For most of the past fortnight, the big education story in France has been about lycées – the upper secondary schools that take 15 to 18-year-olds through to the baccalauréat, the national school-leaving exam.
But on Thursday protests that began over a handful of unfilled teaching posts moved into universities, and the higher education end of what’s been happening is worth understanding on its own terms.
It all started on 21 September at the Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, south-east of Paris, over missing teachers.
Within days it had become a broader revolt over staff shortages, classes of 32 to 36, school days running from 8am to 6pm, crumbling buildings, and inadequate canteens – spread largely through Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok before being picked up and coordinated by organised pupil and student unions.
The authorities counted 180 affected schools on Monday 28 September and 356 on Wednesday, and by Thursday officials were reporting 900 “actions” across every French department, while the Union Étudiante claimed 640 lycées were blocked.
Thursday was also the day the movement properly reached higher education. The Union Étudiante claimed more than 30 universities were blocked, while the higher education minister put the number at around 40 university sites seeing some form of action.
France doesn’t have students’ unions in the UK sense – there’s no institution-level SU with a block grant and a building. Instead, national student organisations compete in elections for seats on university governing councils and on the boards of the Crous, the regional bodies that run student halls and restaurants, and administer grants.
The Union Étudiante, or UE, founded in 2023, is the newest and most radical of them, and has been a lead organiser alongside the Union syndicale lycéenne, or USL, a pupil union whose president Ryad Rani has argued that formal channels for pupil representation are neglected and ineffective.
UNEF is the historic left-wing student union, and FAGE – a federation of local and subject-based student associations that has topped national student elections in recent years – is generally more moderate, which makes its move this week toward supporting the action more significant than it might look.
The three organisations’ positions overlap without being identical, but the common core is more public funding for universities, more staff, and enough study places, alongside a set of student welfare demands and a long-running objection to selection.
The welfare demands centre on aide personnalisée au logement, or APL, the means-tested housing benefit paid to tenants through the family benefits system that large numbers of students receive – and which the 2027 budget is reported to hold at 2026 levels rather than uprating, a real-terms cut. They also want the €1 meal in Crous university restaurants protected, and action on student poverty, housing, and food.
On selection, the target is Parcoursup – the national online platform, introduced in 2018, through which applicants list their choices for first-year higher education and courses rank them – and its newer postgraduate equivalent, Mon Master, which handles applications to the first year of master’s programmes.
Critics argue both sort young people by social background as much as by ability, and Parcoursup is also a source of acute stress among lycée pupils, which is one reason the school and university grievances have fused so easily.
Since 2019, students from outside the European Economic Area and Switzerland have in principle paid “differentiated” fees for national bachelor’s degrees, known as the licence, and master’s degrees.
In practice universities applied them unevenly, because their boards could set their own exemption criteria, and many used that power to charge most international students the standard rate.
A decree in May, part of the government’s “Choose France for Higher Education” plan, closed that door. For 2026–27 the differentiated fee is €2,902 a year for a licence and €3,950 for a master’s, against €178 and €255 for everyone else.
Universities can now exempt no more than 30 per cent of their international students this year, falling to 25 per cent in 2027–28 and eventually 20 per cent, with those already exempted in 2025–26 protected until the end of their current degree cycle.
The ministry’s line is that even the higher fee covers less than a third of the real cost of a course – by UK standards these are modest sums, but for students from north and west Africa, who make up a large share of France’s international intake, they’re more than 15 times what their French classmates pay.
The 2027 budget – the PLF, or projet de loi de finances, the annual finance bill – was presented on the same day as the biggest mobilisation, with a target of cutting the deficit to 5 per cent of GDP. It included a proposal to charge students who aren’t on the means-tested grant, the bourse sur critères sociaux, €178 a year for a BTS and €270 for a classe préparatoire.
A BTS, or brevet de technicien supérieur, is a two-year vocational higher education qualification, and the “prépas” are intensive two-year courses preparing students for the competitive entrance exams to the grandes écoles – both are typically taught on lycée premises.
On Thursday evening education minister Édouard Geffray withdrew the measure after talks with unions and the prime minister. It’s a real win, but a narrow one – it doesn’t touch APL, university funding, Parcoursup, or international fees.
On Thursday the interior ministry reported 1,949 arrests and 305 injured police and gendarmes, the education minister said 170 pupils and 65 staff had been injured since the movement began, and the IGPN – the police’s internal inspectorate – is investigating three cases of young people injured by police.
Matignon – the prime minister’s office – says intelligence services see the movement as organised by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s radical left party La France insoumise, or LFI, and “ultra-left proxies.”
LFI denies it, and while its elected figures have clearly encouraged and visited blockades, an earlier police note reported by Le Monde described the spread as largely organic, and the government hasn’t published anything to support the claim of central direction.
With a presidential election due in April and May 2027, both sides have obvious reasons to fight over who owns the movement.
More than 400 schools are closing on Friday and switching to remote learning while Geffray meets staff, parent, and pupil bodies. UE and USL have called a national youth demonstration for Tuesday 6 October and are asking other unions to join.
The issue now for higher education is whether university involvement stays largely symbolic – a building blocked here, a general assembly there – or turns into the sort of sustained occupations and strikes French campuses have seen before.
That might all depend on whether the APL freeze and the cap on fee exemptions survive a budget process in which the government has already shown it’ll give ground when the streets fill up.
Friday brings the ministry’s briefing on the detail of the higher education budget, and whatever it shows is unlikely to please a sector already in serious financial trouble.
The number of universities in a formal financial-recovery procedure has risen from nine in 2025 to 14 this year, and France Universités reckons every university set a deficit budget for 2026.
The government’s own funding review projects a sector-wide shortfall of around €2bn by 2030, and the fees rise it proposed to help close the gap have already been disowned by the minister who commissioned it.
Students marching against costs being shifted onto them and universities that can’t balance their books are, in the end, asking the state for much the same thing – and on the current numbers, neither looks likely to get it.