They came out on Tuesday in numbers the government could not ignore: 266,000 protesters, by the official count, pupils and teachers and parents moving through the streets of France against the condition of its schools. The unions and student organisers who called the marches describe the scale as exceptional. “I think this is very historic and unprecedented by how big it is,” Alice Cohen-Morzadec, international spokesperson for France’s Student Union, said that day, as Al Jazeera reported — hundreds of thousands answering a call that was not made in any ministry.

Al Jazeera frames the uprising as “a crisis of hope”, and reaches for the comparison every French government dreads: May 1968, when the discontent of a student generation triggered nationwide strikes and nearly brought down a republic. History never repeats itself exactly, but it has a long memory, and so does Paris.

The grievances

The revolt began modestly, as revolts do. On 21 September, lycée students in the Créteil academy, on the edge of the Paris region, started blockading their schools, and within weeks the barricades had spread to more than 40 cities, The New York Times reported. At the blockades the students recited a plain ledger of neglect: teachers absent and often not replaced, overcrowded classrooms, dilapidated buildings. They also have, the Times noted, a beef with Parcoursup, the state-run portal that decides which of them gets a university place — a website, in effect, made deputy minister for young people’s futures.

By Tuesday, more than 250,000 people were on the streets in what Time described as the biggest day yet of two weeks of escalating unrest, teachers, parents and union activists joining the pupils over what the protesters call a poorly funded lycée system.

Fires and files

The state’s answer, so far, has been familiar. The Guardian reported fires, fury and hundreds of arrests as schools shut across the country, and the tally has grown heavier since: Reuters put total arrests at 6,100 by Tuesday, with the Justice Ministry reporting that 87 percent of those detained were minors. More than 1,800 people were being prosecuted, among them 1,483 minors; 790 cases were dismissed. The injured included 715 police officers and 215 teenagers. Read those numbers twice. This is largely a children’s uprising, answered with charge sheets.

On 2 October, Education Minister Édouard Geffray met high-school organisations; their demands included abolishing Parcoursup altogether. The students’ own accounting is blunter. “The education budget is being cut to shreds while so much extra funding is being put into the army,” a student named Sophia told the Guardian at the barricades — she hopes to study art and work in animation, and she hoped the blockades would hold.

A government can count 266,000 marchers and call it a figure. A ministry can process 6,100 arrests and call it order. But a generation that has taken the measure of its classrooms and found them wanting will not be persuaded by either arithmetic. The elders of 1968 are retired now; their grandchildren are stacking desks against the school gates, and they too are learning the oldest lesson of French politics — that the street, not the portal, decides who gets in.