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France Is Burning Its Furniture To Stay Warm

I've been watching France for weeks. Just clips on my phone, mostly. Kids in front of gates. Police. Signs written in marker that bleeds in the rain. And I can't get rid of this feeling that I'm watching a country eat itself.

Not in the sexy revolution way. Not 1789 with the barricades, even though one kid did have a sign that said "2026 is the new 1789." Slower than that. Sadder. Like when a family starts selling the nice stuff just to keep the lights on. Except here the nice stuff is schools. And the bill is debt that no politician wants to say out loud.

It started with the kids. It always does.

Mid-September. One lycée outside Paris. By early October, hundreds. They're not asking for much. More teachers. Buildings that don't leak. Toilets that actually work.

One 16-year-old told AFP — I screenshot it — "no toilets, no toilet paper, everything is broken." He said they sit 36 in a room from 8am to 6pm with one hour break.

36 kids. In one room. No toilet paper.

In France.

Not somewhere we're told to feel sorry for. France. The place that invented public school. Descartes. Rousseau. Liberté, egalité, all that. And outside a school in Paris a kid holds up a sign that says: "You say young people are the future. So listen to them."

And the state listened by bringing tear gas.

That's what gets me. Not just that they dismissed them. That they brought water cannons. To a high school blockade.

In Lens, a 15-year-old lost his hand. A stun grenade. Fifteen. Lost his hand protesting his own school. The Interior Minister then said they would suspend stun grenades — but only "for the high-school movement." Read that again. As if there's a normal setting where it's fine to blow a kid's hand off, and a special setting where maybe we shouldn't.

6,100 arrests. Mostly minors. 6,100 kids arrested for blocking the door to their own classrooms.

You treat your kids like a threat long enough, don't be shocked when they start acting like one.

And now it's not just kids. Parents are there. University kids are there. The CGT called for more. What started as "fix the bathrooms" turned into "nothing works anymore."

Because nothing does.

The government has cut growth forecasts three times this year. 1% -> 0.9% -> 0.7% -> 0.5%. INSEE, their own stats agency, says nah, 0.4% and put the whole economy on "orange alert." The 5% deficit target? Gone. French bonds vs German bonds — worst spread since 2012.

Unemployment crawling to 8.6%. Debt heading to basically double what the EU says is allowed. They spent FOUR MONTHS just trying to pass a budget. The prime minister had to use 49.3 — that constitutional cheat code that lets you pass a law without a vote — three times. Three. The two guys before him got kicked out in just over a year for trying to cut costs.

So yeah. The government can't pass a budget without forcing it. The economy is flatlining. The debt is everywhere. And the schools are falling apart.

The kids are protesting the symptom. The disease is older.

For decades France promised a certain deal. Good pensions. Health care that actually works. Good schools. A net that catches you. And it paid for it on credit. Now the credit card bill is here. And the only ideas on the table are cutting the exact things that made people proud to be French in the first place.

The students know. They might not say "austerity." They just see the ceiling tiles falling in while money is found for other things. They see teachers crying in the hallway and then quitting. They see the gap between the France in the textbooks and the France with no toilet paper.

I don't blame them for being furious. I'd be furious too.

But I also have no answer. You can't tax your way out of this without killing what's left of growth. You can't cut your way out without gutting the stuff people actually need to live. You can't borrow your way out because the markets are already giving you that look. France is stuck between what it promised and what it can add up. And the bill is landing on the kids.

And then the spin. God, the spin. Prime minister says France Insoumise is "sowing chaos" before next year's election. Classic. Kids are angry about something real, so blame the left. Never mind this started at one school, with no party, no banner, just kids who were told school is the way out and now watch that way crumble.

One sign keeps coming back to me. Handwritten, all caps: SCHOOLS WITH NO MONEY, COUNTRY WITH NO FUTURE.

That's not a chant. That's a diagnosis. You can't keep a country running if you can't keep its schools running. That's the canary. And the canary is dead.

Macron has seven months left. Last term. Can't run again. His PM is a placeholder everyone knows is a placeholder. The Assembly split into three chunks that hate each other. Far-right climbing in the polls. Left ready to burn it all down. And the kids who have to live in whatever comes next are in the street getting gassed for asking for soap in the bathroom.

Fifth Republic was born in crisis. It's survived a lot. But this feels different. The old tricks don't work. The 49.3, the reshuffle, the big speech about reform. None of it lands. Debt is too big. Trust is too thin. Kids are too angry.

I don't know if this is a beginning or just another slide down.

I just know this: when a 15-year-old loses his hand to a police grenade for protesting that his school has no toilets, something has gone deeply, deeply wrong.

And no article of the constitution is going to fix that.

The house is on fire. The kids are screaming that it's on fire.

And we're still standing in the kitchen arguing about whether we smell smoke.

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