A generational reckoning on the streets of Paris

After weeks of mounting tension on the streets of Paris, my wife and I decided to take our six-year-old daughter and leave town during Saturday’s protests. When the main demonstration assembled at 2pm at the Place de la Republique, we were hiking in the forests southeast of Paris near Fontainebleau, once an autumnal retreat and hunting ground for French kings.

After taking the train back and walking to the Metro, we caught a whiff of tear gas in the air. The metro stop by our apartment was closed, so we got off at a nearby station, where we found a crowd of teenagers huddled below the exit stairway, handing out COVID-19 pandemic-era face masks. We grabbed one for each of us, just before a cloud of tear gas sent us all scrambling back down the stairs toward the train, our eyes burning.

There was no escaping the protests, which erupted in France’s high schools late last month. Many young people here, like their peers around the world, lack hope for the future. Burdened by austerity and financial pressures, their schools are deteriorating. Some teachers, overwhelmed by poor working conditions, are absent and not replaced. This summer was also the hottest in France since records began in 1900. The young know that more summers like it, or worse, lie ahead, and they see the adults in charge doing little about it.

Not long after the student protests began, various political factions — some acting in good faith, and some not — tried to attach themselves to the movement, but despite the political jockeying, the students remain at its heart.

Street protests in France are a national ritual. In 2023, large demonstrations erupted when French President Emmanuel Macron announced a plan to raise the legal retirement age from 62 to 64. The reform became law, and the protests subsided. Its central age-related measures were later suspended until 2028.

This time, no similar end is in sight. The French government can withdraw a bill from consideration or rewrite it to secure its passage, but governments today seem incapable of legislating into existence the future young people want and deserve.

With next year’s presidential election looming and the far-right surging in opinion polls, some people I have spoken to predict that the protests would boost far-left forces. Either way, the center is not holding, and I have a difficult time finding anyone here who thinks it deserves to, or even hopes it will.

Where does this leave France? For now, the students’ demands are mostly inchoate. Many older protesters focused on the rising cost of living, echoing the language of “affordability” heard elsewhere. The day after the protests, headlines dwelled on who was responsible for the violence. However, I suspect that the most significant issue might be generational. No country can have a decent future if its youth see none for themselves.

Perhaps one day, the protests would be seen as a step toward a confrontation between the claims of the old and the prospects of the young. Politics has long been organized along lines of class, national belonging, religion or identity. Might age become politics’ defining fault line? If so, we will need to think harder about how power and opportunity are distributed across generations.

Youth politics is hardly new. The living veterans of the 1968 Paris barricades are all pensioners now. Today, pension-related contributions account for about one-third of the French Ministry of National Education’s budget. That partly reflects how the ministry accounts for pension costs, but the figure is nonetheless revealing.

As public debt mounts, and concerns over government borrowing grow, there is much talk about whether France can still afford its welfare state. However, the more important question is what kind of welfare state it wants, and what its priorities should be. How can governments protect people in old age — one of the great achievements of 20th-century democracy — while giving the young a chance at a decent future?

These questions extend far beyond any real or imagined zero-sum tradeoff between pension rights and education spending. At stake is the quality of education, but also our response to global warming and the rise of artificial intelligence.

Older generations are politically formidable. They vote in large numbers and, as France’s population ages, carry ever greater electoral weight. Most high-school students, by contrast, are not old enough to vote.

Older generations also occupy many of the offices through which formal power is exercised. So far, the students themselves have not directed their demands explicitly against older generations, but if these protests are to have lasting significance, it would be because they marked the rumblings of a new politics in which young people demand a greater say over the conditions determining their prospects and those of the planet.

On our walk home, I saw groups of masked teenagers perched on footbridges over the Canal Saint-Martin, their legs dangling, watching trash cans burn. The canal’s bridges also figured in the bloody fighting of the June Days of the Revolution of 1848, when Parisian workers confronted the French National Guard and other government forces.

The political divisions of that era were different. Ours are only now coming into view.

Jonathan Levy, professor of history at Sciences Po, is the author of Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States and The Real Economy: History and Theory.