Whenever France burns, people look for precedents, the best comparison to the riots du jour. People throw around dates such as 1968, or sometimes 2005. Those with longer memories cite 1848 or 1789.
Since the great general strike of ’68, there has been a pretense that protests in France are somehow a traditional feature of rebellion against some aspect of the French system, or a wider injustice. The current conflagration began somewhat in this manner, with the asinine claim that the riots now spreading across the cities that are the jewels of French civilization are somehow “school protests.”
It does not take a historian to notice that the current events do not look like school protests. Even if it were true that some students were protesting about their schooling, they would have absolutely no justification for doing so. Last year, French government spending accounted for a staggering 57 percent of gross domestic product, and French education spending is above average within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. This is in a country whose debt-to-GDP ratio is 115 percent. France is, if anything, spending too much on the education of its youth. Or rather, it is borrowing money to educate a generation, portions of which are now protesting against their expensive (though clearly inadequate) education.
When I say it does not take a historian to understand what is going on this month, I mean that identifying what is fueling these protests requires nothing more than having eyes.