Protests in France | "This is a revolt against the existing order"

Musicians from the “Orchestre du Nouveau Monde” (Orchestra of the New World) performed on the Place de la République on November 7, 2026, ahead of a demonstration in Paris. Photo: AFP/Sébastien Bozon Your new book "Survivances de la révolte" (Survivance of the Revolt, La Découverte) is published as France rises. What do you see emerging from this revolt?

I am pleasantly surprised to see a resonance between the themes I have covered in my book and current events, which are marked by a revolt that is particularly impressive, even spectacular, in France. But it is a global phenomenon. On October 17, the forms of action in several Italian cities were very similar to those in France.

I think we are experiencing the symptoms of a revolt in which the younger generations play a particularly important role. Beyond the immediate demands, it is a revolt against the existing order, against the imposed social and political system, which young people perceive as a veritable iron cage, a straitjacket, a punishment.

In May 1968 there was a generation that did not accept the future offered to them. Today, young people are revolting against a system that offers them no future at all - or rather a future that, for the overwhelming majority, will be worse than that of their parents: a future of social uncertainty, but also characterized by ecocide and threats to the basic living conditions of humanity on this planet. The younger generations are much more aware of this than my generation. So you have every reason to rebel.

How do teacher shortages and overcrowded classes lead to such profound political protest?

This movement did not arise - like other movements in the past - against reform. It emerged from study and living conditions that had become intolerable. The feeling of injustice has become unbearable. As a historian, I can see that revolts are always predictable in hindsight. But no one could have imagined that young people would take to the streets in Paris, Marseille, Lyon or Milan on the same day - and find very similar forms of expression.

The political dimension of this revolt is undeniable. One analogy to the Paris Commune particularly strikes me: the anti-Communard discourse is very similar to that which is spreading today. He refuses to ask about the social and political causes of the revolt and contents himself with criminalizing it, sometimes by racializing it. In France as in Italy, the revolt is in a certain way ethnicized or biologized. This was already the case in the anti-Communard discourse: Paris was portrayed as being in the hands of “savages” and “barbarians,” and civilization was threatened.

We then experienced extreme police violence, with young teenagers having their eyes shot out and being mutilated. But the dominant discourse focuses on property. But I think that these young people know that there is much more violence in a multinational corporation than in the act of a young person throwing a stone at a shop window.

A generation emerges, it is formed around a founding event. October 17th politicized a generation. But one thing is certain: these young people do not want a system that is also an anthropological model based on competition and individualism. She rejects the idea of ​​a future that shrinks to a privatized utopia and in which the future should only be thought of as individual success and professional career. It is a revolt against a civilization and against a system of values ​​that seemed to have established itself as an unchanging way of life.

At the demonstrations I saw this slogan: “We want to break out of the present.” It is a protest against “presentism,” that regime of historical consciousness that is trapped in the present and has no horizon of expectations. The demonstrators want to break open this iron cage. I think a slogan like this expresses an awareness of history. For twenty years, social movements, sometimes powerful ones, have been unable to imagine a future. I'm not saying this problem is solved. We don't know where we're going yet; We are in the midst of an ongoing crisis. But perhaps an alternative is emerging.

Are we seeing a convergence of struggles beyond the generation you describe?

This is a demand that emerges from this revolt. The young people who are taking to the streets and blocking high schools and universities know that they cannot win unless their movement goes beyond their own borders. So the struggles have to connect. This has begun.

Historian Patrick Boucheron describes a "pre-authoritarian" phase instead of a "pre-revolutionary" phase in the French daily newspaper "Libération". What do you think of it?

I would say that the dialectic of history is characterized by precisely this uncertainty. Why not a pre-revolutionary situation? The prerequisites are there. I am not calling the current crisis pre-revolutionary; it's still too early for that. But if this movement disintegrates and exhausts itself, if the convergence of struggles finds neither political expression nor forms of resistance to the brutal repression that is being carried out today, then an authoritarian turn is among the possible outcomes. Everything is already prepared. I would even say that the violence of this power is inversely proportional to its level of legitimacy.

There is no conspiracy or hidden force planning the events. Revolts break out spontaneously. The memory that I examine in my book is a subterranean memory, a memory that I call "Marranian." The memory of revolts and emancipatory movements is an alternative to what Pierre Nora has called “places of memory”: they are institutionalized and sacralized by politics of memory, which are power politics.

The memories of the revolt are invisible. They are passed on like underground rivers and suddenly reappear in the form of an explosion. To understand these movements, one must pay attention to what is happening beneath the surface.

Since October 7, 2023, the memory of the Shoah, which had been an instrument in the fight against racism and discrimination for decades, has been dialectically turned into its opposite. It was mobilized to legitimize genocide. What is happening now is a movement to reverse this entire device that has become a lie.

The French daily newspaper “L’Humanité” was founded in 1904 by the socialist Jean Jaurès. Originally intended as a mouthpiece for the socialist movement, it has consistently represented left-wing and socialist positions ever since. She advocates for social justice, workers' rights and global peace.

The newspaper is the former central organ of the French Communist Party (PCF). In 1999 the explicit reference to the party was dropped. Since 2004, 40 percent of the newspaper has belonged to the PCF, friends and employees each hold ten percent, the Society of Friends holds 20 percent and large companies such as savings banks, the broadcaster TF1 and the arms company Lagardère hold the rest. Today, around 60 editors work at “L’Humanité”; the newspaper has around 40,000 subscribers. The press festival, the Fête de L’Humanité, which was held for the first time in 1930, is still an important event in social life in France today.

Isn't secularism also being turned against Muslims?

Yes. In the extreme right, which I call “post-fascist,” there has been a transition from anti-Semitism – one of the cornerstones of nationalist and fascist cultures in the first half of the 20th century – to Islamophobia. Today it is the unifying element of all the extreme right.

This explains these movements' ties to Israel and their support for the genocide in Gaza. This does not mean that anti-Semitism has disappeared as a prejudice, nor that the extreme right does not continue to be one of its centers. But the ideological axis of this extreme right today is Islamophobia - linked to the transformation of secularism, a principle that must be defended, into a weapon against a minority, the Muslim minority.

What political solution is there for these revolts now that the revolutionary horizon has disappeared with the failure of the communist countries?

I think we're still looking for it. In the 20th century the left had models: a social democratic model and a communist model. It offered an alternative, and in the collective consciousness capitalism was not seen as without an alternative. This horizon closed in 1989 – an event that I personally experienced as liberating.

But we quickly realized that it also marked the end of a historical period: the end of the revolutions of the 20th century. Since then, the left has been unable to invent new models. Communism has left the stage of history as a revolutionary perspective.

The movements that emerged afterwards were movements without memory. They criticized the existing order, but could no longer fit into a continuity. I often give the example of the communists who were deported to the Nazi camps and executed there. As they died, they knew that their sacrifice was not in vain because they belonged to a movement that could continue their fight.

This historical awareness of belonging to a movement that is moving into the future contained many illusions, but had an extraordinary power: “The future belongs to us. I may die, others will continue my fight." The loss of that point of reference was devastating.

I believe there is a significant gap between the richness of contemporary critical thought and the inability to build a political alternative. But this theoretical elaboration was not yet able to support a political movement that would create an alternative in the eyes of the subaltern classes, the working classes. How is that supposed to work? I don't know it. Intellectuals can formulate projects, but they must emerge from the social movements themselves. You can't work them out at your desk.

So does the failure of historical communism make it more difficult to invent a new ideal?

The obstacle is enormous. We live in a situation comparable to the world at the beginning of the First World War, when Rosa Luxemburg issued the slogan “socialism or barbarism”. But there is a big difference. In the 21st century we must note that socialism has come to power, that there have been initial attempts at implementation and that in several cases it has become one of the dimensions of barbarism itself. We can't ignore that.

This means there can be no turning back. There is no model to recreate. One cannot say that the solution is to return to the social democracy of the 1950s and 1960s or to the communism of the 1920s. So we have to invent something else.

There were attempts in Latin America, in Greece with Syriza and in Spain with Podemos. They failed. A socialist movement is on the rise in the United States. But I cannot say today what shape a new model will take.

Can remembering past revolutions help us invent something different?

As enormous social anger grips France and other European countries, Paris-based Italian historian Enzo Traverso asks what is fueling the revolts and how they relate to the struggles of the past. With his latest book “Survivances de la révolte” (Survivance of the Revolt, La Découverte) he completes a trilogy that began with “Mélancolie de gauche” (Melancholy of the Left, 2016) and continued with “Révolution” (Revolution, 2022). He talks about the role of youth, the underground memories of the fighting and the difficulty of creating a political alternative.

I think that without an awareness of history, no future can be built. It's a truism to say that, but I believe it. The memory of anti-fascism, for example, is indispensable for preserving and changing democracies. Especially since the new fascisms claim to defend democracy and want to assert themselves within the institutions in order to change them from within and rob them of their essence.

At the demonstrations I saw posters that commemorated the Paris Commune and the massacre of the Algerians in Paris on October 17, 1961. One should not try to artificially infuse a memory into movements as if they were without one. You already have a memory, which is sometimes inscribed in the unconscious and in the collective imagination. Maybe it needs to be given visibility and a form.

In my book, I cite the example of the iconoclastic wave in the United States that saw the toppling of statues celebrating slavery or colonialism. This movement was branded barbaric. Its actors were portrayed as ignorant people who wanted to destroy history. These movements were an extraordinary moment in which societies reappropriated the past.

Together with Walter Benjamin, I am convinced that one can speak of a reactivation of the past. Of course, what happened cannot be changed, but the past is not a cold, archived, exhausted continent radically separated from the present. In certain historical circumstances, changing the present also means making amends for the past. Benjamin even used a theological term: the “redemption of the past.” It's about bringing justice to the vanquished of the past and redeeming them.

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