Why is France burning?

The postwar model of the welfare state, run by civil servants responsible for modernizing the economy, moderating market forces, and defining the public good, has been in place in France.

The French love to go out and do it often.

On September 17, students at Lycée Saint-Exupéry, a relatively deprived high school in the suburbs of Paris, erupted in protest at their institution's dire conditions: chronic teacher shortages, poor facilities, a long-term decline in educational quality. Two weeks later, a wave of protests swept cities across France. Students from hundreds of schools and many universities joined the protests, supported by parents, teachers and trade unions. More than 160,000 students and trade union activists protested across France on Tuesday in a third week of protests.

France has never seen so many violent incidents in a movement made up mostly of high school students. So far, more than 200 students, 85 school employees and 700 police officers have been injured in clashes across the country. Protesters broke into schools and in some cases set fire to occupied or besieged buildings. On October 5, a 15-year-old boy's hand was blown off by a police grenade during a demonstration in Lens, northern France, an incident that crystallized the tough response authorities had taken since the protests' early days. More than 6,000 protesters have been arrested, most of them minors, and later released without charge.

The protests came after nearly a decade of Macronism, the center-right, top-down style of government epitomized by French President Emmanuel Macron. And they express a broader discontent: anger over disparities in the quality of schools, college admissions decisions, and implicit racial discrimination, and the sense among young people that those in power are not listening to them and that the country offers little hope for their future.

The protests also come amid a wider crisis of political confidence in the country. France will hold its presidential election in April 2027, and the far-right and far-left are leading the polls. The front-runner is Marine Le Pen, who has spent years trying to make her far-right party, National Rally, more selective while campaigning on immigration, crime and denouncing an out-of-touch political class. His party is currently the largest opposition party in parliament, and an early legislative election after the presidential election could further consolidate it.

On the other side, Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leader of France Without Bows, is a far-left party that promises a massive redistribution of power and resources among the working class. Both have built much of their appeal on opposition to the political establishment, promises to lift budget constraints and deep hostility to the European Union.

If France feels at a crossroads today, that's because it's supposed to. The post-war model of a large regulatory welfare state, run by a class of civil servants tasked with modernizing the economy, moderating market forces, and defining the public good, has run its course.

France now has one of Europe's largest budget deficits: its public debt is 119.3 percent of GDP, and is expected to rise next year. Fears of a crippling financial crisis are growing. Borrowing costs have soared to the point that France is drawing comparisons with Greece, whose 2010 debt crisis threatened the eurozone's survival. And with stagnant economic growth, there is no easy way out.

Otherwise, France will have to spend more: for defense, as the threat from Russia increases, the war in Ukraine continues, and the United States retreats from its traditional role as the guarantor of European security. As for new technologies, because the country that once produced the Concorde and high-speed trains is now leading the way in innovation with high-tech and artificial intelligence. about strained public services, from schools to hospitals and neglected neighbourhoods; and in infrastructures that are able to withstand the increasing effects of climate change.

Successive French governments have promised to turn things around and allow these much-needed investments in the country's future, but none have succeeded.

French unhappiness deepens. Inequality has been one of the main problems of students. They are not wrong. As in many countries, economic inequality in France has increased over the past two decades under the combined effects of globalization, industrial decline, and the increasing concentration of inherited wealth.

French economist Thomas Piketty in his book Capital in the 21st Century showed how wealth perpetuates over generations and widens the gap between the owners of capital and others. This concentration of wealth and power remains deeply infuriating: for many, President Macron's main sin is still his brief stint at investment bank Rothschild before entering politics.

But the most damaging form of inequality lies elsewhere: in the power of France's national meritocracy myth, which holds that people owe their social status largely to their academic performance. At the top of that system are highly competitive institutions of higher learning, institutions of higher learning that have produced leaders in politics, culture, and business.

What makes this myth so destructive is not that academic achievement remains unrewarded, but that it remains a perfectly reliable path to better jobs, higher status, and positions of power. In such a system, students in underfunded public schools face a profound disadvantage compared to their peers who attend better-resourced schools and whose more educated parents know how to navigate the system.

Private schools offer another route, but are still not considered a way to buy advantage. Not surprisingly, the protests began in Curtil, a working-class suburb outside Paris where schools are chronically under-resourced.

Racial and geographic discrimination also contribute to the crisis in France. The collection of ethno-racial statistics is prohibited by French law. An admirable limitation in principle, Stama is problematic in practice. Visible minorities remain underrepresented among the French political and business elite.

Families with immigrant backgrounds, many with roots in African and Asian countries once colonized by France, are disproportionately concentrated in urban fringes, where jobs are scarce and residents often face discrimination from employers elsewhere.

Islamophobia has also grown in the past decade amid conflicts in the Middle East and a string of Islamist-inspired terrorist attacks. Rhetoric once largely confined to the far right has infiltrated the mainstream right, where calls for "order" and "security" often carry an anti-immigrant charge. Macron's reference to the "decivilization" of some young people and former interior minister Bruno Ratalo's description of migrant participation in protests that followed the killing of a teenager by police in 2023 as a "return to ethnic roots" are emblematic of this shift.

There is another problem with France's ideal of meritocracy: Paris. Political power, economic opportunity, cultural prestige, and elite education are overwhelmingly concentrated in the capital. The result is a deep economic divide between Paris and the rest of the country and an elite that lives largely among itself, surrounded by people with similar educations, occupations and assumptions, and isolated from many parts of the country.

The yellow vest riots from 2018 to 2019 were a previous social explosion. It is precisely this resentment that is not surprising when students denounce the unequal distribution of resources between Paris and the rest of the country, or that the protests started in Curtil, so close to the capital that the contrast cannot be missed.

When students from my previous school, Lyceum Henry-IV, where I was a relatively poor student, joined the movement in the third week, I noticed how carefully they described themselves as protesting "in solidarity" with less privileged schools. They knew which side of the divide they were on. So much for meritocracy.

Where does this leave France? As presidential elections approach next April, political parties are scrambling to position themselves against a protest movement that shows no signs of abating. On October 6, more than a quarter of a million people took to the streets as high school students joined them, along with students, teachers, parents and labor unions. An even broader "national day of protest" is planned for October 17.

Familiar and new dynamics will shape the elections. The dilemma is familiar in the second round: voters may once again be asked to back a candidate from the opposition political camp to prevent Le Pen from reaching the Elysee. Le Pen made it to the second round in both 2017 and 2022 and is leading the polls by a wide margin. This time, however, the terrain he follows is unusually fragmented. Two former prime ministers under Macron, Edouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal, are in the race. Philippe is competing for second place with Mélenchon, while Atal is behind them both.

Whatever the outcome, the presidential vote may be somewhat settled. A president from the extreme right of the National Rally can govern himself without a stable parliamentary majority or widespread support among the public or within the state apparatus. A compromise candidate from the center or left could face the same fractured parliament that marred the final years of Macron's presidency, during which France had five prime ministers in two years.

What is new is the extent to which France is being reshaped by forces now familiar around the world: a crisis of confidence in democracy, conservative billionaires building media empires and funding ideological movements, social media polarization, foreign interference in elections, and growing voter distrust of supranational institutions, including the European Union.

Whatever the outcome of the presidential election, the outlook for Europe is worrisome. A Le Pen or Melenchon presidency will test European cohesion on everything from Ukraine and relations with Russia to immigration, the EU's budget and authority. But even a more moderate president is likely to lack a sufficient coalition to govern effectively, reflecting Germany's current situation, where Chancellor Friedrich Merz is struggling due to unpopularity and growing support for the far-right Alternative for Deutschland.

Together with France and Germany, they make up almost 40% of the European Union. The economy is depriving its traditional engine of political weakness in both European capitals at a dangerous moment. Europe is facing increasing pressure on three fronts: China's industrial onslaught, reflected in an annual trade deficit of almost €360 billion; Russia's war against Ukraine and the escalation of the "Grey War" operation; and America's turn against the postwar international order to which Europe has long depended. All this comes as Europe must also prepare for the profound disruptions of climate change and artificial intelligence.

The solution, which Mario Draghi famously saved for the euro during his tenure as ECB president, calls for greater integration of the single market, greater investment and industrial integration, and greater capacity for collective action. France is essential for such reforms. A politically paralyzed France will weaken Europe precisely at the moment when it is least financially capable.

At the heart of the French Revolution in 1789 was the abolition of the privileges of the nobility and clergy. Nearly two and a half centuries later, privilege is deeply entrenched in French society, dispersed across an almost caste-like set of social and professional groups, from journalists, lawyers, and intellectuals to civil servants and union workers, each with benefits, protections, pension arrangements, and claims on state resources. Rantije is a policy in which almost everyone agrees that reform is urgently needed, provided someone else pays, and the benefits of one's own group remain intact.

If 1789 seems like too much to read, consider Macron's own choice of title for the book that launched his presidential bid: The Revolution. His presidency may not have been entirely revolutionary, but many of his larger versions have aged well: governments around the world have embraced state industrial policy, greater strategic autonomy, and reduced dependence on fossil fuels, while distrust of American hegemony and calls for deeper European integration have been addressed by the collapse of the postwar order.

Macron can also be credited with preserving and in some places reviving France's traditional strengths: a largely nuclear-powered electricity system, global leadership in luxury goods, tourism and hospitality, and a deep pool of scientific talent, now exemplified by Mistral, Europe's closest thing to a world-class AI contender.

A skilled diplomat and relentless defender of the multilateral system, Macron has taken principled positions on Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, debt relief for the world's poorest countries and climate change, while closely monitoring France's relations with the US and China. France's permanent seat on the UN Security Council gives it diplomatic weight far beyond its economic size, a situation French diplomats derisively describe as "flying first class with an economy ticket."

However, neither these prescriptions nor these assets have been enough to reverse France's decline over the past two decades. Perhaps what is missing is a revolution not in politics but in political culture: a new social contract in which the sacrifices necessary to adapt to France's diminished means and relative power are accepted, as the burdens seem to be shared fairly. If such a revolution is to take place, it is less likely to begin in the Elysées or ministries than among students demanding to be heard in the streets.