At 7am on the eastern edge of the busy Paris ring road at Montreuil, Jess, a 35-year-old hospital neurologist, had joined protesters attempting to stop traffic in order to show her anger at the French government.
“Inequality is rife in France and this is the only way to be heard,” she said. Pushed back with teargas by riot police, Jess, who asked for her real name not to be published, said she was scared by police tactics but felt it was crucial to be on the streets.
“Public services are failing, the quality of care in hospitals is getting worse,” she said. “Years of cuts to the health sector means doctors suffer, patients suffer. The health service is very visibly the target of austerity cuts that are having an impact on people’s wellbeing. Meanwhile, the rich are getting richer, people are getting poorer and the politicians aren’t listening. No one is even taking account of the way we vote.”
Jess had joined the Block Everything day of action, a loose protest movement with no leader that began on messaging groups over the summer to plan protests against budget cuts and the government. Some trade unions later added their support as well as Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s leftwing party, La France Insoumise. Those on the street on Wednesday came from a variety of backgrounds.
Jess took part in the street demonstrations against Emmanuel Macron’s rise in the pension age in 2023 and supported the “gilets jaunes” (yellow vests) anti-government protest movement in 2018.
“We don’t feel like we’re being listened to by politicians,” said another protester, a 28-year-old high-school philosophy teacher. “There’s a lack of democracy.”
The latest French political crisis this week has only added to the protesters’ fury. Sébastien Lecornu, a close Macron ally who had served as defence minister, was appointed prime minister on Tuesday after the centrist François Bayrou was ousted by parliament after only nine months in office over his unpopular budget.
“Lecornu’s appointment shows complete contempt for voters,” said a 25-year-old doctoral students in social sciences. In Montreuil, banners read “Macron give the money back” and featured jokes about barricades being “Bayroucades”.
After Macron called an inconclusive snap election last year, parliament remains divided between the left, the far right and the centre, with no absolute majority. Many voters on the left and far right felt their calls for change had been ignored and that by appointing Lecornu, Macron was sticking firmly to his pro-business economic policy.
Eighty-thousand police and gendarmes were mobilised across France on Wednesday as protesters attempted to block roads, built barricades or gathered in town centres. By mid-afternoon there had been more than 300 arrests, with more than 180 in Paris. At Paris’s Gare du Nord, riot police stopped hundreds of protesters from entering the building and fired teargas in nearby streets. In Lyon, protesters blocked a road running through the city and set bins on fire. In the western city of Nantes and in the southern city of Marseille police used teargas to disperse protesters. South of Limoges, tractors blocked a key road. Across France about 150 high schools were barricaded.
Outside the Lycée Hélène-Boucher in the east of Paris, smoke was rising from smouldering bins on a pedestrian crossing after they had been used to create a flaming roadblock. The high school entrance was blocked by dozens of bins and police had used teargas on crowds in the street outside.
“It’s my first barricade,” said Claire, a first-year high school student, who did not want her real name to be published. She had woken at 6.30am to gather bins from surrounding streets to blockade the entrance to the school. All lessons had been cancelled. “I’m doing this to protest against inequality – there is a growing divide between the very rich and the poor,” she said. Her parents, who were high-school history teachers, supported her and had taken her on gilets jaunes protests in 2018.
A cardboard sign on the barricade read: “First step: burn the bins, second step: burn Matignon [the prime minister’s official residence].”
One high school student who had been teargassed said: “I’m here because amid this political crisis no one is mentioning what really matters to me: the climate crisis. There is no long-term policy about the planet.”
Marie, 35, a university teacher from Nice, who did not want her real name published, had been among protesters on the Paris ring road. She said: “There is a buildup of frustration in France. I demonstrated against Macron’s rise in the pension age in 2023 and nobody has been listening at the top. This is not the kind of world I want to live in, where the poor are getting poorer. People are angry and determined to make themselves heard.”
Another teacher from southern France, who had joined the gilets jaunes protests in Paris in 2018, said: “Under Macron, tax cuts for businesses and the very wealthy have simply handed money to the president’s bourgeois friends, while the rest of us can’t make ends meet. It feels as if our lives are being stolen from us. Things have to change.”
