France answered its schoolchildren with riot shields — then sent their parents the bill

When France's schoolchildren told their government that their classrooms were falling apart, the government heard them. Then it sent in the riot police. This week, as some 400 high schools stayed shut and tear gas drifted through Strasbourg, the Macron government revealed exactly what it thinks of young people who demand an education: they are a public-order problem.

Let us be clear about what the students asked for. Not revolution — substitute teachers, repaired buildings, books. The protests began in the Paris region last month over teacher shortages and dilapidated schools, and spread because the grievance is national. France's answer was Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez's mobile units, Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin's 2,000 arrests — most of them teenagers — and a demand that parents pay reparations for the damage.

Note the order of operations. The state starves schools of funds — education is set for a below-inflation budget increase while planned cuts bite — then criminalises the hunger it created. Children who asked for teachers get tear gas; parents who cannot afford tutors get the bill for broken windows. This is the neoliberal state in miniature: austerity for the public good, repression for its critics, and the invoice always lands on the poor.

Yes, there has been destruction — fires set in high schools, a teacher doused with petrol in Marseille, a torched car in Strasbourg. Violence against people is indefensible, and a movement that burns its own schools burns its own future. But Darmanin himself admits the arsonists may not even be students — "we're not entirely sure that they are even high-school students themselves" — which makes the blanket crackdown on teenagers all the more grotesque: punish the children for the crimes of whoever showed up.

And note what the government chose to blame instead of itself: the "hard left," with intelligence briefings fingering La France Insoumise for starting the movement. Six months before a presidential election, with Macron deeply unpopular in the polls, the playbook is familiar — paint the young as manipulated, the left as instigators, and never, ever the budget as the culprit.

"We have a future to build, not to endure," read one Paris placard this week. The students are right. A republic that cannot staff its classrooms but can always staff its riot lines has made its choice — and it was not the children.