Protests in France are a reaction to colonialism, imperialism, and austerity.
Originally published in Workers World.
We know the police state does not select the dates of its oppression against us without design. In 1995, the date of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s execution, fixed by the state of Pennsylvania, was August 17 — Marcus Garvey’s birthday. The people’s mass mobilization vacated that date.
The date of October 17 has been chosen by the people of France as the apex of their mass mobilization in their streets also for a reason.
It marks the 65th anniversary of Red October Day — Oct. 17, 1961 — when 30,000 Algerians living in the French diaspora, at the call of the French branch of the national liberation movement, Front de Liberation Nationale [FLN], protested peacefully in the streets of Paris against the daily arbitrary curfew they were subjected to and in support of the courageous FLN’s struggle for an independent Algeria. The repression ordered by the Paris police chief and former Nazi collaborator, Maurice Papon, against this peaceful march was ferocious.
Hundreds of Algerians — women, men, workers — were tortured, beaten to death and thrown in the River Seine — some still alive, where they drowned. The first victim was a woman. Many simply disappeared.
Maurice Papon (1910-2007) was a French civil servant, mass murderer and Nazi collaborator who was convicted of crimes against humanity committed during the occupation of France. Papon led the police in major prefectures from the 1930s to the 1960s, before he became a Gaullist politician. He was secretary general for the police in Bordeaux during World War II and participated in the deportation of more than 1,600 Jewish people living in France.
Papon is also known for his activities in the Algerian War (1954-62), during which he tortured insurgent prisoners as prefect of the Constantinois department and ordered, as prefect of the Paris police, the 1961 Paris massacre of pro-FLN demonstrators for violating a curfew that he had “advised.”
In 1961, Papon was personally awarded the Legion of Honour by French President Charles de Gaulle, whose government had been struggling with the FLN insurgency. Papon also commanded the Paris police in the Charonne subway massacre and the 1961 Paris massacre, during which between 200 and 300 Algerian demonstrators were deliberately killed by the Paris police.
Forced to resign in 1967 after the suspicious, forced disappearance of the Moroccan Marxist Mehdi Ben Barka, with de Gaulle’s support he was named as president of Sud Aviation, the company which co-developed Concorde.
October 17, 2026
The mass mobilization being prepared for Oct. 17 has spread to the universities, fire fighters, teachers, nurses, farmers and ecology groups, an increasing number of workers’ trade unions and the yellow vests in a pre-electoral fever, dominated on the Left by a timorous French Communist Party whose influence is declining in the eyes of the youth and the party of the France Unbowed whose influence is rising in the ranks of the young protesters often protected in the street against police brutality by elected representatives of that party.
The footage of Mayor Bally Bagayoko of Saint Denis being assaulted and tear gassed by the police as he tried to protect the youth during a peaceful protest has gone viral. Bagayoko is Black, from Mali and belongs to France Unbowed. He is proud to have a street in his city named for Mumia Abu-Jamal and has recently adopted Mumia as honorary citizen of Saint Denis, where the Paul Eluard High School was the scene of a George Floyd-type chokehold imposed on an underaged student only yesterday.
Intergenerational flavor
The presence of 1968 veterans as “big brothers” in the students’ midst has also offered a very unreported intergenerational flavor to these protests. Also unreported is the fact that the May 1968 upheavals did not originate from “well-to-do students at the new University of Nanterre,” as oversimplifications would have it.
They sprung from the fact that these privileged students were exposed to the culture shock of Algerian shantytowns [“bidonvilles” in French, which literally means towns made out of tin cans] in immediate proximity to the university. The students were radicalized by the fact that since WWII, colonized Algerians were “imported” as dirt cheap labor to rebuild war-torn France but were treated as less than second-class citizens.
Impact of de-colonialization in the Global South
2026 colonial France weighs equally heavy in the genesis of today’s high schoolers’ and student protests, sparked in working-class suburbs where Black and Arab people are still disenfranchised and segregated. French Guiana, Mayotte, Reunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique — all [former] French colonies yet still French Overseas Departments under neocolonial control — had student protests in early September, even before the first protests started near Paris, in Creteil and Saint Denis. Again, underreported.
The youth are more and more aware that, pushed by the U.S., NATO has now exacted from France 3.5% of its GDP until 2035 to finance flailing imperial wars. The youth refuse to be cannon fodder, just as they refuse to be the ones to repay the financial debt incurred by the French Epstein class.
Even on the left, there remain those who are still convinced that all is not lost, that France is still a “welfare state,” that “there is worse.” However, as Kwame Nkrumah explained in his landmark “Neo-Colonialism – the Last Stage of Imperialism,” the welfare state can only survive as long as it can batten on the theft of the resources and wealth of its colonies.
The pace of decolonization in the Global South is putting an end to the welfare states in the Global North, and the students know it, because they live it daily. They side with decolonization.
‘I think therefore I protest’
The students, who are often accused of being illiterate and incapable of spelling out demands, which are being criticized as being superficial and not structural, have shown a brilliant depth of geopolitical acumen as evidenced by the language used on their signs and banners. Like George Jackson and Palestinian writers like Refaat Alareer, they have taken the colonizers’ language, mastered it and turned it back against them.
From the new meaning they have given to the French national anthem “La Marseillaise” and stanzas within the anthem like, “To arms, citizens, let’s form our battalions,” when facing French President Emmanuel Macron’s police — to signs making famous French literary quotes all their own. Descartes had said: “I think therefore I am.” The high schoolers write on their signs: “I think therefore I protest.”
Simply no future
Their creativity and sense of humor are as deep as their radicalism, and the difference between those who were on the barricades in 1968 and now is that in 1968 France was not indebted, and the students had a future whether they overthrew the government or not. This time around their future has been mortgaged by the alliance between the billionaire class and the warmongers. There simply is no future. These children do not need to be rocket scientists to grasp it.
But first and foremost, the pro-Palestinian dimension of these rebellions goes deep and has created a sea change in the culture of protest. The slogans are many that refer to the contrast between the underfunding of schools and the funding of genocide: “We are all Gaza’s children.”
Back in 1968, we used to chant “Sous les paves, la plage” [Under the cobblestones, the beach], and there was a sense of festivity and farniente [lazing around], which is sobered today by the awareness that when that same slogan is cried out, it refers to the bloody beaches of Gaza, a Gaza still under genocidal siege.
The “liberal” zionists in the French universities have not underestimated the pro-Palestinian current running through the student rebellions, because they have made it known that they would agree with their demands if only there were no Palestinian flags.
Both the National Front, a neo-Nazi party founded by Jean Le Pen who we now know tortured people in Algeria, and the neo-liberal Socialist Party are also hostile to the youths’ unrest and their demands.
Meanwhile Macron is silent, and his ministers make ineffectual gesticulations while the whole “matter” is treated not like peaceful mobilizations by the nation’s children but like “urban unrest” justifying the sort of war time weapons like the stun grenade that tore off the hand of a 15-year-old whose hand had to be amputated and is waiting to hear if his other hand can be saved.
Because of the anti-colonial, anti-imperialist dimension of what will unfold on Oct. 17, it is to be feared that police repression will be heavy and unrestrained. We can only hope there will be no human losses, as there were 65 years ago.
We can only hope that the world will not be content to watch their screens tomorrow as these children make history, but that revolutionaries everywhere will accompany them with active, on-the-ground solidarity. Not only statements, even if those are important, but because as always in history the window is narrow in which to seize the time.
The UN's renewal of the Gang Suppression Force mandate is part of a wider hemispheric project to reassert military control across the Americas. Caribbean leaders cannot claim to support a Zone of…
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has issued a letter addressed to the American people, outlining its views on recent developments and Iran-U.S. relations.
The Trump administration's new sanctions on Cuba, are part of a dual strategy to create unendurable hardship while simultaneously making Cuba financially dependent on the United States.
The armed groups in Haiti are not a spontaneous wave of banditry, but a scheme orchestrated by imperialist powers in concert with a reactionary and subservient Haitian political class. The…
A coalition of Pan-African and socialist organizations has launched an international campaign to defend Cuba, arguing that African peoples must remember the sacrifices Cuban internationalists made…
