When I was U.S. consul general in Marseille, France, from 2017–2020, I visited countless schools across the south. One was the Lycée de la Méditerranée, a high school in the city of La Ciotat on the Mediterranean coast. By French standards, it was a tough school, though it would not have seemed so in comparison with inner-city America. Many of its students had family roots in France’s former colonies.
Today, I watched a video of young people at that Lycée, who may not all have been students there, assault and pour gasoline on a teacher, with the presumed intent to set him alight.
Elsewhere across France, there has been rioting and mayhem. In Marseille, rioters set their school on fire and then torched the fire truck sent to put it out. In Nantes, rioters caused millions of euros in damage to 40 schools. In Paris, high schoolers blocked their school, set fire to e-bikes, and played cat-and-mouse with riot police. French police have arrested around 2,000 people—mostly young folks, though not necessarily students—so far.
Strikes are a national sport in France, and not a year goes by without a major walkout and protest by public workers over pay, benefits, work conditions, or politics. In my three years, the rail system was regularly shut down by strikes, and the roads were once blocked for days at a time by the Yellow Vest movement, which merged various cost-of-living grudges into an inchoate populist protest nationwide for two years. Setting fire to cars, breaking windows, and other property damage are also common in French protests.
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