The stone-paved streets of Paris are no strangers to history. For centuries, not only people but also ideas, anger and hopes have moved along both banks of the Seine. The stones of the Bastille are no longer there, yet its shadow has never disappeared from France’s political memory. Squares that once looked upon the splendour of monarchy later witnessed the voices of revolutionaries, workers’ strikes, students’ slogans and the smoke of barricades.

In France, the street has never been merely a street. At times, when parliament fell silent, the squares spoke; when the doors of politics seemed closed, people filled the roads. The revolutionary crowds of 1789, the uprisings of 1848, the youth of 1968 and, half a century later, the Yellow Vests who coloured the roads yellow all represented different Frances in different periods. Their stories were not the same, but each marked a moment when the distance between society and political power became visible.

Is a new page now being opened in that long history?

The renewed voices of protest in French cities deserve to be read as more than a budget dispute or a temporary reaction to government policy. The student movement that began in September 2026 around teacher shortages, inadequate educational resources and poor physical conditions in schools soon intersected with wider concerns about the quality of public services, social inequality, young people’s anxiety about the future and political representation. The cost of living, pressure on public finances and political fragmentation form the broader background. It is therefore important to distinguish the movement’s initial demands from the different meanings subsequently attached to it.

Of course, today’s France is not the France of 1789. The Bastille is gone; monarchy has given way to the Republic. Citizens can make their voices heard through elections, parliament and constitutional institutions. Modern France also possesses strong social-security mechanisms and institutional “pressure-release valves” that the Ancien Régime did not have. It would therefore be historically misleading to interpret current developments as the harbinger of a new French Revolution.

Yet some of history’s questions do not disappear with time: How is trust between the state and society to be preserved? On whose shoulders do economic burdens fall? When people begin to worry not about today but about tomorrow, where does the responsibility of politics begin?

France Seen from Marseille

France cannot be fully understood from Paris alone. Perhaps nowhere taught me this more clearly than Marseille.

In 2011–2012, I served for nearly two years at the Turkish Consulate General in Marseille. During those years, I had the opportunity to know France not only through diplomatic meetings, official contacts and protocol, but also through everyday life.

Marseille is somewhat different from the rest of France.

With its harbour opening onto the blue Mediterranean, neighbourhoods leaning toward the coves, fishing boats, narrow streets and roads descending from the hills to the sea, the city has a rhythm of its own. In the mornings, the scent of salt from the sea mingles with coffee and fresh bread and with the movement of the port. Sometimes a soft Mediterranean breeze settles over the city; at other times the Mistral suddenly strips away that softness and sharpens the air.

The voice of North Africa can also be heard in Marseille’s streets. The cultural traces of people from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia create an urban fabric that connects the two shores of the Mediterranean rather than simply separating them. Arabic, French and different Mediterranean accents mingle together. Neighbourhoods, markets, the port area and public squares reveal France’s multilayered social structure more openly than the formal image of Paris.

Perhaps this is why the spirit of the street is easier to understand in Marseille.

Even then, the streets of France were not entirely quiet. I had the opportunity to observe farmers demonstrating with their tractors, workers gathering in squares at the call of trade unions, and occasional waves of social protest.

Yet it would be wrong to draw a direct line of continuity between the protests I saw in those years and the broader unrest visible in France today.

Still, looking back, one thing I observed in the streets of Marseille remains important for understanding the present: in France, the street is not a space outside politics; it is a place where politics periodically makes itself felt again.

The Yellow Vest movement that emerged in later years demonstrated this far more powerfully on a national scale. What began as opposition to fuel taxes and the cost of living quickly broadened into questions of purchasing power, regional inequality, the relationship between the state and the citizen, and political representation.

Like Marseille’s harbour, French social life is a sea in which different currents meet. Sometimes those currents merge calmly; sometimes they collide and create rough waves on the surface.

To understand what is happening today, we must also look at those waves.

A Death Reopens an Old File

It would also be incomplete to interpret France’s social tensions solely through economics.

Especially in the banlieues, social, economic and identity-related problems accumulated over many years periodically rise to the surface in harsher forms. The protests that spread through many French cities after 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk was killed by police in 2023 were a striking example.

The incident quickly became more than a reaction to a single police intervention. It triggered a wider debate about policing practices, discrimination, social exclusion, the future of young people, and the relationship of trust between the banlieues and the state.

France had experienced such eruptions before. In 2005, the unrest that followed the deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré brought the problem of trust, particularly between young people and the state, onto the national agenda.

Sometimes a tragedy reopens a file that society has kept closed for years.

The issue here is not simply ethnicity or immigration. The deeper problem is that some neighbourhoods feel distant from the centre of the country not only geographically, but politically and socially as well.

When parts of a society begin to see themselves as........

© Stratejik Düşünce Enstitüsü