Burning bins and smart slogans at French student protests

Inside France is editor Emma Pearson’s weekly look at some of the news, talking points and gossip in France that you might not have heard about. It’s published each Saturday and members can receive it directly to their inbox, by going to their newsletter preferences or adding their email to the sign-up box in this article.

News from France this week has been dominated by student protests as hundreds of thousands of teenage pupils at lycées took to the streets to demand more resources for education – a movement that started small but quickly engulfed the country and was widely reported abroad as a ‘student revolt’.

In truth, their demands were quite conservative – more teachers, an increase in the maintenance budget, better organisation of the school day – and have been partially successful; the education minister on Thursday announced the deployment of an extra 3,000 teachers to cover classes where the teacher is absent.

It’s worth noting that teachers have been staging strikes about this exact issue for years with no progress – the students’ tactics seem to have been more effective.

But as the protests went on, the issues covered have widened into more general political struggles while more and more placards have referenced police violence against the protesters, including the teens who have lost teeth, eyes and hands at the hands of the police.

Whatever your views on the protesters, there’s no denying that French kids are world-class slogan writers – among the tens of thousands of placards photographed on the protests there have been funny ones, rude ones, cultural references and astute political points.

READ ALSO: Bac to f**k: Understanding French lycées protest signs

It’s also interesting how many see themselves as the heirs of the student protesters of May 1968 (which at least shows that they are learning some history) – one placard references ‘the 6 7 generation re-staging 68’ – referring to the viral TikTok ‘6-7’ trend which obviously I, as an old lady, do not understand.

Talking France

We decided to do a special episode of Talking France on the student protests, speaking to some experts to try and answer questions such as: are French lycées really that bad? How did a protest over teacher numbers get this big? Is this linked to the febrile political atmosphere ahead of the 2027 elections? Listen here.

Perspectives

One thing that always happens when there are big protests in France is that the foreign media descends and does its best to portray the whole country as a flaming war zone – meaning that foreigners living here get a barrage of messages from worried relatives overseas asking if they’re OK and advising them to stay indoors.

I wrote about this disconnect and was pleased to see that it resonated with many readers – it is always odd to be going about your day perfectly normally while loved ones overseas are convinced that the entire country is in flames.

READ ALSO: OPINION: Relax, mum, France isn’t in flames it’s just a bin on fire

Some of this, of course, is the natural tendency of journalists to make everything seem as dramatic as possible, but there are increasingly more sinister explanations, as the French radio station RFI showed with their breakdown of social media posts by influencers based in the UK, US, Russia and Israel – many of the pictures they were sharing were either from different protests or taken in a different country (the ‘rioting’ teens surrounding a car were actually in Times Square in New York).

Will no one think of the bins?

A favourite media trick is to take a photo of a bin on fire and crop it very closely so that it seems like the city is burning – a wide angle will usually show a single bin on fire while in the background people go about their daily business.

Of course it’s not ideal that bins get burned, it’s annoying for residents, expensive for local councils and requires deployment of the fire service to put them out. And this is not unique to student protests – every time social unrest flares in France you can more or less guarantee that a bin will get it. I remember during the 2023 riots the large wheeled bin for my building disappeared one night – trying to figure out how to request a replacement, I went to the website of the local mairie, expecting the process to be very complicated, only to be greeted with a pop-up that basically said ‘has your bin been burned in a riot? Click here’.

But while this is not ideal, it is, at the end of the day, just a bin – it’s not a priceless piece of art, and it’s not a sentient being. Is protecting the bins from being burned really worth the increasingly violent policing that we are seeing of these protests? Which do we value more highly – our children or our bins?

« Tu vas voir qu’ils vont faire une minute de silence pour les poubelles » Mouvement lycéen, Paris, 06/10/26.

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— Wcrt L (@l-wcrdt.bsky.social) 6 October 2026 at 16:22

 

This graffiti sums it up: ‘You’ll see, they will have a minute’s silence for the bins’.

Veggie

And let’s finish with something nice – the viral vegetarian wolf is back! The wolf was the star of last year’s Christmas advert for the supermarket Intermarché, which went unexpectedly viral due to a combination of the lovely hand-drawn animation, the quirky story and a French pop classic.

Its success obviously caught Intermarché by surprise, and they did not have time to create a soft toy of the wolf, despite public demand. So instead, the wolf will be on sale this year.

The wolf did have a brief – and possibly unlicensed – political career after his Christmas hit, appearing in posters for a farming collective, warning that his idyllic vegetarian lifestyle still requires farmers to produce the fruit and veg. 

So far, he hasn’t announced a 2027 presidential election bid, but there’s still time. 

The vegetarian wolf stares sadly at an empty plate while the caption reads ‘And if the wolf didn’t have any more fruit and veg to eat? Help us feed him’. Photo: The Local

Thanks for reading, and bon weekend.

Inside France is editor Emma Pearson’s weekly look at some of the news, talking points and gossip in France that you might not have heard about. It’s published each Saturday and members can receive it directly to their inbox, by going to their newsletter preferences or adding their email to the sign-up box in this article.