On Thursday, thousands of protesters, many of them high schoolers, sang the national anthem at Place de la Bastille, where in 1789 a mob stormed a royal prison and touched off the French Revolution. Protests are so embedded in French political life that the streets are considered a fourth branch of government, a last resort when the legislative, executive and judicial branches are unresponsive, according to David A. Bell, a history professor at Princeton University.
From street revolts throughout the 19th century, including a short-lived one in 1832 that inspired "Les Misérables," to the Yellow Vest protests that began in 2018, that tradition has thrived. Julian Bourg, a history professor at Boston College, notes that France has a distinct political culture. "In contrast to the Anglo-American tradition, which sees the state as some foreign, invasive body threatening individual freedom, in France, there's a long tradition that the state embodies the people," he said, making the state directly accountable to the people.
Most importantly, Mr. Bell said, protests are common because they seem to work. Demonstrations in the 1930s led to worker protections that are still jealously guarded, and French leaders have offered some concessions in recent protests, though some advocates have dismissed those as a "smoke screen."
These protests differ in key ways. For the first time in decades, high school students were the first to act, and social media has allowed movements to spread like wildfire, unlike past uprisings that took longer to ripple out from Paris. Still, the 1968 uprisings, which were led by university students and inspired millions of workers to strike, offer instructive echoes. Mr. Bourg cautioned that recent demonstrations have been more tightly focused and less ideologically potent, but noted that each major French protest movement raises the possibility of a broader political crisis.
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