Repression of high school students: the true face of the capitalist state is one of terror!

Intimidation, repression and terror! Such is the bourgeois state’s response to the immense anger of the young high school pupils in struggle and the university students standing in solidarity with them. Banned from blocking school gates and demonstrating in the vicinity of their schools, the young people are being pushed into confrontation by police officers who are swarming the area and responding with extreme brutality. Faced with teachers who are outraged and equally exasperated by the lack of resources and austerity measures, the Ministry displays the same contempt, spouts the same old nonsense and sends in its police to crush the slightest expression of discontent.

The bourgeoisie shows its true colours

Ever since the first blockades, the police have been targeting high school pupils above all else – children barely fifteen years old. Horses, trained dogs, violent charges, tear gas and flash-balls: every means is used to subdue the youth and zealously uphold bourgeois order. In the media, the bourgeoisie portrays its future working class—anxious about their future—as a horde of savages to legitimise this unbearable outburst of violence. The result is devastating. In Tours, a young man was blinded in one eye. In Alençon, a schoolgirl was strangled. In Asnières, pupils from the Lycée Renoir were brought before the court in Nanterre after twenty-four hours in police custody. In Saint-Denis, teachers had to form a human chain to protect their pupils from police brutality. Across the country, there were more than 170 young people injured and nearly 2,000 arrests by 1st October!

It cannot be said that Macron’s presidency has shone for its subtlety when it comes to ‘maintaining order’. After ferociously cracking down on the cross-class Yellow Vests movement, the police have displayed incredible violence against environmental movements (notably during the protests against the mega-reservoirs at Sainte-Soline, in the Deux-Sèvres, in March 2023), against the nationalist movement in New Caledonia, against the riots in the suburbs, and during the despicable anti-migrant operations in Mayotte.

But this brutality is far from being a new phenomenon, and the bourgeoisie, in France as elsewhere, has always reserved its most violent blows for its true class enemy, the proletariat. The ruling class is always ready to repress with the utmost savagery those it exploits, or those it intends to exploit in the future.

The French bourgeoisie has a long tradition of repression against the working class. In 1947, for example, Jules Mochle, a ‘Socialist’ member of the Resistance, deployed the CRS and the army against the ‘insurrectionary’ strikes at Renault, against a backdrop of food shortages and rampant inflation. The following year, the miners’ strike was suppressed even more harshly: the army occupied the mines, several miners were killed, and thousands were arrested and sacked. In 1979, in Longwy and Denain, the riot police ran amok: they seriously injured numerous steelworkers as well as children. A young man was beaten with the butt of a rifle. A worker had his hand torn off by a grenade. In 1986, the movement against the Devaquet Act saw the return of the notorious ‘voltigeurs’. Malik Oussekine died under their blows. In 2016, during the Nuit Debout movement, the police kettled and injured numerous demonstrators. Since then, ‘law and order’ measures during social movements have only become harsher.

History teaches us that the greatest democracies do not hesitate to commit the most abominable crimes to preserve their privileges and silence the revolt of the exploited. This was the case in 1871, when the revolutionary workers of the Paris Commune were executed in cold blood against the wall of the Père-Lachaise cemetery. It was the case again during the international revolutionary wave that followed the First World War: in Germany, the Social Democrats massacred workers during the Berlin uprising of January 1919 and murdered some of the most influential revolutionaries, such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. No method was too barbaric: the aerial bombardment of working-class neighbourhoods, the mass slaughter of the proletariat with machine-gun fire…

By cracking down on young people today, and applauding wholeheartedly its police who are clamouring for the right to inflict even harder blows, the Macron government is not only laying bare its stupidity and cruelty: it is revealing the true face of the bourgeoisie, a class capable of the worst to maintain capitalist exploitation. And the more the crisis and poverty worsen, the more the ruling class will have to resort to violence, with increasingly delusional ‘justifications’, to impose its attacks and, tomorrow, to attempt to crush all those who challenge the capitalist system.

The trap of futile violence

For the time being, the stupid and brutal handling of the high school pupils’ movement is only fuelling an already growing anger. This repression feeds discontent and outrages a large section of the working class. Like the high school pupils and university students, workers (who are also concerned parents) condemn and reject the instrumentalisation of the violence perpetrated by ‘rioters’, which fuels bourgeois propaganda and provides it with a pretext to justify its abuses. It is in the name of ‘urban violence’—by making a big deal of a burnt-out fire engine in Marseille, a school set alight in Nantes or attacks on teachers—that the state spreads its propaganda and seeks to legitimise the brutality of its law enforcement agencies.

Pointless clashes with the police and acts of vandalism serve only as outlets for frustration and, above all, as arguments to better justify repression. True methods of struggle, on the contrary, are based on solidarity and conscious collective action. We must return to methods of struggle that enable us to build a united dynamic: taking control of the struggle through sovereign and open general assemblies, in order to extend the movement to other workers, unify it and create a genuine balance of forces. In this regard, the strike by Airbus workers in Spain must serve as a source of inspiration, just as the students’ successful campaign twenty years ago against the CPE did: through their solidarity and their methods of struggle, they were able to force the government of the time to back down.

Today, anger is mounting and the reasons for fighting are the same everywhere: a lack of resources, austerity and inflation linked to war and soaring military spending. In Spain, young people are also on strike. In Germany, they are in uproar over the reform of military service, the first step towards the reintroduction of compulsory conscription. From one country to another, the reasons to fight are countless, and everywhere young people are being deprived of a future…

Faced with the barbarism of capitalism and its forces of repression, the only way out is international, united struggle – as massive and as conscious as possible!

WH, 1st October 2026