Behind France's School Blockades And 'Yellow Vest' Riots, A Far-Left Network Years In The Making
Authored by Etienne Fauchaire via The Epoch Times,
PARIS - Five weeks have passed since students in the Paris suburbs blockaded a high school to protest overcrowding and staff shortages. Within a month, they joined forces with the Yellow Vests, and rioting led to nearly 8,000 arrests.
On Oct. 17, at least 3,000 shops were looted or damaged, according to French Commerce Minister Serge Papin. The movement's next round of protests followed on Oct. 24, with 70,000 police officers deployed across the country.
Statements from trade unions, social media posts, and the far-left, as well as foreign flags and slogans seen and heard at the protests, show that the movement was backed and promoted by a range of left and far-left actors, including LFI lawmakers, Trotskyist groups, and activists linked to political Islam.
Since Oct. 1, the French government has blamed France Unbowed (LFI), a hard-left party led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, for the upheaval, calling it "a maneuver organized by LFI and its ultra-left proxies." Mélenchon, LFI's presidential candidate and a former deputy of the National Assembly, once belonged to the International Communist Organization (OCI) and has voiced support for socialist regimes, including those of China, Cuba, and Venezuela.
LFI denies this accusation. Manuel Bompard, LFI's national coordinator, called on the government "not to descend into conspiracy theories."
'A Movement Manufactured From Scratch'
The first student blockade, regarded as the starting point of the high school movement, took place on Sept. 17 at Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, southeast of Paris, after teachers protested staff shortages.
The previous day, the local LFI chapter had announced its support for the protest.
LFI lawmakers Louis Boyard and Clémence Guetté attended the blockade on the first day. A week later, on Sept. 28, Bally Bagayoko, the LFI mayor of Saint-Denis, joined protesting students at Lycée Paul-Éluard, which had become another focal point of the movement in the heavily immigrant suburb north of Paris.
Asked the following day about clashes outside the schools, Bagayoko said that violence could be "legitimate" but that "whenever it can be avoided, that's better." The Paris police prefect subsequently referred his remarks to prosecutors over possible incitement to commit an offense.
Mélenchon also intervened on Sept. 28, accusing the government on social media platform X of having "ordered repression" against "harmless" students, with an "obvious racist aftertaste." He urged LFI activists to place themselves between students and police.
The president of the Union Syndicale Lycéenne (USL), a left-wing high school students' union, called for a nationwide mobilization on Sept. 26. On Oct. 1, the French Interior Ministry reported disruptions at 1,027 of France's approximately 3,700 high schools.
The USL's president, Ryad Rani, 19, has longstanding ties to LFI. At age 14, he interned for LFI lawmaker David Guiraud, who is now the mayor of Roubaix. He later ran on an LFI-backed slate in March's municipal elections and appeared alongside Boyard on a panel at the party's most recent summer conference.
The USL and its university counterpart, the Union Etudiante (Student Union), jointly issued the calls to blockade high schools and universities on Oct. 1 and to join a nationwide youth demonstration on Oct. 6.
"This movement began at the end," Olivier Vial, director of the Center for University Studies and Research, a think tank that studies emerging forms of radicalism, told The Epoch Times.
In a typical French student movement, he said, violence by a radical hardcore group is the final stage, reached once the majority of pupils have obtained satisfaction and gone home.
"Apart from Paul-Éluard, there was first the far left and the violence, and only afterwards did the unions come with their demands. What we are dealing with is a movement manufactured from scratch," Vial said.
Noah, 21, a film student who identifies with the antifascist movement, told The Epoch Times during a protest on Oct. 13 that he was taking to the streets because of anger over the rising cost of higher education and the lack of government support for students, a shortfall that he said leaves him no choice but to work alongside his studies.
He also said he tolerated ideas from those who were on the center-right as long as they did not support the National Rally.
Several grievances brought Jean, a 21-year-old student, to the protest, he told The Epoch Times on Oct. 24. Pointing to the lack of funding for public education, he accused French President Emmanuel Macron of favoring the ultra-rich by refusing to tax them, arguing that greater wealth redistribution would help those in need, particularly in suburbs with large immigrant populations who he said are less privileged.
The best way to achieve this was to vote for LFI, he said.
LFI's Radical Hinterland
Among the groups active in the blockades was Permanent Revolution, a Trotskyist organization that emerged from a 2021 split within the New Anticapitalist Party.
Its student wing, Le Poing Levé (the Raised Fist), called for a "black week" of school blockades beginning on Oct. 5. On Oct. 11, the group's spokesman, Anasse Kazib, launched his 2027 presidential campaign in Saint-Denis, an event the organization described as taking place "under the sign of the high school revolt."
"Their weight is significant, because they are probably the ones with the greatest momentum today," Vial said of the radical groups. "LFI is in reality the soft center of this radical galaxy, surrounded by movements with even more extreme positions."
French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez told lawmakers on Oct. 20 that there was indeed a "connecting link" between LFI and certain radical organizations. Without naming him, Nuñez referred to LFI lawmaker Raphaël Arnault, a cofounder of the Young Guard, an antifascist group dissolved by the government in 2025 over its involvement in violence.
Yellow Vests Without the Yellow Vests
The call for nationwide demonstrations on Oct. 17 originated outside the student movement, drawing on the legacy of the Yellow Vest protests of 2018. An anonymous young TikTok creator known as "v2.95" first proposed the date in a video posted Sept. 7, TF1 reported.
Left-wing parties quickly rallied behind the call. On Sept. 11, Communist Party leader Fabien Roussel urged a mobilization on the scale of the 2018 protests. Mathilde Panot, LFI's parliamentary leader, also endorsed the initiative, while the CGT and Solidaires labor unions, along with student unions, subsequently joined the call.
"Not only have the Yellow Vests, or rather what is left of them, been co-opted and swallowed up by the far left, but the Oct. 17 demonstrations were organized and instigated by that same far left from start to finish," Benjamin Cauchy, a prominent figure in the early days of the 2018 Yellow Vest movement, told The Epoch Times.
Cauchy said the French left had initially been hostile to the Yellow Vests, a spontaneous movement made up of entrepreneurs, shop owners, and private-sector employees.
"But after several weeks, seeing that the movement was lasting, the opportunistic far left infiltrated it and then took it over from late December 2018 onward," Cauchy said, noting that this led to demobilization.
"We wanted lower taxes so we could live off our work; the far left was demanding more welfare benefits."
The Islamists and Foreign Amplifiers
Another group involved in online promotion of the protests is the far-left RED Youth.
In 2025, the group was among the founding associations of Generation EDR alongside the USL, the Young Guard, and Muslim Students of France. In May 2025, a French government report on the Muslim Brotherhood named Muslim Students of France as among those part of the federation, which it described as the organization's branch in France.
Among the online posts promoting the protests, one by Franco-Iranian influencer Shahin Hazamy drew millions of views on Instagram.
External actors multiplied during the unrest.
On Oct. 7, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot summoned the Iranian ambassador to France to denounce what he described as a "disinformation campaign" by the Iranian authorities surrounding the student protests.
Al Jazeera France, the French-language arm of the Qatar-funded news network, also endorsed the protests, claiming that French police had used violence against pupils and that high schoolers were being subjected to "repression."
In the United States, BreakThrough News has also celebrated the unrest and told its hundreds of thousands of followers that high schoolers had suffered police violence.
Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, alleged in May that BreakThrough News belongs to a U.S.-based network of nonprofits funded by Neville Roy Singham and linked to the Chinese Communist Party. Smith's committee has been investigating the media outlet over its financial ties to Singham.
BreakThrough News, for its part, has denounced what it calls "persecution," saying the scrutiny is "fueled by opposition to BreakThrough's editorial stances and viewpoints, which he calls 'anti-American'."
The Role of Media and Education
No single organization is behind this autumn's unrest, but many groups have a stake in fueling and sustaining the protests, Vial said.
"The people who want to manipulate and mobilize don't even need to get their feet wet anymore," Vial said. "They just need to fuel tensions on social networks and indicate the targets."
Vial said that many demonstrators have already bought into the idea that far-left violence can be justified.
"For years, a whole political culture originating from the radical left has taken root within universities, the media, and online. This culture is so ingrained now that you don't even need to give them instructions anymore," he said.
On Oct. 6 and Oct. 7, the polling institute Ifop conducted a study for the news outlet LCI and found that 47 percent of people younger than 35 agreed that "it is sometimes necessary to resort to a certain degree of violence in order to advance one's ideas within society." Among supporters of the radical-left LFI party, that number rose to 64 percent.
Ifop also found that 40 percent of the people surveyed who held advanced diplomas accepted the use of violence, compared with 25 percent for people who did not have a diploma.
"For a very long time, we were told that violence was the language of those who did not have the words to express themselves. We are now finding that this is false. The higher the level of education, the greater the acceptance of political violence," Vial said.
In the Ifop poll, acceptance for political violence was flat at 33 percent across respondents with a vocational certificate, a high school diploma, or a bachelor's degree.
"So the question is not whether people are educated, but what they have been educated in," Vial said.