Paris suburb students protest crumbling schools, claiming state abandonment

Mohammed wakes at six in the morning. Before he can think about school, he has to help his mother—a security guard working long shifts—get his younger siblings ready for their day. Then comes the commute: two crowded buses and a local train that carry him northeast from Paris into Sevran, a low-income suburb in Seine-Saint-Denis. By the time he reaches the Lycée Blaise-Cendrars, he has already burned through hours of his day just to arrive.

Once there, he finds a classroom so packed that some students cannot sit down. There are not enough chairs or desks. The heat during this year's heatwaves turned the room into something close to forty degrees Celsius, with no shade, no curtains, no relief. "It was so hot my brain couldn't function," he said. The overcrowding is so severe that meaningful interaction with teachers becomes nearly impossible. And then there are the absences—months when a teacher simply does not show up, their position unfilled. One class lost its French teacher just before the baccalaureate exam, leaving students unable to study the required texts. Another class got a teacher who was supposed to teach in English but could not speak the language.

Mohammed is seventeen, in his final year of high school, hoping to study management and digital communication at a Paris university. But he and his classmates have concluded that the odds are deliberately stacked against them. This week, hundreds of thousands of teenagers across France took to the streets in what has become the largest youth protest movement in decades. They were protesting inequality baked into the education system itself—crumbling buildings, teacher shortages, class sizes that make learning a theoretical exercise. Hundreds of schools were blockaded. Thousands of teenagers were arrested. Rights groups documented allegations of police brutality: one child lost the use of an eye; another lost a hand.

The students of Sevran have been at the center of this uprising. They barricaded their school and voted to continue the protests into the following week, planning to take their case directly to the mayor, elected officials, and education representatives. The photographs on their phones tell the story in concrete detail: broken chairs, holes in walls, holes in ceilings, mold spreading across surfaces, buckets positioned to catch leaks from above, lights that do not work. The toilets are broken or missing doors entirely. There is often no toilet paper, no soap. Video projectors are absent. Science equipment is lacking. "We're not asking for luxury, just the basics to learn in decent conditions," Mohammed said.

When they gathered outside their school to protest, police on horseback charged them. Teargas was fired. Arrests were made. "It's so dangerous to be charged by a horse, it could kill you," Mohammed recalled. "I just ran, I was trying to help my classmates." Seine-Saint-Denis, the département where Sevran sits, is mainland France's youngest region by population, with one of the highest birthrates and among the lowest average incomes. Despite hosting the 2024 Paris Olympics and launching numerous government initiatives to address inequality and poverty, the area remains visibly disadvantaged compared to Paris itself. High schools here experience rapid turnover among young teachers. In 2024, students and teachers at the Lycée Blaise-Cendrars—which enrolls more than a thousand pupils—made a viral video documenting the state of their classrooms, toilets, and equipment. The regional government announced a major refurbishment project. But the teenagers say the core problems persist.

Ilian, also seventeen, whose father works as a traffic warden, put it plainly: "We're starting at an unfair advantage because our parents aren't as rich as others, they can't buy us books, they can't take us to films. We're missing school during these protests, we risk falling behind in an exam year, we're desperate to get back into class to study, but the conditions we're facing are so bad we can't stop until the government promises action." He has been waiting months to see a child psychiatrist. His school has no nurse and lacks support staff for students with disabilities. He and others have alleged that police made racial insults during the protests. "The police look down on us as if we're animals," he said. "They talk to us with such cruelty."

Stéphane Troussel, the Socialist head of the Seine-Saint-Denis département council, met with the students this week and called the policing response "intolerable." He has called for police to stop using a type of rubber-bullet launcher, after stun grenades were suspended following injuries. The French interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, has defended the policing tactics. The education ministry promised three thousand teachers to fill urgent gaps, but teachers' unions expressed skepticism, saying longer-term planning and increased funding would be necessary—even as the government claims there is little spare money. Stéphane Blanchet, the mayor of Sevran, a town of fifty-two thousand with a higher-than-average poverty rate, has backed the students' demands. Many residents, he said, feel "relegated" and forgotten by the state.

Sarah, seventeen, whose father works in a warehouse and who hopes to attend an elite Paris engineering school, spoke of the surprise and gratitude she and her classmates felt when teenagers from wealthier parts of France marched in solidarity this week. "We know we're disadvantaged and that we have to work ten times as hard as others to escape discrimination against our postcode," she said. "But we can't learn properly in these conditions when we're not even guaranteed a chair to sit on in school." The protests have exposed a wound that has never fully healed. In 2005, unrest that began on housing estates in Seine-Saint-Denis escalated into weeks of upheaval across France, triggered by the deaths of two young boys hiding from police in an electrical substation. Two decades later, the inequality and discrimination remain. The mistrust between young people and police persists. This week's uprising suggests that neither the passage of time nor the promise of Olympic glory has changed the fundamental conditions that young people in these suburbs face every day.