What Happened
It began quietly. In mid-September, teachers and staff at Lycée Saint-Exupéry, a state high school in Créteil, southeast of Paris, protested a list of unfilled posts: a vice principal, three teachers, a full-time nurse, a full-time social worker, and two vocational instructors. On Friday, September 18, the students joined them and blockaded the school. Videos spread on social media, and within two weeks the movement had reached hundreds of schools from Seine-Saint-Denis to Marseille, Strasbourg, Tours, and Lille. One account quotes an education official calling it “the largest high school movement in 40 years.”
What started as a blockade became a riot. Students lit fires at school entrances — damaging the gates of two Paris high schools, Léonard-de-Vinci and Gaston-Bachelard — threw projectiles, and clashed with police, who answered with tear gas. More than 100 schools have been reported severely damaged. In La Ciotat a teacher was doused with petrol and assaulted. In Belfort a police officer was kicked and beaten by youths. In Tours a young man was blinded in one eye during clashes.
On Friday, October 2, roughly 400 of France’s 3,700 high schools were closed and 735 were disrupted. About 1,750 people were arrested that day alone, most of them minors. About 170 students and 65 school staff — including 40 principals — have been injured, and Time reports more than 400 police officers hurt. Education Minister Édouard Geffray warned parents that their children were “in danger” and urged them to keep them home. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez condemned “projectiles thrown, attacks on law enforcement, teachers, journalists, passers-by.” Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu called a crisis meeting, and unions have announced more protests for Tuesday, October 6.
Real Grievances
It must be said plainly: the students’ complaints are not invented. Last school year nearly 10 percent of scheduled class hours in French public secondary schools were never taught, mostly because absent teachers were not replaced. Students describe classrooms reaching 95°F with no cooling, broken desks, and schools without nurses. In Seine-Saint-Denis, a union survey found that two-thirds of schools have teacher posts they cannot fill. France’s junior high classes already average about 26 pupils, against an EU average under 21, and the 2026 budget cut roughly 4,000 teaching positions as the government struggles with a national debt near 117 percent of its economy.
Nor is it simply a matter of immigration swelling the classrooms. Nationally, France has fewer pupils every year: about 160,000 fewer this fall than last, and a projected 1.7 million fewer by 2035, as the birth rate falls. The crowding comes chiefly from budget cuts and teachers who are not there. Immigration plays a real but more local part. The movement began in the suburbs east and north of Paris, which have some of the largest immigrant populations in France, and the French Observatory of Immigration and Demography reports that pupils of immigrant background are concentrated in the “priority education” schools, where many arrive with little French. These are the same schools hardest hit by the shortages.
But none of this justifies what followed. A broken desk does not justify burning a school. A missing teacher does not justify pouring petrol on another one. The Scripture does not allow grievance to become an excuse for lawlessness: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God… Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God” (Romans 13:1–2).
Who Is Fanning the Flames
Not every student in the streets is a rioter. One account notes that most of the students are not very political, that much of the violence came from outsiders, and that student organizers themselves called for an end to the disorder. But others have been quick to use the unrest. La France Insoumise, the hard-left party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, backed the Créteil protest from its first days through its local branch. The writer Omar Youssef Souleimane argues that the party has turned the movement into a recruiting ground for the 2027 elections. He points to the Palestinian flags that have appeared at blockade after blockade, and to a video from Carpentras showing students chanting antisemitic slogans around a burning flag. Whatever the full truth, children are being stirred up by men who should be calming them, and the Scripture has a word for that: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20).
From Saint-Denis to Secularism
The suburbs where this movement caught fire carry a history that tells its own story. The town of Saint-Denis is named for the man tradition calls the first bishop of Paris. Its basilica, built from the 12th century on the site of a chapel over his tomb, became the burial place of nearly every king of France. For centuries this was Rome’s heartland, and Rome had every advantage: the crown, the land, the schools, the people.
Yet Rome produced no lasting faith there, because it never gave the people the Word of God. When the Revolution came in 1789, the mobs turned on the church that had ruled them; the royal tombs at Saint-Denis were broken open and the kings’ remains thrown into a common pit in 1793. In the 20th century the same suburbs became the communist “red belt” around Paris. Saint-Denis earned the nickname la ville rouge, the red city, and its mayors were Communists until 1934. Today the department of Seine-Saint-Denis is among the most immigrant and most Muslim in France, though France keeps no official count by religion. Catholicism, then atheistic communism, then Islam — one empty house after another, swept and garnished, but never filled with Christ (Matthew 12:43–45).
The school where it all began fits the pattern. Despite the name, Lycée Saint-Exupéry is not named for a saint at all, but for Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the aviator who wrote The Little Prince. Like every state school in France, it is secular by law. Since the 1905 law separating church and state, and earlier school laws of the 1880s, French children have been educated in a system that deliberately leaves God out.
A Generation Without the Fear of God
The Bible foretold exactly this kind of generation:
“Disobedient to parents” and “fierce” describe the scenes in France’s streets well enough. But the young are not chiefly to blame. They have been raised exactly as their nation intended: told that God is a private opinion at best, that there is no higher law than the state and no higher purpose than oneself. When the state then fails them, there is nothing left to restrain them. “Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he” (Proverbs 29:18). The prophet Isaiah described a nation under judgment in words that read like this week’s headlines: “the people shall be oppressed, every one by another… the child shall behave himself proudly against the ancient” (Isaiah 3:5).
God gave the responsibility for teaching children not to the state but to their parents: “And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children” (Deuteronomy 6:6–7). “Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him” (Proverbs 22:15). And to fathers: “bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). A nation that hands its children to a godless system, and then wonders why they burn the schools, has forgotten where wisdom begins: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10).
Nor should Christians in America or Britain read this with any sense of superiority. Our own public schools long ago banished the Bible and prayer, and our own streets have seen their share of riots. “Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people” (Proverbs 14:34). France is simply further along a road many Western nations are walking.
What These Young People Truly Need
The French government will meet with unions, promise to replace absent teachers faster, and perhaps find more money. Some of that may help. But no budget can give a young man a new heart, and no school reform can teach him to fear God. What these students need most is what every sinner needs: the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The law can punish rioters, but only grace can change them. Christ came “to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10), and He saves not by our works or our reforms but by His own finished work, freely given: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). “Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth” (Ecclesiastes 12:1) is still God’s call to the young of France and of every nation.
Pray for France
Let Christians pray for France: for the students, many of them only fourteen or fifteen, that God would have mercy on them and bring some of them to Christ; for the teachers and principals who have been threatened and injured; for the police who must restore order; and for those in authority, “that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” (1 Timothy 2:2). Pray especially for the small number of faithful gospel preachers in France, that the Lord would open doors for His Word in a land that has heard it so little. And let parents everywhere take this as a warning to teach their own children the Scriptures while there is time.
Sources: Time, Al Jazeera, CNN, ABC News (Australia), ITV, and Euronews coverage of the protests (October 1–3, 2026); La Clé Publique and the French Ministry of Education on enrollment projections; Courthouse News on the 2026 budget and class sizes; Créteil Citoyenne (LFI) on the Saint-Exupéry vacancies; Omar Youssef Souleimane’s commentary via IntelliNews; reporting on the Observatory of Immigration and Demography’s school study; and historical sources on Saint-Denis. All Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.