By Antonio Pele

Ed. note: Antonio Pele is Associate Professor at the Law School of PUC-Rio (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro). His work develops a critical genealogy of human dignity through Foucault, and examines the politics of life and death under digital technologies. He contributed ‘Data Necropolitics’ to Abolition Democracy 13/13. Website: www.antoniopele.com.

On 16 September 2026, teachers at Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, a public high school with approximately 1,500 students in the eastern suburbs of Paris, went on strike to protest teaching positions that remained unfilled three weeks into the school year. The next morning, their students blocked the gates. Their leaflet cited staff shortages, overcrowded classrooms, and, in some rooms, an insufficient number of tables to accommodate everyone. Within two weeks, amplified by videos shared on social media and a call from the Union syndicale lycéenne, the blockade had developed into a national movement. By the first week of October, classes were suspended in 400 to 500 lycées, more than a third of the public high schools of the Paris region were closed for the day, and more than 5,000 people had been taken into police custody. Riot police cleared the entrance to the Lycée Hélène-Boucher in Paris. In Lens, a teenager lost a hand to a grenade on the margins of a blockade. How it happened is still disputed. Thousands manifested in Nantes, Marseille and Lyon. University students joined them, followed by students from Belgian lycées. On Tuesday 13 October, for the fifth ‘act’ of the movement, the student and lycéen unions counted 480,000 marchers in some ten cities, against 450,000 the Tuesday before. These are the organisers’ figures, and that morning the education minister interpreted them as a sign that the movement was ebbing. But after three weeks of blockades, and just days before the autumn holidays, it had not stopped.

What were they requesting? Not an end to schooling, but more of it. The demands reiterated at assembly after assembly are notably modest and precise: absent teachers should be replaced, and class sizes should be limited to thirty-five pupils. Buildings should be maintained and kept at a comfortable temperature during periods of hot weather. Timetables should be organized to avoid extended gaps that require students to remain at school from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. The anxiety caused by Parcoursup, the national platform that ranks applicants for university admission, should also be taken seriously. The primary request on every list is the most straightforward: a teacher in front of the classroom.

This is the puzzle I want to consider: France is witnessing a mass movement of adolescents, met with riot police and thousands of arrests, whose central demand is to be taught.

Two ways of getting it wrong

Two interpretations of the movement are presented, and they are mirror images of one another.

The first is advanced by the government and much of the press. The president of the Paris region described the blockades as turning into ‘urban riots’. Commentators noted that the leaders of the two principal student unions are no longer in high school and are, respectively, close to La France Insoumise and the presidential party, as though the involvement of adults explained the anger of minors. A more conventional interpretation is the longstanding one: these are young people seeking to skip class.

The second interpretation comes from the movement’s left wing. From this perspective, the blockades constitute a revolt against austerity, selection, and a neoliberal school system that sorts children by postcode—in short, against ‘the system’. Student unions refer to the State’s ‘disengagement’ and to ‘social and racist selection’.

The two readings disagree about everything but their grammar. Both frame the resistance as a revolt against something, order or the system. I think both miss what is most distinctive about this autumn: the lycéens are not rejecting the norms of the Éducation nationale. They are enforcing them. They are holding the State accountable to its own rulebook, in its own words, using the civic tools the school itself taught them to use. To make this clear, I want to draw on two concepts from two thinkers: E.P. Thompson’s moral economy and Michel Foucault’s counter-conduct.

Thompson’s crowd

In 1971, English historian E.P. Thompson published an essay about the food riots in eighteenth-century England.[1] He wrote it against what he called the ‘spasmodic view of popular history’: the assumption, shared by Whig historians and by some Marxists, that hungry people riot the way a stomach cramps, reflexively, when the price of bread rises. Thompson examined the riots of 1795 and identified a different interpretation. The crowds that halted grain wagons, broke into mills, and marched on markets were not acting impulsively. They were disciplined, often led by women, and motivated by what Thompson called a legitimizing notion: the belief that they were defending customary rights and that most of the community supported them.

The content of that belief matters because the crowd did not invent it. It came from the old paternalist model of provision, which the English State had codified more than two centuries earlier in the Book of Orders, the assize of bread, and the statutes against forestalling, regrating, and engrossing. Under this model, grain was to be sold openly in the local market before being transported elsewhere. Millers and dealers were not to withhold it in the aim of driving up prices. Bread was to be sold at a price determined by a fair assessment, and magistrates were responsible for enforcing these requirements. By 1795, the authorities had quietly abandoned this model in favor of Adam Smith’s new political economy, according to which the free movement of grain was the surest remedy for scarcity. The crowd had not.

Thus, the most compelling scene in Thompson’s essay depicts the practice the French called taxation populaire. The crowd seizes a dealer’s grain, sets what it considers to be a fair price, sells the grain at that price, and gives the proceeds to the dealer. This is not pillage. It is enforcement. The crowd takes the place of the magistrate who has stopped doing his job: it enforces the rule laid down by the State, which has since abandoned it, and then goes home. Thompson’s crowd was not against the market or the order. It was the order’s last guardian, left behind by the authorities. Twenty years later, when he revisited the concept, he insisted that ‘moral’ in moral economy referred not to sentiment but to a dense web of expectations and obligations concerning what the powerful owed the governed in a crisis.[2]

Now transpose the analysis. The French lycée has its own paternalistic code, which, unlike the customs defended by Thompson’s crowd, is written, statutory, and republican. The Code de l’éducation begins by declaring education the nation’s foremost priority and designates the State as the guarantor of the right to education. Education is compulsory from the ages of three to sixteen, establishing a reciprocal obligation that the lycéens have understood clearly: if the State requires a child’s attendance, it must, in turn, be present. Within days, the minister acknowledged as much, adopting precisely the tone of a magistrate reminded of the assize: replacing absent teachers, he said, is the State’s responsibility.

Viewed in this light, the demands made this autumn resemble an assize of bread for schooling. Twenty-four pupils per class rather than thirty-five. A replacement teacher within the week. And a table for every pupil. When students in Créteil complained that some classrooms lacked tables, they were like the crowd in the marketplace noticing that the measure fell short. Their blockade is a taxation populaire. It establishes the fair price of a school day, a teacher, a chair, and a roof, and refuses to allow the State to provide less.

Foucault’s counter-conduct

On 1 March 1978, during his lectures at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault examined what he called pastoral power: the Christian art of governing souls, in which a shepherd guides a flock, knows each sheep individually, and is responsible for each one.[3] He saw it as an early precursor to the modern State’s way of governing populations. Then he asked a question he had never asked before: what struggles had emerged in response to this kind of power?

He tried out the available words and discarded them one by one. ‘Revolt’ sounded too military. ‘Disobedience’ was too weak. ‘Dissidence’ belonged to the Soviet context and wouldn’t travel. A little reluctantly, he settled on a word he admitted was clumsy: counter-conduct, the struggle against the procedures by which one is conducted. The crucial point was what counter-conduct was not. The medieval counter-conducts he described, ascesis, lay communities, mysticism, a return to Scripture, and the eschatological expectation that the shepherd’s time was ending, were not external to the pastorate. They borrowed its own elements and turned them against it. They did not say, ‘No shepherd.’ They said, ‘Not this shepherd, not this way, not at this price.’ Or, more pointedly: ‘You promised to lead us, and you have stopped.’ A few weeks later, before the French Society of Philosophy, Foucault would describe critique itself as the art of not being governed like that, by those people, at that cost, a formulation that presupposes one is governed and expects to be.[4]

Transpose again and consider the instruments: the assemblée générale in the courtyard, the vote to block, the cahier de revendications presented to the headteacher, the delegation to the rectorat, and the student council, the conseil de la vie lycéenne, convening the assembly. None of this comes from outside the school. It is the school’s own civic pedagogy: the hours of enseignement moral et civique, the class-delegate elections, and the practice of ‘engagement’ set out in the Ministry’s own programmes, now directed at the institution that taught it. Teachers have recognised themselves in it. When students blocked a lycée in the Paris suburbs in 2020 against new exams, their teachers wrote to parents that the children had exercised their civic conscience. This year, teachers at Saint-Exupéry went on strike the day before their pupils blocked the school.

The lycéens do not refuse to be conducted. Their complaint is that nobody is providing it. The teacher is absent and has not been replaced. The guidance counsellor has no time available. Parcoursup, an algorithm, has replaced the adult who was meant to help them choose a path in life. This is a flock seeking a shepherd. It is the opposite of the account we typically give of adolescent revolt, and it is precisely what Foucault meant when he argued that counter-conduct is not external to government but one of its internal possibilities: the moment when the governed take the pastor’s promises more seriously than the pastor does.

Why the two concepts need each other

Thompson supplies the content, while Foucault supplies the form. Moral economy shows what is being defended: a norm written by the State, the expectations of what the governed are owed, and the sense of violation when that rule is quietly abandoned. Counter-conduct shows how it is defended: from within government, using government’s own tools, by people who want to be governed better, not to escape governance altogether.

Each concept, taken alone, has a weakness the other corrects. Moral economy on its own slides towards nostalgia: defending an old order simply because it is old. Counter-conduct on its own can become a formalism in which every refusal looks the same. Together, they describe something precise: a moral economy of public education, whose guardians this autumn are sixteen-year-olds.

One difference separates them from Thompson’s crowd, and it is the difference that makes the lycéens so hard for the State to answer. The norm defended by the English crowd was customary, remembered, and unwritten, and the authorities could ultimately declare it obsolete. The norm advocated by the lycée students is documented in print. Equality, free schooling, laïcité, the continuity of public service: these are not folk memories but the vocabulary of the Republic, taught in the very classrooms that now stand empty for want of a teacher. The State cannot say the rule has lapsed, because it is still teaching the rule. All it can do is what it did within days: announce 3,000 replacement teachers while sending the police to the gates. Concede the norm and arrest the crowd. Thompson’s magistrates did likewise, and he noted the awkwardness.

A movement with a long memory

This is nothing new, and the lycéens know it. Historians of French education point out that the French secondary school has known two kinds of mobilisation since the late 1970s. The ‘spring’ movements rise up against a reform: a new exam, a new admissions system, and a new employment contract for young people. The ‘back-to-school’ movements begin in September and October, first in the suburbs, protesting a school year that has simply failed to start: no teachers, forty students to a class, and no one to supervise them. A union report on the autumn of 1978 could be reprinted today without changing a word: a calamitous rentrée, overcrowded classes, no staff, and in Seine-Saint-Denis some doubt if term had begun at all. The 1998 movement began in the same way, in the same département, with the same demand for ‘means’. The 2019 blockades against the Blanquer reforms featured leaflets calling for classes of twenty-four.[5]

The geography is Thompson’s too. His riots didn’t happen everywhere. They erupted where the abandonment of the old rules hit hardest, in the market towns grain passed through on its way to London. French blockades begin in Créteil, Bobigny, and Saint-Denis, where the gap between the Republic’s stated principles and their implementation is greatest. The periphery is not where the moral economy is weakest. It is where it is most acutely remembered, because it is so frequently violated.

May 1968 offers the contrast that clarifies everything. That movement rejected the institution: the lecture hall, the exam, the professor, the father. This one wants the institution. It wants a full lecture hall, a fair exam, and a present professor. If 1968 represented a revolt in the sense Foucault rejected, this autumn represents a counter-conduct in the sense he preferred.

What the police response shows

Why, then, respond to a demand for conformity with riot police, five thousand arrests, and the loss of a teenager’s hand? Not because the demand is dangerous, but because it is embarrassing, and a counter-conduct is more embarrassing than a revolt.

A revolt can be othered: called an urban riot, blamed on outside agitators, attributed to a political party, or filed under public order. A counter-conduct cannot, because it holds up the State’s own code and asks the State to read it aloud. The repression this October is best understood as an effort to transform one into the other: to portray children seeking a teacher as rioters, thereby reframing a question of moral economy as one of public order. When the regional president talks about ‘urban riots’, she is not describing the blockades. She is carrying out that conversion. Bernard Harcourt has demonstrated how the counterinsurgency paradigm turned inward, leading governments to view their own citizens as a population to be managed and, where necessary, suppressed.[6] This autumn, the population in question is between fifteen and eighteen years of age.

There’s a second reason, and Thompson helps explain it. The budget’s language is neutral: unfilled posts, unassigned hours, and a ‘tense’ fiscal context. The moral economy rejects such neutrality. It characterizes the same facts as a breach of obligation, doing so in the State’s own words. That is why the student unions’ phrase, the State’s ‘disengagement’, cuts deeper than any slogan about capitalism. It states: ‘You established the rule, taught it to us, and have since ceased to uphold it.’ A State may contend with an adversary. It cannot readily dispute the terms of its own syllabus.

A third response came on the morning of the fifth act. The education minister said he saw the movement waning, but was not betting on its exhaustion. Instead, he was counting on democracy, pointing to the 86,000 contributions received on an online cahier de doléances. The choice of instrument is telling. The cahier de doléances is the old petition of subjects to a sovereign. It gathers grievances, one contribution at a time, and does not by itself decide any of them. The lycéens’ unions, meanwhile, are still presenting a single list that calls for abolishing Parcoursup and investing ten billion euros in lycées. The State offers to hear every voice. The movement asks it to answer a single demand. This is the pastor’s classic gesture, attention to each sheep, offered in place of what the flock has asked for: not to be heard, but to be led. And once again, it is the opposite of Thompson’s crowd. That crowd did not petition. It set the price and sold the grain.

17 October, and after

As I write, on 14 October, the movement is looking towards Saturday 17 October, the first day of the autumn vacations. The date did not begin with the lycéens. It first appeared on social networks weeks ago, amid concerns over fuel prices and the cost of living, and was widely seen as a revival of the Gilets jaunes. The lycéens have since made it part of their own calendar. Many say they’ll march despite the holidays, hoping workers, farmers, nurses and firefighters will join them. Their union describes it as a true convergence of struggles. Yet no union had officially endorsed the day as of 13 October, and no march had been declared to the Paris police prefecture. The CGT has said it will be present wherever conditions allow. Some students are weary after three weeks of blockades. Others fear the police. We do not yet know whether this will be the moment a counter-conduct becomes something the State can more comfortably call a revolt, or whether it will hold to its own grammar.

What I understand is this: the most conservative movement France has seen in years, conservative in the strict sense that it seeks nothing beyond the norm, is also its most subversive, because it publicly measures, in the Republic’s own terms, the distance between what the State says and what it does. Thompson’s crowd did this in 1795 with a bushel of grain and a fair price. The lycée students do it with a chair, a table, and a teacher. When children in a democracy have to block the school in order to get a school, the question is not what they oppose. It is what the State has stopped standing for.

Notes

[1] E.P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past & Present 50 (1971): 76–136. https://doi.org/10.1093/past/50.1.76

[2] E.P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy Reviewed’, in Customs in Common (London: Merlin Press, 1991), 259–351.

[3] Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), lecture of 1 March 1978, 191–226. The discussion of the word ‘counter-conduct’ and of the five medieval counter-conducts is at 194–216.

[4] Michel Foucault, ‘What is Critique?’ (lecture to the Société française de philosophie, 27 May 1978), in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 41–81.

[5] On the cyclical character of autumn mobilisations since 1978, see the analysis published in The Conversation (October 2026), which quotes the SNES report on the rentrée of 1978, linked above. For 2019, see the communiqué of the teachers of the lycée Mozart, Le Blanc-Mesnil, 16 September 2019: https://creteil.snes.edu/IMG/pdf/lycee_mozart_-_communique_16_septembre_2019.pdf

[6] Bernard E. Harcourt, The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens (New York: Basic Books, 2018).

The figures on the movement (lycées affected, closures in Île-de-France, arrests, the 3,000 replacement posts, the march of 13 October, the 86,000 online contributions) are those reported by France 24, franceinfo, Le JDD, Public Sénat, CNEWS and the Ministry between 4 and 13 October 2026, linked in the text. The counts of 450,000 and 480,000 marchers are the organisers’ own.