When a man my age reads the foreign news over his first cup of coffee, his face gets stuck somewhere between a squint and a wince, and mine has been stuck there for three weeks. The cause is France, where the high school students have gone on strike. Not the teachers. The students. When I was in school we called that skipping, and it was handled with a phone call home, not a crisis meeting chaired by the Prime Minister. But France is a serious country, and in a serious country a teenager with a trash can is a matter of state.
It started in mid-September, when students at a handful of high schools blocked their own front doors with garbage bins to protest classroom conditions, which, with a budget on the table calling for fifty-four billion euros in cuts, are not expected to improve. France has a high school students' union. I'll give you a moment with that. It has officers and a platform, and on September 29 it called a national day of action, presumably after a quorum was established. By October 1 the Prime Minister had called a crisis meeting and the government had officially classified the whole thing as "urban violence," which is the French bureaucratic term for teenagers. By the next day more than twelve hundred high schools had been disrupted, and by October 5 there were around five thousand arrests. It's hard to say who was more surprised, the students or the government.
The method deserves some study. The students' grievance is that their schools are falling apart, and their solution was to help. In Avignon, students blockading a school threw rocks at the firemen who came to put out the fires they'd set, which I believe is the first recorded case of a building being saved from improvement. One region put its damage at twenty-five to thirty million euros. Somewhere in a ministry a man with a calculator is working out how many new textbooks that would have bought, then setting the calculator down very gently and staring out the window.
My favorite moment came on October 5 at a Paris high school called Lycée Sophie Germain. The students had the entrance blocked with bins, the principal came out and told them the school would be closed for the rest of the day, and the students called off the protest and put the bins back. I've read a great many political manifestos and none of them was as honest as that. The demands were negotiable. The bins were borrowed. Those kids are the only people in this whole affair who knew exactly what they wanted, got it, and cleaned up afterward, and the rest of this story is about the people who didn't.
Because then the grownups arrived, and the grownups always arrive. Lawmakers from La France Insoumise, the hard-left party, had stopped by one of the first schools before anybody else noticed anything, the way a fox drops by a henhouse to check on the hens' morale. The government spent the next few weeks accusing that party of being behind the whole thing, and the party spent those same weeks being visibly delighted about it. Its longtime leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, endorsed the protests while urging nonviolence, which is a bit like handing a boy a box of matches and reminding him to mind the drapes. An investigation counted fifty organizations organizing, backing, or cheering the movement. Fifteen of them were student or youth groups. The other thirty-five were unions, parties, activists, and assorted professional revolutionaries, which makes this the first student uprising with a median age of fifty-two and a pension plan. Every one of them showed up to fight for the children, and not one of them brought a bin.
Then came the media. BreakThrough News, a New York outfit funded by an American millionaire who lives in Shanghai and admires the Chinese Communist Party, told the world it was a historic strike against austerity. I want to make sure I have this right. A capitalist living under a communist government is funding an American newsroom to tell French teenagers that capitalism is why their radiator doesn't work. You couldn't route that through more countries if you were shipping a car part.
And then the international community weighed in. Amnesty International scolded the French police for heavy-handedness, which is roughly what Amnesty International is for. And then Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran, summoned the French ambassador to express its concern about how France polices protesters. I read that one three times. I'm still not sure I've finished. A man could spend his whole career in comedy and never write anything that good, and the Iranian foreign ministry knocked it out before lunch.
Naturally the idea is spreading. Organizers have called a Europe-wide school strike for November 20, this time against military spending, so in five weeks the movement has gone from a broken radiator to NATO. That's how these things grow. A fair complaint goes in one end, and by the time it comes out the other it's about NATO, capitalism, and the fate of the international working class, and nobody can remember whose radiator it was. Brunswick parents may want to keep an eye on the trash cans.
Here's the part I keep coming back to. Underneath the bonfires the kids have a fair point, and nobody I know in Glynn County, whichever way they vote, would tell a student he doesn't deserve a classroom that works. They'll get one, I suspect, about the time the thirty-five grownups who borrowed their protest finish using it. My hope, and I'm a hopeful man most mornings before the second cup, is that somebody in Paris fixes a few roofs and the teenagers go back to being teenagers. The professionals will move on to the next cause, which is what professionals do, and they'll leave it about the way they left the schools.
Somewhere in Paris a custodian is counting trash cans this week. I hope they all came back.