France Reports 320,000 Participants in Third Weekend of Youth-Led Protests

France has not been asked, these past three weekends, to consider a new idea. It has been asked to applaud an old reflex in younger clothes.

The Interior Ministry counted about 320,000 demonstrators on Saturday, some 70,000 of them in Paris. They want more money for education and more money for social programs. They are angry about prices, about the police, about the general experience of being young in a country that lectures them on solidarity and then hands them a crowded lecture hall, a short-term contract and a rent that eats the salary. Those grievances are not imaginary. The conclusion the street has drawn from them is.

France already runs one of the largest public sectors in the democratic world. Public spending consumes more than half of national income. The tax take is among the heaviest in the OECD. If the French school and the French safety net were starving, that would be news. They are not starving. They are expensive, rigid, and — judged by results that do not match the bill, and by a labor market that still locks outsiders out of stable work — not good enough. A politics that answers every disappointment with a supplementary budget is not a youth movement. It is the establishment, chanting.

Look at who showed up to bless it. Unions and the professional opponents of Emmanuel Macron did not discover the cost of living last month. They joined a "youth-led" mobilization because the French left has always needed a generational face for a syndicalist program. The banner says students. The demand says 1981, or 1995, or 2006: the street as a second legislature, the blockade as an argument, the taxpayer as the only adult required to be reasonable.

That is the part the romantic coverage slides past. Student organizers have already promised more blockades of universities and lycées. A blockade is not a seminar and it is not a civil liberty. It is the organized theft of other people's class time, usually by the most politicized minority on campus, imposed on the many who would like to finish a degree and get on with earning a living. You cannot shut the school in the name of the school. The republic should say so without apology, and then keep the doors open.

Nor is the police story the one the slogans suggest. By mid-afternoon the authorities reported 27 arrests on a national day that drew a third of a million people. Tear gas in Lyon, water cannons against an unauthorized gathering in Toulouse, clashes in Marseille: unpleasant, and in a country with a real history of policing failures, never above scrutiny. But a state that deploys 70,000 officers and gendarmes because it expects a demonstration to curdle into a riot is not revealing a taste for tyranny. It is revealing what French protest culture has taught the state to expect. Order is not a reactionary fetish. It is the condition under which everyone who is not in the cortège — the nurse on the shift, the shopkeeper, the student who is not a militant — gets to have a Saturday.

The cost of living is the serious issue hiding inside the unserious program. Prices are high. Housing in the cities that produce the jobs is scarce and slow to build, strangled by rules, appeals and a political class terrified of cranes. Energy became expensive in a Europe that spent years treating reliable power as a moral embarrassment and then acted surprised when the bill arrived. Work is heavily taxed before a young employee ever sees it. In some neighborhoods, rapid immigration has added pressure to the very schools, clinics and housing the marchers say are failing — a fact the cortège has no vocabulary for, and that much of the respectable left treats as unmentionable. You can subsidize households forever and still lose if you will not build, produce and prefer wages to charges.

Here the right should refuse its own lazy speech. Scolding students for ingratitude is not a program. They are not mourning a golden age they missed. They are inheriting a protected labor market for insiders, a pension promise written before they were born, and a debt stock that will be presented to them as solidarity. The intergenerational swindle is real. It will not be repaired by enlarging it. It will be repaired by housing that can actually be built, by schools with standards and adult authority, by a shift of taxation off the first wages of the young, and by a welfare state that stops confusing spending with justice.

Macron will be tempted to split the difference, because splitting the difference is what this presidency has often meant: a speech about transformation, then a managed retreat when the boulevard fills. He is not the author of France's protest ritual, but he has governed inside it, and a government that meets every social demand by pre-positioning riot police has already conceded that argument has been replaced by choreography.

Three weekends, 320,000 people, the same prescription. France's young do not need another allocation and another cloud of tear gas. They need a country that is allowed to grow, to build, to teach and to keep the peace — and a political class, on the street and in the Élysée, that stops mistaking its oldest habit for their future.