French police have arrested a teenager on suspicion of using an aerosol can to direct a jet of flames at a woman’s face during high school and university student protests sweeping the country.

The altercation was filmed on Thursday in the southern port city of Marseille, where protesters attacked public transport, torching at least one bus and a fire engine. The victim, a social worker, told BFM TV that she was waiting for a bus when a crowd of young people approached and began vandalizing the bus stop. She said she tried to intervene, prompting one of the youths to use an aerosol can as an improvised flamethrower.

“I wasn’t expecting such violence. I thought I might get shoved … I didn’t expect kids to be so violent,” the woman said. “Fortunately, my face didn’t suffer injuries as serious as the images might suggest,” she added.

https://www.rt.com/news/646688-teen-arrested-over-flamethrower-attack/

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France’s ‘high school’ protests aren’t what you think

The ‘spontaneous’ student uprising has been adopted suspiciously quickly by left-wing politicians to push their own pet causes

The spoiled French brats are back at it again. This time burning down their own schools, at least one of which was brand new. About the only thing these kids are good for is giving taxpayers an effective visual of where their tax dollars have been going: up in flames.

French teenagers nationwide have been staging a full-scale insurrection over government budget-slashing, flipping out alongside public servants demanding more money, with banners screaming, “Less police, more money”– apparently ignoring the fact that the cops are also public servants – while barricading gates, burning garbage bins, and hurling hydrochloric acid at the cops. They’ve contributed to bleeding France dry, and now they’re complaining that the blood bank is empty.Unfortunately for the broke French state, it hasn’t yet found a way to have Russia pay for it by stealing the cash interest from frozen Russian assets held in the West. Only the poor defense contractors standing on the street corner with an eye-patch and shaking a tin cup get to benefit from that. Nothing to do with the fact that it’s an “investment” that boosts GDP on a euro-for-euro basis, of course.

So how does France punish these little hooligans? By making them attend classes online from the comfort of home, with the fridge just a few feet away. All while mom and dad are probably at work. That’ll sure show them. What kid wouldn’t totally hate that and be compelled to correct their behavior?

Almost 2,000 arrests (and counting) have been made since Monday, according to French authorities. We’re told that the “little dears/loves” (as their French parents constantly call them) have some legitimate complaints. Alright, I’ll bite. Let’s sit down for a second and listen to what the little angels are upset about. If only because I’ve never met a French parent whose kid was behaving like a little hoodlum in public who didn’t loudly insist that every adult around indulge them while they exercise their “right” to “express themselves.”

First, they say that they don’t like long school days that stretch from 8 AM to 6 PM, with a two-hour lunch. Boy, do I have bad news for you when it comes to what awaits you in the real world. Apparently, it isn’t enough that they also get two weeks of vacation every six weeks throughout the entire school year, plus the two-month summer break to enjoy taxpayer-subsidized vacations. Or that they spend much of their school day already being bussed around to various activities.

They say that their schools aren’t up to snuff. And sometimes there isn’t even toilet paper in the stalls, they cry. Does the state have to wipe your behinds, too?

They say that there’s a shortage of teachers, resulting in bigger classes. And that many of the ones who are still hanging in there end up nonetheless disappearing on leave for days on end. Gee, I can’t possibly imagine why.

They also complain of poor facilities. Like not enough air conditioning. That’s less of a “problem” than a deliberate ideological choice championed by the same comrades with whom these kids are happily associating themselves on the far left in order to make it look like the leftists’ annual September freakout is actually effective this year.

Take that one up with them. They’re the ones who want you to sweat it out for the planet and get angry when any money is spent on air cooling. At least until you die from heat exhaustion and can then finally enjoy some industrial-grade post-mortem cold storage whose carbon footprint you’ll be offsetting by not breathing carbon dioxide into the air.

“This spontaneous movement was born out of exasperation with educational conditions that are absolutely unworthy,” said far-left politician and coordinator Manuel Bompard. Yeah, “spontaneous.” Just something cooked up by a few kids between swigs of Red Bull and not at all by a professional activist movement that has its annual street protests at this time every year.

The urgent thing is to open a dialogue with the high-school students who are mobilizing. We need to support the high-school students’ mobilization and, above all, respond to their demands,” said left-wing CGT union rep Sophie Binet. Let me guess. You, as their helicopter parents, will be right there with them for any meeting.

Sorry, we’re all too busy trying to navigate a Grand Theft Auto style hellscape imposed by your little darlings to pursue this little chat much further right now.

What a wild coincidence that the left explicitly connects the teens’ grievances to their own pre-existing demands about education funding, staffing, class sizes, public services, social inequality, and government policy.

“We, the children of the suburbs, are abandoned and neglected,” one 16-year-old useful idiot told the press. Take it up with your parents, who enjoy every possible benefit imaginable courtesy of the French taxpayer – including having your school supplies paid for every year, with that cash-in-hand often famously misused to buy things like new TVs. Look to them, not to the state. Unless you’re talking about cops failing to crack down on the kind of destruction that you’re fueling – in which case, yes, there’s a problem. A big one. And the fact that these protests are so out of control is a testament to it.

So is the fact that these same high schoolers have recently invaded cities – big and small – with lawless electric scooters, bowling down pedestrians from behind on the sidewalks while going at road speed.

A quick check with the local cops is all you need to learn that they’re just totally overwhelmed by the lack of power to do anything about it. No motorcycle license or evidence of any road rule knowledge required for these similarly motorized two-wheel vehicles. Just a little tap on the wrist and a plea to use more common sense, while the kid speeds off down the sidewalk laughing at the impotence of the authorities.

No one can be bothered doing any actual parenting in this society. The parents can’t. The teachers can’t – lest they end up with the parents on their case with zero support from the school administration. The state can’t. The cops can’t. These once unmanageable toddlers are now teenagers and having the same tantrums that used to make their parents yell at adults rolling their eyes at them in public.

We’re not going to pretend to have an adult conversation about it. Not with them. Nor with their adoptive ideological parents on the left and far left, whose only real interest is to have them serve as proxies to do their own bomb-tossing dirty work with the ultimate aim of sucking the taxpayer dry for their pet causes. We literally can’t afford to indulge your nonsense anymore.

https://www.rt.com/news/646638-france-high-school-protests/

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Mobilize the working class to defend French student protests, stop war!

Alex Lantier

Over the last week, protests at high schools across France against austerity and police repression have grown into a direct confrontation with the state. The occupations began on September 21 at a high school in Créteil, outside Paris, spread nationwide during the September 29 public sector strike and escalated after that one-day strike.

A quarter of France’s approximately 3,000 high schools have been blockaded by students or preemptively shut down by the government to prevent youth from gathering.

Anger is mounting over the brutal police crackdown launched by lame-duck President Emmanuel Macron. More than 5,000 people, most of them minors, have been arrested since Monday, and many were rushed before kangaroo courts. Videos of police assaulting youth have been seen by millions. They show police firing a tear-gas grenade launcher into a 14-year-old boy’s face at point-blank range in Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône, grabbing a 14-year-old girl by the throat in Alençon, and leaving a youth near Balzac High School in Tours at risk of losing an eye.

On Thursday, the movement spread to the universities. There were blockades at 29 universities that morning, among them campuses in Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Lille, Toulouse, Montpellier, Rennes, Rouen, Reims, Poitiers, Dijon and Brest. On Friday, an all-trade union alliance of the CGT, CFDT, FO, FSU, UNSA and SUD issued a joint call for a national education strike on Tuesday, October 6.

The ruling class clearly fears an outcome like May 1968, when protests against mass arrests of students at Sorbonne University led to the eruption of the greatest general strike in French history.

French authorities are carrying out emergency shutdowns of public transport in major cities. In Marseille and Grenoble, transit authorities and the unions jointly shut down the entire system, supposedly to protect transit workers from assault by protesters, stranding large numbers of commuters. In Toulouse, transit service to the university district was cut off, and trams were halted in Strasbourg and Mulhouse.

The Macron government and the neo-fascist National Rally (RN) both denounced the protests as a communist plot by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s populist France Unbowed (LFI) party. At an emergency cabinet meeting, an aide to Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu reported that French intelligence declared the protests “a manoeuvre” by LFI “and its ultra-left proxies.” RN leader Marine Le Pen called them “riots organised by professionals and overseen by France Unbowed members of parliament.”

But the all-trade union alliance, like Mélenchon and his political satellites, is trying to channel, not to lead, the protests. Among significant layers of workers and youth, the all-trade union alliance is discredited for selling out the 2023 mass strikes against Macron’s massively unpopular pension cuts. It wore down and ultimately shut down the largest strike movement in France since 1968, after top union officials went on television at the height of the strike to declare that they were terrified of social anger against Macron.

In a video posted Thursday, Mélenchon called on voters to back him in next year’s presidential election and promised a return to the policies of the Socialist Party (PS) governments of the 1980s and 1990s. Stating that PS Minister Lionel Jospin had met with high school protesters in 1986 and 1990, “and two-three days later, 4.5 billion were given,” Mélenchon added, “Go on, get out the billions. I know how that’s done.”

But what is emerging is not a national protest movement that will be resolved by reforms granted under pressure by capitalist governments. It is an irreconcilable class conflict between the capitalist oligarchy and the police state, on the one hand, and workers and youth opposed to austerity, neo-fascism and war, on the other. Moreover, it is a conflict that is unfolding on an international scale.

In Spain, mass protests are mounting against high rents and evictions demanded by real estate investors, after the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen a week ago. Protest camps spread from Madrid to Barcelona, Seville, Pamplona and Bilbao after parliament voted down a proposed partial ban on evictions. Yesterday, the renters’ union in Madrid called for a general strike for housing ahead of protests today in these cities and in Valencia, Granada, Murcia and Cádiz.

Strikes and social protests are erupting across Europe. In Portugal, public administration workers held a one-day national strike for a 15 percent wage increase, the opening of a wave of workplace actions planned for October and November. On Thursday, high school students in Liège carried the French movement into Belgium. In Germany, young people continue to protest against remilitarization and conscription.

The issues driving the protests, from overcrowded classrooms and unaffordable rents to low wages and conscription, are directly connected to an escalating economic crisis, the expansion of war and the subordination of all of society to the interests of the capitalist oligarchy.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/10/03/emyq-o03.html

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