lead to a change in the status quo is within living memory,” Chabal says, contrasting the situation with Britain, where protests very rarely lead to change. 

In February 2003, for instance, 1.5 million people took to the streets in London to march against the looming Iraq War, in the largest political demonstration in UK history – yet just a month later, the UK and US invaded Iraq.

Britain’s lack of cross-generational support

The third reason for France’s strong tradition of protest, Chabal says, is the “intergenerational transfer of knowledge and tactics” from older activists to new generations.

Professor Pickard, author of Politics, Protest and Young People, notes that rather than protests in France being “atomised” between ages, “the trade unions, the teaching unions, the school student unions, [are] supporting each other”.

French parents have widely come out in support of the children, while trade unionists have published guides on effective action and helped planned rallies. The collaboration echoes how schoolchildren came out in support of older people when they protested against raising the retirement age in 2023.

In the UK, a lack of cross-generational support is one reason why school protests haven’t spread in the same way as in France, Pickard suggests. “In France, it’s almost like a rite of passage to take part [in a protest],” Pickard says.

A 2021 academic study, comparing students in the French city of Lyon with south Wales, found the French students were four times more likely to have participated in a political rally, eight times more likely to have boycotted certain products, and four times more likely to have joined a demonstration.

Part of this, the study concluded, is because while the French curriculum stresses freedom, equality, solidarity and human rights, the defence of which can involve political struggle, the British education system emphasises social and moral responsibility through “volunteering rather than through participating in strikes and demonstrations for change”.

In the UK, the curriculum teaches students “to be dutiful citizens”, Pickard says. In France, however, each generation can point to protests from school students that had at least some impact on government policy.

This normalisation of protest is reflected in school policies. If a student in France misses classes during an organised protest day, they are not penalised or formally marked as absent. In England, however, school students and their parents are very often reprimanded.

In recent days, critics of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the radical left La France Insoumise party, have accused him of orchestrating the current unrest – an allegation Mélenchon, who is popular among young people, labelled as "absurd".

Although viewed by some, such as Michael Gove, with slight suspicion from across the Channel, the protests are having an impact. 

On Wednesday, the French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said his government would present proposals to address student demands by the end of the month. “Nobody should remain deaf to the anguish” voiced by pupils, he said. 

As one of our listeners, a teacher in France wrote in to say: “Time is now being given in schools across the nation to children and staff to discuss and debate the issues… the government is engaging. Maybe the French approach is not so daft after all.”

Read more from Chabal in his book, France and from Pickard in Politics, Protest and Young People. Members can claim 10% using the code MOCKINGBIRD via our partner bookshop Coles.

On Leading, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood spoke candidly about her faith: “If you’re going to ask me questions about who I am, I’m going to lead with being a Muslim because that is the thing that’s the most important thing about my existence.”

Her comments were striking because, as she acknowledged, for a long time, the subject was a no-go zone for politicians, who worried the topic of religion would alienate voters.

This week, we want to know what you think:

Last week’s results…

We asked whether the pension triple lock should be scrapped – and your answer was a resounding “yes”.

The 94% of you who voted in favour gave various reasons for doing so, but fairness and support for a new social care system emerged as key themes.

“It has served its purpose in cutting pensioner poverty. Any further funding should be targeted to those who need it,” said TRIP+ member Janet.

“If the government can guarantee free social care, then I am more than happy to let go of the triple lock,” said Sue.

Not everyone was in favour, however. One listener wrote: “The triple lock was introduced in part to protect pensioners’ incomes and help tackle pensioner poverty. That problem has not disappeared, and weakening or scrapping the triple lock risks making it worse.”

Alastair

We also wanted to recommend this piece from Foreign Affairs which analyses comprehensive polling of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza

Michael Gove

Did you enjoy this piece? What topics would you like to see covered in our newsletters? Let us know at [email protected]