Bobigny (France) (AFP) – Sitting on their electric scooters and balance bikes in Bobigny, two 15-year-old high school girls chat while chewing strawberry-flavored chewing gum. The high school blockades will continue, they hope, because the government “doesn’t really listen to us”.

Published on: 01/11/2026 - 15:39

Strolling in the new pedestrian street which leads to the Seine-Saint-Denis prefecture, Assia (not her real name) is enjoying the very end of the school holidays. This resident of the Karl Marx city - who could see herself "working in medicine" - has, however, hardly had any classes since she entered the second general year... because "there was a blockade".

In an interview broadcast by the YouTube channel HugoDécrypte which she follows, the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, called on Wednesday for classes to resume on Monday, "taking into account the fact that young people have been heard".

But "they don't really listen to us", says the teenager.

The high school movement in France left the Paris suburbs in mid-September, “because city center high schools are more valued than those in the suburbs,” she says. "One of the main demands, in my high school, is in relation to absent teachers who are not replaced... And if there is a water leak, in a high school in Paris, it will be resolved more quickly than in the suburbs: everything is like that."

Her friend Asma, who lives in "an old building" nearby, has the patter of a lawyer in pink K-way: "For blockades, I wake up at 6:00 a.m. But for classes, I don't want to. Blockades, it's good, it's funny," judges the teenager, "in bridge class" in a vocational high school.

“Structural injustices”

Met in the new “heart of the city”, Kayla and Nayla, 16-year-old Balbynians in “pro” high schools in other cities, would like to tell the government: “Really listen to the youth!”.

And “delete Parcoursup, quickly,” adds Kayla. “It hurts the people who are rejected. It’s not okay to sort like that!”

In the city-prefecture of 57,000 inhabitants, whose communist mayor Abdel Sadi supported the movement, the Louise-Michel establishment is the only general and technological high school. Baccalaureate success rate: 88% in 2025.

At the beginning of October, the students involved in the blockade received support from some of the teachers.

“Our demands matched theirs,” Shakila Zamboulingame, associate professor of history-geography and cinema and audiovisual, unionized CGT Educ’action 93, told AFP.

"Students who have very good grades have been hyper-mobilized because they are particularly aware that all their work could be wasted by structural injustices" generated in particular by Parcoursup: "A space for selection and selling oneself", according to her, where many do not have "the means to highlight their CV in comparison with more privileged high school students".

"What's your name"

Near the Town Hall, small groups cross the slab slated for demolition, so photogenic that filming is increasing there. “Love always wins,” we read on a wall.

Two brothers and their friend, aged 16 to 18, say they were “zoning out” that day. Already no longer high school students, they support the movement.

Living in an 18-story tower, Hilal, 16, calls himself "Turkish and French" native of Seine-Saint-Denis, and sorry to have already "dropped out of school".

For him, if he failed in second grade, it was because he felt "lost" at the agricultural high school that he had not chosen and attributes "a little of the fault" to National Education. “For two years, I didn’t even have an English teacher, I know how to say ‘What’s your name’,” he says, making his friend laugh, before adding: “I don’t want the next generation to be like me.”

Ibrahima, 17, finds that "they were not right to break up the small businesses of people in difficulty like us" but that "creating blockades, burning trash cans and throwing mortars at the police, that's okay, because the police hit us too (...) If they had only waved flags, like the trade unionists, the government would not have calculated them."

Under his Under Armor hat, Hilal's brother, Léo, 18, says he quit in second grade, after a school career that was "not great at all" and claims to have left drug trafficking known since he was 12 "a year ago."

“It is here, in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, that we need more education, better monitoring at 12-13 years old. So that young people do not drop out,” he says, before escaping.

© 2026 AFP

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