Frances Grahl continues her series of articles on the inspiring student strikes in France (for the first article on this, click here)

‘On en a marre’ is what French students are chanting now: ‘We’re sick and tired’. The strikes continue but the government has so far ceded in very little. The Pécresse Reforms, hotly contested across France since November 2008, have been delayed for several months, but there’s no evidence that the current standstill will lead to a complete rescindment. It’s more likely that the ministers for Education and Higher Education, Xavier Darcos and Valérie Pécresse, are lying low in the hope that the fuss will die down. However, postponing the 1000-odd job losses until next year and staggering the ‘reforms’ will not be enough for striking students and teachers, who are refusing all calls for negotiation until the proposals are fully withdrawn.

Out of 80-odd universities, at least 40 continue to strike. Pickets have turned to blockades in many of these faculties. The movement has been nationalised by two committees, the National University Coordination and the National Coordination of Students. While the former voted last week in support of blocking faculties, the latter launched a call to students to actively occupy their universities.

In Tours students have acted on this call. Three faculty buildings have been blocked since reading week (end of February) and this week the Faculty of Music erected its own blockades. This increase in radicalism has not gone uncontested by the powers that be at the university- students on pickets on Monday and Tuesday found security guards blocking their own access to the building, and only after scuffles were they able to get the President to remove the guards and allow them back in. An internet vote, organised by the President of the university, Loïc Vaillant, claimed that around 65% of voters wanted the strikers to lift the blockades. However due to a boycott of the poorly worded ballot ‘A minority of students have caused class to be cancelled….’ most students affected by the blockades refused to participate, and attendance in the vote was around 30%. Many voiced their fears that participation would lead to disciplinary repercussions from the faculty. Now, it seems that M. Vaillant has realised he cannot act without the majority support of his staff and students, and it is to be hoped he will soon follow the example of other University Presidents, who do not just tolerate but also actively endorse the struggle.

At the same time police involvement in the strike has heightened to a threatening level. On a peaceful march through the centre of Tours, Thursday 5th March, students brought traffic to a standstill on the two main bridges into the city from North of the Loire. To keep the roads blocked, a fire was lit and students sat down by the exit from the Wilson Bridge. Meanwhile, the much smaller group of students on the Napoleon Bridge found themselves surrounded by police in riot gear, who tried to drag the students off so that traffic could move. The impasse ended with the timely arrival of more student protesters, but since that day police presence around town has much increased and police in riot gear are not an unusual sight around affected campuses. Similar attempts by administration in Marseille and Strasbourg also ended in successful reoccupation of faculties by the movement.

Last weekend was marked by the Place Plumereau riot on Saturday 7th May, a sign that in Tours, as in the rest of France, social discontent is not limited to the Universities. A party in the main square of Tours, organised on Facebook, was invaded by riot police who fired tear gas on partiers and onlookers without warning, leading to a struggle between several hundred citizens and the police that continued for at least five hours. Rubber bullets were fired and 12 people arrested. Facebook is now apparently releasing cache information to the police in order to track down the organisers. Although this is a tiny event compared to weeks of rebellion and near revolution in the French-run territories of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and now La Réunion, it still indicates a strong level of dissatisfaction among young people in the small, bourgeois city of Tours, and local residents have been left shocked out of their comfort zone by the violent reaction of the local police.

Back in the university, strike organisation has never been so strong. New movements such as flash-mob-style public reading (at a given time, everyone takes out a book and reads out loud in a public square) and the Spring-time of Chairs (students ‘liberate’ chairs from their classrooms so class cannot take place) have been inspired by actions across the country. In Tours university three or four alternative lectures are taking place every day, and the General Meetings still have good attendance, at around 800 students each time. Students are concerned about the classes they are missing, but morale and determination remain strong. The latest part of the movement is intervention in primary and secondary schools to spread to word- after all it is for future students that we are fighting. It’s doubtful whether any class will take place before the end of the school year, the 19th of April.

On Saturday, 14th March the University is holding its annual ‘Open Doors Day’, for future students to come and see the faculties, and it is certain that strikers will not miss this opportunity to present their point of view. It is to be hoped that high school pupils and prospective students will join the movement, which currently seems to grow stronger every day.

For the first article in the series, click here