In this episode of French Politics, we follow France’s high-school protest movement from the classroom to the street, the screen, and the halls of power. Through political artwork and the ideas of Rousseau, Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, Pierre Bourdieu, Immanuel Kant, Fatima Mernissi, Mohamed Abed al-Jabri, Ibn Rushd, and Martin Luther King Jr., the episode asks who is recognized as a political voice and who is dismissed as noise.

From unequal schools and student blockades to media framing, polling, institutional listening, and the politics of waiting, the episode looks at what democracy means when the people most affected by public decisions feel unheard. Visit frenchpolitics.fr/protest for the visual archive with the artworks and frenchpolitics.fr/highschoolmouvement for The 2026 lycée movement cahier.

Amine Zidouh

France promises its children education, equality, and protection. Its high school protesters are asking the country to live up to those promises.

In part two of our series on France’s high school protests, Amine Zidouh turns the streets into a philosophy classroom. Through protest art, political cartoons, and ideas from Kant, Hobbes, Rawls, and Camus, this episode explores the questions behind the confrontation: who the state is supposed to protect, what schools owe their students, and how a demand for education becomes a struggle over dignity and democracy.

What makes a police response “proportionate,” and who bears the cost of that calculation? Can an education system call itself fair when some students have missing teachers and leaking classrooms while others can pay for help navigating university admissions? Where does violence begin: with a burning bin, or with the conditions that brought students into the streets?

Moving between injured bodies, neglected classrooms, and the artwork that makes these contradictions visible, this episode/ asks us to look beyond the familiar opposition between order and protest. A legitimate grievance does not justify every act of rebellion. A duty to maintain order does not justify every use of force. Rather than offering ready-made answers, we use philosophy to think through the anger and examine the promises being made in our name.

Explore the artwork discussed in the episode at frenchpolitics.fr/protest

What if looking beyond our own borders is not just a way tounderstand others, but to understand ourselves, making visible the political assumptions we’ve learned to take for granted?

I’m Dr. Amine Zidouh, I specialize in French and Francophone Studies, Political Science and Discourse Analysis, and this is French Politics.

This show is for American and English-speaking audiences who want to understand French politics and unpack the ideas, assumptions, and power relations behind it. Looking at another country can also help us see what we take for granted in our own.

We start with the political parties: what they stand for, wherethey come from, and whose interests they serve. But politics extends beyond parties and elections. We’ll also explore political concepts, cultural debates, and contemporary issues in French society.

Everyone is open to critique here. That’s not a claim to neutrality. It’s a commitment to sincere, consistent criticism: making my perspectives clear, questioning my own assumptions, and applying the same critical standards to every political force. That doesn’t mean reaching the same judgment about everyone. It means giving no one an exemption.

The goal is not to tell you whom to support, but to give you the context and tools to think critically about French politics, and perhaps see your own political world differently.

Follow French Politics with Dr. Amine Zidouh wherever youget your podcasts.

A student slogan becomes the starting point for an urgent examination of France’s unfolding high-school protest movement: “Nous manquons les cours pour vous en faire une” in English: “We’re missing class to teach you one.”

Across France, lycée students are mobilizing around absent teachers, overcrowded classrooms, deteriorating buildings, unequal access to education, Parcoursup anxiety, and a public-school system shaped by deep territorial and social divides. But as their demands spread beyond the banlieues and into cities nationwide, the state’s response has increasingly centered on police intervention, arrests, surveillance, and the language of “urban violence.”

This episode asks what happens when young people are told that education is the Republic’s highest priority, yet experience the state through shortage, inequality, police custody, and force. It examines the political meaning of protest signs, the escalation trap of confrontational policing, the media narratives that make student demands disappear behind images of disorder, and the contradiction at the heart of official discourse: students are treated as dangerous enough to arrest, yet supposedly too immature to speak for themselves.

From le bac (baccalaureat) to the BAC (anti-crime police), from the promise of republican equality to the realities of unequal schools, this is an analysis of education, policing, political language, and who gets to define a movement while it is still being written.

French political discourse often frames the present conflict as a choice between two dangerous extremes: the far right on one side, the radical left on the other. In this narrative, the center presents itself not as one political choice among many, but as the reasonable, responsible, and supposedly non-ideological alternative the only option capable of governing.

This episode begins a series that will critically examine France’s major political parties and currents across the spectrum. The purpose is not to claim that they are all the same, but to question their narratives, policies, and relationship to power: who benefits, who pays, who is heard, and who is treated as a problem to manage.

In this first episode, I examine Emmanuel Macron and Macronism through the idea of the far center a concept I have been developing in a book project. The episode asks what happens when the political center turns its own program into “reality,” dismisses alternatives as irresponsible or extreme, and treats democratic conflict as a failure of public understanding rather than a legitimate disagreement. From labor reform and policing to immigration, pension reform, education, and the post-2024 political crisis, this is a critique of the myth of "neutral" power. By Amine Zidouh, Lecturer at Dartmouth College.

---Visit ⁠⁠www.frenchpolitics.fr⁠⁠ to explore the show’s visual atlas of French political parties, elections, movements, ideas, and public debates, alongside episode sources and further analysis.