Standing outside the gates of a shuttered Parisian school, the air doesn’t smell of revolution; it smells of institutional failure. As the third wave of student mobilizations rolls across France, the conversation in the halls of power has become dangerously detached from the reality on the ground. We are no longer debating pedagogy or budgets; we are witnessing a state that has decided to treat its youth as an enemy insurrection rather than a constituency in need of support.

The demands coming from these high schoolers are not radical manifestos. They are, in fact, remarkably modest. They are asking for the basic mechanics of a functioning education system: teachers who are actually present to teach, class sizes that allow for actual learning, and buildings that aren’t crumbling under the weight of decades of neglect. In any other sector, these would be considered baseline requirements for operation. In the French educational system, however, they are treated as bargaining chips that the state is unwilling to trade.

What is most chilling is the escalation of force used to meet these grievances. When hundreds of schools are shuttered preventatively and marches through the capital are met with the heavy-handed tactics of the CRS, a clear message is sent to the next generation: your voice only matters if it can be ignored. When it becomes loud enough to be heard, it will be suppressed. Watching these interactions as a resident and a parent, one cannot help but see a grim dress rehearsal for the political volatility looming on the horizon. If the state cannot handle a request for more chemistry teachers without deploying riot gear, how will it navigate the ideological fractures of an election year?

This is not a fringe movement of professional agitators. These are teenagers looking at the inequality between a prestigious lycée in the city center and a struggling school in the suburbs and asking why their zip code determines their dignity. By responding with violence and systemic dismissal, the government is radicalizing a demographic that was simply asking for the tools to succeed. The authorities may succeed in clearing the streets and unblocking the gates for a day, but they are losing the far more critical battle for the trust of their citizens. You cannot beat a student into believing that their education is a priority. Order without justice is just an expensive form of silence, and in the classrooms of Paris, that silence is becoming deafening.