French student activist: 'We won't stop protesting until we get what we need'

In the lead up to the mass strikes in France on November 5, Green Left's Sam Wainwright spoke to Mélies Huet, a student activist at the senior high school, Lycée Jean-Jaurès, in Seine-Saint-Denis, a working class suburb to the north of Paris, about the mass student-led protest movement that erupted in September, over the conditions in schools.

Could you introduce yourself and explain how you got involved?

Well, I’m in high school right now, in the final year. We are blockading our school and protesting. I represent my high school during negotiations with the police, [school] administration and people in authority.

I’ve always had a political stance and I needed to show it, so I started protesting and from that, when I was in the eighth grade, I started joining blockades.

We were one of the first high schools to blockade on the first day of the movement, on 23 September.

We had done blockades before … at our school we follow the movement because it’s a left-wing town, we have people who are in left-wing parties and unions … It’s something that has always been present, politics was already everywhere, so we just said that we will follow the movement.

Are the blockades to stop anyone from entering the school, students, teachers and management?

Yes. Teachers have their own [entrance], but in general they stand with us to protect us from violence and the cops, and just to be with us. They do the same as us and come to the protests because they also know that their voices are not being heard.