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The story
The protest movement started by high schoolers in the suburbs of Paris in September called for fixing teacher shortages and crumbling school buildings, but citizens struggling with rising prices joined in, and in some areas the demonstrations turned into riots nationwide, with arson and looting breaking out. Reacting to a Tokyo Shimbun report, 5ch saw envious voices saying “We wish Japan could pull off protests on this scale too” clash with skeptics arguing “There’s no way high schoolers alone could cause a riot this big.” Related reports noting the arrest of a far-left activist for damaging a city hall were also cited, and many commenters drew a line between the genuine protest over education issues and the opportunistic violence that piggybacked on it.
Paris in Flames: Why Has It Gone This Far? The Education and Poverty the High Schoolers Who Started the Protest Are Fighting For, and the Divide With Adults Who “Won’t Listen”: Tokyo Shimbun Digital
October 21, 2026, 5:00 AM — Subscriber-only article
It started in September with a protest by high schoolers at a school in the Paris suburbs, demanding fixes to teacher shortages and aging school buildings. The protest then spread across the country as citizens struggling with rising prices and other hardships joined in. Part of it turned into rioting, with arson and looting breaking out. So what’s really behind it? (By Rieko Ota, Nao Sakata)
Source: tokyo-np.co.jp / Read the original article here
What people said
We did that 60 years ago
Like burning down houses? With this many densely packed, wooden buildings around, the fires would spread in no time
That's exactly why the article tells you to separate this from the riots. At least read the source, man
And now, riots
Guess Elon Musk was right after all to slash government jobs like crazy
South Korea and Greece went through brutal cuts under the IMF and bounced back V-shaped within a few years. Socialist Japan, meanwhile, has been dragging it out for 30 years like a frog slowly boiling
s://i.imgur.com/NFtgkiA.jpeg
Those immigrant guys are dressed pretty sharp. That leather jacket alone probably runs about ¥200,000 (~$1,300). Kind of mafia-looking.
Guess it's never good when a place has a history of uprisings AND those uprisings get romanticized as "cool" (´・ω・`)
The Fuji TV protest was pretty moving too, wasn't it!
In France, school is basically free from kindergarten (starting at age 3) all the way through high school, plus tuition at public universities. They just let in too many refugees and immigrants and drained the budget.
And it's always been true that elections never change anything
If this outcome is actually what the students wanted, I have zero sympathy
> The system changed so that universities now screen applicants more strictly, leaving a certain number of people unable to advance to higher education
I always thought France was an ultra credential-obsessed society, epitomized by the grandes écoles — guess that's not really true anymore?
Universities and the grandes écoles are totally different things.
There's a separate elite-education track outside the regular university system — if you want to join the elite like Macron, you have to graduate from one of those
In a way, that's basically the Third Reich
Here's what's actually in it:
It's a student protest
i.imgur.com/0ike4yQ.jpeg
i.imgur.com/dH82Qsr.jpeg
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As if a high schooler like you exists
That narrative line isn't going to budge
The ones who torched the city hall were a far-left violent group anyway
Was it also a far-left violent group that trashed the high school building and dumped garbage all over it? lol
Are high schoolers really the ones attacking, torching, and looting as many as 1,500 stores?
Wasn't it the students themselves who trashed the school? No info on it either way, so who knows. In Japan students clean their own school, but I doubt that's a thing over there
Professional adult leftist groups are definitely stirring things up, and immigrants along with second- and third-generation immigrants are the ones doing all the destroying and looting
Yep, that's right
"Large-Scale Protests in France: Far-Left Activist Arrested on Suspicion of Damaging Limoges City Hall" [Shōkō-san★]
https://asahi.5ch.io/test/read.cgi/newsplus/1792545142/
Apparently the international far-left group Antifa is the mastermind behind it
This was the youth of today's Japanese grandpas and grandmas in their 70s
That generation really is the worst, isn't it
Background and Key Points of This Debate
What the article describes is a protest by high schoolers over teacher shortages and crumbling school buildings that grew as citizens struggling with rising prices joined in, with part of it turning into rioting involving arson and looting. In the thread, opinion split over whether the people actually driving the protest were really high schoolers, or adults and political groups piggybacking on it. A separate report noting the arrest of a far-left activist on suspicion of damaging a city hall was also brought up, and the point that the violence and the original protest over “education and poverty” are two different things came up repeatedly. Meanwhile, some speculated about a link between France’s free education system and the fiscal burden of accepting immigrants and refugees, though the article itself provides no concrete financial data to back that up. A few posts also touched on the mechanics of France’s credential-based society, such as the grandes écoles, suggesting there’s an institutional backdrop here that can’t simply be reduced to “a student protest.”
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “Paris in Flames: Why Has It Gone This Far? The Education and Poverty the High Schoolers Who Started the Protest Are Fighting For, and the Divide With Adults Who ‘Won’t Listen’.”
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