France: A Generation Sacrificed… in the Name of What?

The text that follows is long, but it forms a whole that would be artificial to divide. We hope the reader will forgive us. Born of the high-school protests in France, it takes these events as the starting point for a broader reflection on society, the world, political life and the future of generations to come. It does not claim to offer definitive answers but seeks, above all and with humility, to raise questions, prompt further inquiry and encourage reflection.

“You who build the altars now to sacrifice your children, you must not do it any more.”

In 1969, among the songs on his second album, Songs from a Room, Canadian poet Leonard Cohen offered the world Story of Isaac, a song inspired by the biblical account of Isaac, whom Abraham prepares to sacrifice in obedience to the divine will.

But Cohen, ever attentive to the social and political developments around him, reversed the perspective of the biblical narrative, in keeping with the spirit of the times. Here, it was no longer Abraham recounting his ordeal, but Isaac, the nine-year-old boy watching his father enter his room before leading him, axe in hand, toward a mountain where the old patriarch intended to carry out what he believed to be a command from God.

The father walked on, utterly convinced of the necessity of his act, and the child followed obediently. Yet behind the trust and the promise of protection that should bind a father to his son loomed something unacceptable, something appalling: an adult was prepared to sacrifice his child in the name of a truth of which he believed himself to be the custodian.

Cohen was writing at a time when the Vietnam War, the questioning of authority, the rejection of inherited values and the challenge to traditional hierarchies were sweeping across Western societies. These upheavals formed part of what he would later describe as a “psychic catastrophe,” a severing of the relationship with God, but also of the social contract binding human beings to one another; a crisis that, over the years and throughout his writings, would become one of his major preoccupations.

Story of Isaac thus went beyond a mere denunciation of war. It questioned that strange human propensity to sacrifice succeeding generations in the name of convictions, certainties and other imperatives that people themselves had elevated into absolutes.

“A scheme is not a vision,” Cohen warned. A plan is not a vision. And at a concert in Berlin in 1972, he introduced the song by dedicating it to those who “would not hesitate to sacrifice one generation for the sake of another.”

More than half a century later, how can one not think of the Canadian singer’s words when confronted, in particular, with images of French high-school students taking to the streets to protest the deterioration of their learning conditions, and with the extreme, utterly contradictory reactions their uprising has provoked?

Admittedly, Cohen’s song is plainly about young people conscripted to serve as cannon fodder, and it remains eminently relevant in that respect.

But what, then, is the connection between these adolescents demanding teachers, decent classrooms and prospects for the future, and the biblical child led by his father as a sacrificial victim to the summit of Mount Moriah?

Precisely this: a generation is being asked to place its trust in a world whose adults seem increasingly incapable of fulfilling their promises or providing any points of reference.

Another form of sacrifice.

A more insidious one.

An Identifiable Malaise, But…

The French high-school protest movement, which began in mid-September 2026 at a school in Créteil before spreading to hundreds of high schools, arose from concrete grievances: teacher shortages, educational inequalities, the dilapidated condition of certain buildings, overcrowded classrooms and concerns over university admissions and selection procedures.

The source of the malaise is therefore, at first sight, perfectly clear. In several schools, particularly in working-class suburbs, the demand is simply for the basic means to study under acceptable conditions. There is no longer even any question of discussing educational approaches or the ultimate purposes of schooling.

That says it all.

Within a matter of weeks, the movement rapidly spread nationwide. University students, teachers, trade unions and parents joined the mobilization, while denunciations of police violence and broader questions about social inequality were added to the initial educational demands.

Yet these grievances undoubtedly raise questions extending far beyond high schools.

School is one of the first places where a sense of citizenship takes shape, and it carries within it the seeds of society’s renewal. Is the fact that the institution itself has fallen into an advanced state of disrepair in some establishments not a glaring sign of the fateful “disenchantment of the world” awaiting its pupils?

School is, in a sense, the promise of the world to come.

Yet for some of these young people, that promise seems stillborn.

Is it any wonder, then, that a generation discovering so early, in the bleakest and most macabre fashion, at the very cradle of culture, that the world being promised to it already lies in pieces should feel the need to express its anger?

A Society in Disintegration?

It would admittedly be tempting to regard this mobilization as a new manifestation of the spirit of May 1968 or, more generally, as a repetition of the high-school and university protests that have regularly shaken France ever since. The connection exists, in that spirit of rebellion and cyclical desire for renewal so characteristic of French sociopolitical history. It is probably even essential to understanding what is happening today. But beyond the spirit of insurrection stricto sensu, what the movement perhaps reveals more profoundly are the profound transformations of a society coming apart.

In 1968, part of France’s youth rose up against a world whose authority, hierarchies, prohibitions and values it rejected wholesale. The university protests were part of a broader transnational movement challenging social relations, traditional morality, family structures and political institutions. By converging with the aspirations of the working class, they had become a crisis of society itself.

Yet the world was still “contained” within systemic ideologies which, whatever their worth, provided frameworks for thought and gave existence a sense of purpose. Often gnostic in their claim to decipher the meaning of history, these ideologies promised to “re-enchant” the world and guide humanity’s march toward its destination.

A substantial part of this generation thus lived in a society sustained by economic growth and by the conviction that progress could open up new possibilities for emancipation. It challenged a world whose foundations it believed it could transform. Institutions were regarded as neither untouchable nor immutable. Behind the protests, there remained a belief in the possibility of inventing another social order.

After smashing everything.

Or almost everything.

The generational conflict was also, to some extent, a conflict over the meaning of freedom. Parents had grown up in a world marked by wars, deprivation, collective obligations and the imperatives of reconstruction. And within a traditional, authoritarian culture that had yet to encounter rock music or the same degree of sexual freedom. Their children sought to challenge the constraints that had shaped this inheritance.

“This world, I made it for you,” sang Maxime Le Forestier in Dialogue, giving voice to a father whose son, far from being satisfied with his inheritance, replied that he had never asked for it and would now have to remake that world, making it a little kinder for the generations to come.

The issue was not merely to reject the future their parents had mapped out, but to claim the freedom to invent another.

And it was precisely in this atmosphere that Story of Isaac appeared.

Abraham, the father in Cohen’s song, could be understood as the embodiment of an older world’s certainties. His son Isaac represented those generations upon whom sacrifices were imposed in the name of values, ideologies or wars they had never chosen.

This is obviously not to idealize that period or to overlook the material anxieties, inequalities and contradictions that ran through it. Ideologies were, after all, as much a straitjacket as a point of reference. Nor did the students of 1968 constitute a homogeneous generation, any more than their demands could be reduced to a romantic yearning for freedom. Sartre and Camus were no more right than Aron. None of them held the keys to a future whose unfolding history would overturn so many certainties.

Nevertheless, beyond their differences, there remained the conviction that history had a meaning, that progress could be steered and that the future was, if not predictable, at least something that could be constructed. The fruit of the Hegelian and Marxist philosophical gnosis of preceding centuries…

And it was precisely this conviction that would gradually begin to crumble.

Disenchantment Disenchanted

Subsequent high-school and university protests tell a different story in this respect. In 1986, students rose up against the Devaquet proposal and the threat of tighter university admissions. The death of Malik Oussekine, beaten by police officers, would leave an enduring mark on France’s political memory of that episode. In 1990 and again in 1998, high-school students were already denouncing the shortcomings of the education system and demanding additional resources.

By the early 2000s, the nature of protest was gradually changing. In 2005, high-school students demonstrated against the Fillon education law, while in 2006, the movement against the First Employment Contract revealed an anxiety extending beyond universities: the growing precariousness of entering professional life.

Over nearly half a century, the outlook of protest had shifted considerably. The objective was no longer so much to break free from a world whose values were rejected as to find a place in a society whose promises of stability and upward mobility were becoming increasingly uncertain.

Resistance to constraints was thus, in part, giving way to the fear of exclusion.

And this shift was not confined to young people. In 2016, the assemblies of Nuit debout on the Place de la République expressed a desire to reclaim a form of collective deliberation outside traditional structures of representation. Two years later, the Yellow Vests blocked major roads, giving voice to the frustrations of a peripheral France that no longer recognized itself in the discourse and workings of political power.

Although these movements differed in their social composition, their demands and, indeed, their political aspirations, they nevertheless expressed, in different forms, the same sense of dispossession.

Disenchantment had itself become disenchanted, in a sense.

This time, the issue was no longer so much to invent a new world as to regain some hold over a world in which decisions seemed to escape those who had to live with their consequences. The crisis of institutions was also becoming a crisis of representation.

Should that come as any surprise?

One of the paradoxes of French political life lies in the tension between charismatic legitimacy, embodied by individual leaders, and republican legitimacy, which is supposed to become anchored in institutions. The Republic seeks to “absorb” its leaders’ charisma and transfer it to institutions, even as France continues to search for providential figures. It is within this permanent tension between the symbolism of the “strongman,” inherited from the monarchy and the Empire, and the parliamentary democratic tradition of the Third Republic that France has been oscillating for two centuries.

A veritable hainamoration, a love-hate relationship with power (out of which a genius named de Gaulle had managed to found the Fifth Republic).

One might almost believe, to adapt Corneille’s verses in Cinna, that no sooner have the French raised their rulers to the summit than they are eager to bring them crashing down.

Is this not, after all, one of the keys to democracy?

The ability to vote those in power out?

Even when driven by passion and, at times, irrationality?

The Disintegration of Politics

But for this arrangement to endure, the “strongmen” still needed the support of robust political parties, institutions capable of outliving them and a commitment to democratic ideals.

It was against the backdrop of a France troubled by economic, social and territorial divisions that Emmanuel Macron came to power in 2017, marking the spectacular weakening of the traditional right and left.

Macronism claimed to transcend their old antagonisms and replace ideological loyalties with an approach based on pragmatism, efficiency and adaptation to economic change. Yet it did not resolve the contradictions running through French society. It inherited them, only to see them reconfigure themselves and, at times, grow more radical.

Despite his ambition to construct the myth of a “strongman,” Macron has often relied on a gleaming marketing image, without managing to recapture the charisma of the leading figures of the Fifth Republic, even as he sought to wield its institutional powers with the virtù of his illustrious predecessors.

Macronism emerged, in a sense, from the disintegration of politics in the aftermath of globalization, but offered nothing tangible with which to restore it. On the contrary, the erosion only accelerated.

Nearly a decade later, the presidential center finds itself without a parliamentary majority, caught between political forces whose visions of society appear difficult to reconcile. Never in more than half a century has the fate of the Fifth Republic, or of France more broadly, seemed so uncertain.

Allowing, of course, for all the historical differences, the present configuration recalls in certain respects the Plain or the Marsh of the National Convention, the grouping situated between the Girondins and the Montagnards, whose shifts in allegiance could tip the balance of revolutionary power.

The analogy obviously goes no further than that. But the Marsh was not a neutral force, any more than Macronism is. Occupying the political center excludes neither convictions nor calculations nor maneuvering. Indeed, it can become a formidable instrument of power when whoever occupies it succeeds in exploiting the antagonisms he claims to transcend.

Perhaps therein lies one of the paradoxes of Macronism: having elevated the transcendence of political divisions into a method of government while contributing, through its political choices and tactical calculations, to their reconfiguration. Even though, ultimately, France still risks tipping one way or the other, beyond the bounds of the democratic and republican political compact.

With Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen, French political debate increasingly seems to revolve around competing conceptions of the people, the nation, sovereignty and social or cultural belonging. A return to pre-globalization arguments in a world undergoing a full-scale reassertion of identity and retreating increasingly into itself.

The two projects of the far left and the far right are obviously not identical. Their political programs and cultural affinities, as well as their respective relationships with freedoms, institutions and rights, cannot truly be conflated… despite their shared nostalgia for the “strongman” and fascination with… Vladimir Putin.

But political confrontation is no longer concerned solely with the distribution of wealth, relations of production or the economic role of the state. It also concerns the definition of who belongs to the national community, who has been forgotten or excluded, and who can claim to speak on behalf of the people.

Such is the logic of post-globalization: the social question increasingly seems to be expressed in the language of identity. Thus, even a demand as elementary as the presence of teachers in high schools becomes absorbed into a dispute pitting suburbs against rural communities, supposedly privileged populations against those who consider themselves abandoned, and one group against another in a strange mimetic competition of frustrations and suffering…

The Return of the Repressed

This transformation is not exclusively French. Indeed, it is probably one of globalization’s most disturbing paradoxes.

Globalization promised the opening of borders, the circulation of wealth, the rapprochement of societies and even a degree of convergence in political and cultural values. Yet the growing integration of economies and communication networks has fallen far short of producing a comparable solidarity among populations. It has also fueled a sense of dispossession among those who saw their surroundings changing without possessing the means to influence these transformations.

Thus, the nation, religion, community and territory quickly reemerged within societies as sources of reassurance, sometimes of withdrawal and even of exclusion. Far from fading away into a humanity supposedly united by progress, the need to belong has gathered new strength. The return of repressed tribal and identitarian instincts?

Have we, in fact, truly entered the era of post-globalization?

It is difficult to say.

The world undoubtedly finds itself in one of those monstrous interregnums of which Gramsci spoke, marked by the exhaustion of some of globalization’s political promises at the very moment when our material and technological interdependencies have reached unprecedented proportions.

Never have human beings been so close to one another virtually, and yet this proximity does not seem to help them understand one another any better! The more means of communication proliferate, the more public debate fragments into separate universes of certainty. The more identities merge into the matrix of capitalism, the more they become impenetrable borders. Economic antagonisms are compounded by cultural, religious and territorial conflicts. Thus, a political adversary is no longer merely someone defending a different project, but someone whose very presence may be perceived as a threat that must be eliminated.

How, then, can a common world be built when the individuals who inhabit it seem increasingly unable to recognize one another as members of the same society? And how can younger generations be asked to find their place in it when adults also pass down their divisions, resentments and contradictory certainties?

For it is no longer merely generational conflicts that seem to be repeating themselves. The unresolved conflicts of previous generations are also becoming the inheritance of those who follow. Adolescents are discovering not only a school whose promises are slipping away, but also a society whose own members struggle to agree on what binds them together.

And this is where the heart of the problem now lies.

Today, we possess extraordinary scientific, technical and material means of transforming the world. We can communicate instantaneously from one continent to another, push back the boundaries of knowledge and contemplate upheavals that would have belonged to science fiction only a few decades ago.

Yet this progress now seems to be moving forward without any intelligible destination.

Artificial intelligence threatens to transform work, education, forms of creativity and even certain understandings of human intelligence itself. Environmental crises call into question the material conditions of existence. Wars and geopolitical fractures, particularly with the resurgence of the nuclear threat, remind us how fragile international balances remain.

The persistence of racism, the resurgence of authoritarian passions and the rise of populism are further reminders that human progress is anything but inevitable. There is no meaning of history that can absolve human beings of their responsibility, their willingness to act, their political culture or the need to build networks of solidarity among “good people,” in Edmund Burke’s sense.

And in this universe whose future contours we are incapable of describing, we demand that adolescents be competitive, high-performing, mobile, flexible, endlessly adaptable!

We promise them autonomy while multiplying uncertainties. We present individual effort as the key to their future, even though the conditions shaping that future depend on mechanisms they cannot control and that their elders themselves struggle to understand.

Who, for that matter, can claim truly to master the consequences of these transformations?

Perhaps this needs to be stated in black and white.

No one.

Not even those who are developing artificial intelligence and nanotechnologies, while telling us every day that humanity is irredeemably doomed by the very things they are so blithely creating…

Oppenheimer must be turning in his grave!

Liquid Society, Rigid Certainties

Perhaps the most troubling aspect is that reactions to the high-school protests reproduce precisely the contradictions of the world these young people are discovering.

On one side, some would like to see in every high-school demonstration the beginnings of a new revolution. On the other, young people are denounced as ungrateful, undisciplined, violent and incapable of respecting authority.

Acts of violence committed by some demonstrators against individuals, schools or law enforcement officers cannot, of course, be excused in the name of some supposed innocence of youth. But the serious injuries suffered by several adolescents during police interventions, along with thousands of arrests, also raise legitimate questions about the proportionality of the authorities’ response.

Authority is indispensable to any society, all the more so under a political system whose legitimacy has been declining for months. But that authority must still be able to claim a legitimacy that rests on something more than its ability to coerce!

Even more disturbing is the tendency to turn adolescents immediately into symbols of the political confrontations of adults. Their voices are welcomed or rejected according to whether they confirm or challenge preexisting convictions.

Yet in both cases, the people most directly concerned sometimes seem to be forgotten.

High-school students are no more the custodians of some new truth than they are responsible for the contradictions of the world they inherit. They are simply marked by the same prejudices, the same authoritarian temptations and the same forms of violence as their elders, and they evolve in step with the world in which they live. Nor is there any reason to assume that they will necessarily build a better society.

But they are entering a world they did not choose and whose consequences they will nevertheless have to bear.

This asymmetry alone ought to impose a particular responsibility upon us.

Can a society perpetuate itself simply by transmitting knowledge, institutions or rules? Or must it also pass on the conviction that something exists which deserves to be preserved, debated and transformed together?

Must it not also give succeeding generations the means to avoid becoming prisoners of the certainties of those who came before them?

What, then, are we passing on to them today?

A world whose reference points are dissolving, institutions struggling to fulfill their promises, political communities fragmenting, technologies whose consequences we cannot fully control, and that strange injunction to adapt to transformations whose ultimate purposes no one seems truly capable of defining.

A “liquid society” in which the frameworks of existence are slipping away, even as political and identitarian certainties grow more rigid. And where reactions are often remarkably hollow.

We promise tomorrow’s generations a world whose future, for the time being, appears seriously compromised. Barely the possibility of survival. Without even being able to guarantee them the conditions of a dignified existence…

A Cry of Life

Should we, then, speak of a “sacrificed generation”?

The sacrifice, here, consists in asking succeeding generations to bear the consequences of our failures and renunciations, in presenting our dead ends as inevitabilities, or in imposing our antagonisms upon them as inheritances from which they cannot escape. Above all, it consists in asking them to believe in a future that we ourselves seem to have given up imagining collectively.

In the name of what?

In the name of competitiveness, security, sovereignty, identity, growth or supposedly unavoidable economic necessities?

In the name of what imperatives, if we can no longer give them a meaning beyond their own perpetuation?

Perhaps the most worrying thing is not that young people are rebelling against the world we offer them. Perhaps it is rather that we have so little to say when they ask what they can expect from it.

Threats, insults, blows from police batons… and incomprehension… with, behind it all, a center and the extremes rubbing their hands, waiting for the wind, with a generous dash of virtù, to turn in the “right” direction…

Each projects onto these young people its own impulses, anxieties, hatreds and desires. Without truly hearing the grievances of those most directly concerned.

And yet these adolescents who are taking to the streets today to demand decent learning conditions and the possibility of choosing their future continue, despite everything, to demonstrate a form of trust in society.

If they are protesting, it is because they still believe that society can be transformed.

Perhaps that is what remains most reassuring about their anger.

The truly sacrificed generation would undoubtedly be the one that, having inherited all our dead ends, all our renunciations and all our contradictory certainties, eventually ceased to expect anything from the world.

And consequently, ceased to ask anything of it.

After all, it is a child’s cry that tells us it was not stillborn.