This year, French pupils and university students have been demonstrating over missing teachers, crowded classrooms and access to further study. Some want greater investment; others want the end of the admissions system altogether. There is anger and a painful familiarity in all. In 1986, Alain Devaquet, a minister in Jacques Chirac’s government, advanced a university reform that raised fears of greater selection and higher fees. University students and school pupils filled the streets. As the movement spread, protesters faced violent policing. During the night of 5–6 December, Malik Oussekine, a 22-year-old student, died after being beaten by police officers. The grief and anger that followed helped make his death inseparable from the history of the revolt. On 8 December, Chirac withdrew the bill.
After this year’s protests, the government promised a replacement for the University exam (Parcoursup) in 2028, 15,000 additional higher-education places and limits on some class sizes. Student organisations said that this did not go far enough, arguing that on their own these measures do not settle the older question of how social class shapes educational possibility. These questions were also live in 1986, when some of the sharpest answers came from young people whom the education system had already marginalised through the vocational school system.
In 1986, in a vocational school in Paris’s tenth arrondissement, a group calling itself Les Lascars du LEP had been asking these larger and much less comfortable questions. LEP stood for ‘lycée d’enseignement professionnel’, a school preparing pupils for vocational qualifications; ‘les Lascars’, ‘the rascals’. These young people joined the demonstrations but refused to pretend that their grievances were identical to those of university students. In a series of four remarkable leaflets, distributed during the protests, they took the argument beyond one proposed law. Their texts addressed university students, workers and teachers in turn.
Their first leaflet revolved around a rebuke. University students feared a new barrier to higher education; for the vocational pupils, that barrier was already in place. ‘Selection has already done its work’, they wrote. Their qualifications seemed to point towards factory work, perhaps after a spell of unemployment. They did not accept the familiar consolation that somebody had to do those jobs, nor were they content to demand admission to a system in which other people would still be confined to its lowest ranks.
The distinction was political. The university students were trying to stop their opportunities from shrinking while vocational pupils questioned why their opportunities had been so narrow to begin with. Their leaflet identified the difference with brutal clarity: ‘ÉTUDIANTS c’est vous qui êtes appelés à gérer cette société et nous à la produire’ (‘STUDENTS, it is you who are destined to manage this society, and we who are destined to produce it’). That difference indicated that some were being prepared to manage society; others, to produce what it consumed. The students’ struggle could not be universal, they argued, unless it confronted this social class division.
In a second leaflet, addressed to workers, the pupils looked beyond the school gates. Teachers spoke warmly of the world of business and arranged visits to workplaces. The pupils had another source of information as they saw the faces of workers coming home exhausted. They asked factory workers, ‘Is the pay good? Are the machines quiet?’ – questioning why their education should prepare them for a life their parents struggled to endure.
They also rejected the belief that politics was meaningful only when it produced a neat list of demands. Their protest had already changed something. Young people who had once remained silent had found one another, argued, laughed and begun to see their troubles as collectively shared. The revolt had transformed private disappointment into a public accusation.
The third leaflet examined how educational sorting functioned. The pupils recalled being directed into short courses by people who had persuaded them that they were incapable of anything else. Their teachers had said that good behaviour and hard work might secure a modest place in the labour market. The pupils reversed the explanation: perhaps it was their expected work that had already determined their education. This was at the centre of their argument: a future was being assigned to them before they had entered adult life.
They were not romanticising academic education. Indeed, they were sceptical that university graduates would enjoy much freedom themselves. Yet they refused the idea that educational sorting could measure a person’s worth. Their anger was directed at expectations that fixed which jobs they should take, which social positions they should occupy, and which ambitions lay beyond their reach.
They also presented a nuanced scrutiny of their teachers. In a fourth leaflet, the pupils acknowledged that many teachers had tried to help them. But kindness could not undo an institution organised around unequal outcomes. They condemned the assumption that the acceptance of inequality was inevitable. Their protest challenged teachers to speak to them as equals, not as damaged pupils awaiting rescue.
This was not simply youthful fury. Their revolt demonstrated how education can reproduce class power without anyone openly naming social class as its purpose. A pupil is ‘guided’ towards a course when a qualification is presented as ‘realistic’. A poorly paid job becomes a sensible ambition. Each decision seems to be practical, but the entire system draws the boundaries of a future life.
The history of 1986 is understandably remembered through mass demonstrations, the retreat of a government and the killing of Oussekine. Those events deserve their place in public memory. Yet this familiar frame can obscure the pupils whose complaint went beyond the bill the government eventually abandoned. The Cité des mémoires étudiantes preserves union papers, student newspapers, leaflets and testimony that reveal the movement’s many voices. The LEP pupils’ words have also survived, through a documentary and a reissued collection of their leaflets. They are not unknown and they remain too easily peripheral to the story we tell.
The protests of 2026 are not a replay of those of 1986. Parcoursup is not the Devaquet proposal. Today’s schools and universities operate in a different economy and under different rules. Moreover, the current movement’s demands include practical improvements to buildings, staffing and student support, alongside challenges to selection. To force both generations into one script would make each less intelligible, but the comparison exposes a persistent fault line. A government can promise more places and a clearer application process while leaving the unequal starting points of applicants largely intact. The 2026 proposals include places in vocational and technological pathways: an important recognition of students outside the most prestigious routes. Whether they open up real choices will depend on what pupils can do with those places, and on the opportunities available beyond them.
The Lascars du LEP understood what governments and universities still avoid admitting. Selection signifies more than an admissions procedure: it is a class verdict passed long before anyone fills in an application form. Schools call it guidance when working-class children are directed towards the labour which society expects them to perform; merit when others enjoy the freedom to choose. The withdrawal of the Devaquet reform could not undo this injustice: a law was defeated, but the system that assigned young people their place survived. Forty years later, the scandal is not simply that opportunities remain unequal. It is that inequality continues to be presented as a reasonable judgment about what a young person can become. The history of 1986 should therefore not end with the ‘success’ of the government’s retreat: it must also reckon with the pupils who refused the future that had been written for them.