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No Discipline, No Schools: Why France's Riots Start at Home

France's lycée protests began as a complaint that the state was failing its children. They have become proof of how readily some communities let a violent minority burn the very schools they say they want.

C.J. Marsden

— 5 min read
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On 17 September, teachers at the Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, on the south-eastern edge of Paris, went on strike. Posts had gone unfilled and classes were going untaught. The next morning their pupils piled bins across the gate in support.

A month later, more than 700 schools across France have been disrupted and roughly 5,000 people arrested. School gates have been set alight. Shops have been looted. A teenager has lost a hand. Forty headteachers have been injured — by the pupils they are paid to educate.

The movement began as a complaint that the state was failing these children. It has become a demonstration of how thoroughly some of them are failing themselves, and how readily the communities around them let it happen.

A grievance of their own making

The complaints are not invented. Absent teachers in these lycées are often not replaced. Classes of 34 and 35 are common. Some buildings are rundown, overheated in summer and infested with vermin. The question is who drove the teachers out and who wrecked the buildings. No ministry ordered pupils to disrespect their teachers, made the streets unsafe or set fire to the gates.

Their defenders will cite a 2018 cross-party parliamentary report, which found that the worst-funded school in Paris was still better resourced than the best-funded school in Seine-Saint-Denis. Teachers and police there are fewer, younger and quicker to leave. Interior ministry staff averaged 2.7 years in post, against 7.4 years in neighbouring Essonne.

All true, and largely beside the point. Teachers and police do not flee Seine-Saint-Denis because Paris forgot to send them. They leave because of how they are treated when they get there. The underfunding is as much a symptom of the community's disorder as a cause of it. Nor is the shabbiness only the state's neglect. A community that loots its own shops tells you exactly how it treats every shared asset: the bus shelter, the library, the gymnasium, the school. Buildings decay faster where nobody respects them. Neglect may explain a tired building. Disrespect explains a burning one.

They are burning the thing they want

The demand is for more teachers. Yet every burning gate makes the posts harder to fill. No graduate chooses a school where the head was hit and the entrance set alight. Bonuses have been tried in Seine-Saint-Denis for years, and teachers still leave. Money does not buy a teacher's safety.

The demand is for better buildings. Yet every smashed window and charred door comes out of the same maintenance budget. A school that is not vandalised needs far less money to keep in good order.

The demand is for respect from the state. Yet the first thing to go in these protests was respect for the teachers who were standing at the gate. In my own schooldays, classes of 40 and 50 worked, because pupils knew where authority sat and teachers were not afraid of them. The size of the room was never the problem. Order was.

It is barbarism, not protest, to burn your own school in the name of education. Calling it anything else is a polite lie.

Discipline starts at home

The figures for this autumn are not yet in. The last time French suburbs burned, in 2023, the Ministry of Justice counted 1,180 minors brought before the courts. About 60% came from single-parent homes, overwhelmingly headed by mothers. Nationally, a quarter of families with children are single-parent. The rioters were more than twice as likely to have grown up without a father in the house.

That is not a statement about every single mother, most of whom raise children who never touch a petrol bomb. It is a statement about where authority goes missing. A boy with no father at home, a mother working early shifts and a street that answers to nobody has been handed no boundaries at all.

The fathers who walk away and pay nothing bear the heaviest share of the blame. But choices made by adults about whom to trust and how to raise a child are not acts of God. They have consequences, and the school gate is where those consequences arrive.

A community that looks away

The rioters are a minority. Five thousand arrests against hundreds of thousands who marched peacefully. That is precisely the indictment. A minority can only rule a neighbourhood when the majority lets it.

In a village, a teenager setting fire to the school would be known by name before the fire brigade arrived. His parents would hear of it from three neighbours. In parts of Seine-Saint-Denis, the same act is met with silence. People fear reprisal, distrust the police and regard speaking up as betrayal.

The cost of that silence is measurable. Seine-Saint-Denis records around 73 crimes per 1,000 residents, against roughly 48 nationally. In Saint-Denis and Saint-Ouen the figure passes 100. Assaults run at half as much again as the national rate. The département had more open-air drug markets than anywhere in France, 276 at the interior ministry's count, in a trade worth an estimated €600 million a year. Drug killings tripled in 2024. Lycée pupils have been found working as runners for the dealers. A third of residents say they feel unsafe, double the national figure. None of this happens without people who know, and say nothing.

Fear of reprisal is an explanation, not an excuse. Every neighbourhood that has ever reclaimed its streets began with ordinary people deciding they had had enough. A community that will not name its own arsonists cannot then present the bill for the damage to everyone else. Seine-Saint-Denis has a poverty rate of nearly 30% and only about 39% of its households pay income tax. Its schools are paid for largely by people who live elsewhere and keep their own in order. Reciprocity is not a lot to ask: we fund your schools, and you stop your sons burning them.

What ownership looks like

The order matters. The left says invest first and order will follow. Twenty years of urban programmes in the banlieues suggest otherwise.

  1. Consequences first. Those who burn and loot are prosecuted and pay. The government's casseurs-payeurs bill, before the Senate on 27 October, is a start. Parents of persistent offenders should feel it too, including in their family allowances.
  2. Then the community. Parents, imams, priests, sports coaches and shopkeepers say openly that this is not acceptable. They stand at the school gate in the morning instead of watching from the window. They name names.
  3. Then the money. Fund the teachers and the buildings, once there is a reasonable chance they will still be standing next year.

The state can punish. It cannot parent. The second step is the one that decides everything, and only the community can take it. No ministry can raise a child, and no budget can buy a neighbourhood the self-respect it will not find for itself.

The gate is theirs to guard

The pupils of Saint-Exupéry say their school is being let down. They should look closer to home before they look to the next budget. Every fire set in their name makes the teachers they want less likely to come, and the money they want more likely to be wasted.

A community that wants better schools has to guard the ones it has. Until it does, every euro sent from Paris will be spent, sooner or later, on a new gate.

C.J. Marsden writes on political economy, public policy and the institutions that are supposed to serve them.

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