The Prometheus International Press Squad (PIPS) is a roving elite band of commie travel writers who try to be at the front lines of global class struggle. This is their report from the October 17th protests in Paris, where hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets, eventually ending in pitched battles with police.

‘At the barricades the pain is over. The transformation is complete. It is completed by a shout from the rooftop that the soldiers are advancing. Suddenly there is nothing to regret. The barricades are between their defenders and the violence done to them throughout their lives. There is nothing to regret because it is the quintessence of their past which is now advancing against them. On their side of the barricades it is already the future.’¹

We started the day early, waking at 3 am, piling into our car, and driving onto the Eurotunnel. After a few pit stops, we parked on the outskirts of Paris mid-morning and headed into the centre. As we got further and further into Paris, we began to see more groups of roving young people and their allies, often carrying banners or masked up.

Since mid-September, a series of protests by high-school students in Paris expanded into a general conflagration nationally. Facing severe state repression, calls to action spread from school to school, then into the universities and society at large. Combining a mixture of youth meme culture with extensive street fighting, the 17th October promised to be the largest day of action yet.

We found a cafe in the centre, a short walk from the Place de la République, and began the European ritual of consuming a cheap but delicious coffee, with 1-2 cigarettes interspersed. Just as we began to discuss making our way to the Place, we heard shouts coming down the street. A group of several thousand younger protesters, with a banner announcing their arrondissement, were headed directly towards us. We simply jumped into the crowd and locked in for the rest of the day.

We marched, displaying a solidarity banner from London, with the group, which only grew as we got closer to the Place. As we passed the Parisian flats above, it was common to see people of all ages waving and applauding in support of the young people below.

As we got closer to la République, several groups merged. By this stage, we were joined not just by groups of teenagers and young students, but also many workers waving trade union flags, as well as collectives of revolutionary groups, the most prominent being Révolution Permanente.²

Our path to the Place de la République was blocked, and the crowd began marching elsewhere. Little did we know that, as people had been assembling at the Place, they had been kettled, and then subsequently indiscriminately tear-gassed, as well as hit with other projectiles from the French riot police, the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (CRS). This then descended into several hours of battles around the Place. However, we joined a growing crowd attempting to get to a different target. Not content with the Place, nor the Bastille, this was an attempt to get to the Élysée Palace.

Near Gare Saint Lazare, PIPS broke away briefly, securing several tins of fine European beer and some food. Finishing our lunch, we rejoined the main march, and quickly saw several hundred masked youth running past the front of Saint Lazare. We decided to follow, with vans of CRS police chasing close behind, clearly aiming to secure the front of the station.

Around the corner, we were chased by CRS, firing tear gas and stun grenades at the front of the Église Saint-Augustin. Luckily, people here were raiding nearby construction sites and road works for barricade materials. We got behind the barricades, made from a mixture of fencing, Lime bikes, and bins, which were eventually set on fire. A crowd of several hundred masked people, most seemingly still teenagers, now waited for the CRS to make their advance. As further waves of tear gas and grenades were fired at the young people, who in turn threw back whatever they could get their hands on, the crowd retreated into a nearby street.

Within this crew of young people, we roamed the streets. Attempts were made to force through to the Élysée Palace, but were rebuffed by police, deploying everything from water cannons to rubber bullets. As a result, we kept coming across further large crowds of people, cheering as our group grew.

We marched closer to the Élysée, now several thousand again. An attempt was made to push back police lines. The young people at the front were now firing fireworks; CRS returned in kind with further gas canisters. People attempted to cover them or kick them back. At one point, the crowd refused to budge following a volley, instead surging forward at the police. In the face of the crowd running, teenagers laughing, the police lines seemingly panicked, retreating further back. Whatever elation we briefly felt at this victory was fleeting; cries of ‘MEDIC’ flew around. Saline was sprayed into the eyes of those exposed to too much tear gas. We saw a young person lying on the ground, their trouser leg ripped up, bloody, likely due to attempting to kick a police projectile which exploded. Over the day, at least one protester died due to what is being described as respiratory cardiac arrest, and far more were hospitalised across the country.³

A further police assault began, with tear gas landing regularly, and the crowd went backwards. Barricades of fencing and other equipment were thrown up to cover our travel. We then heard the roar of motorcycles at our back, and the crowd moved faster. A crew of the BRAV-M were chasing us. Riding on motorcycles in pairs, these particularly sadistic police brigades have been some of the most violent units operating in the last decade. With one driver and another armed officer riding behind, they are capable of firing on and beating youth whilst riding, and are known for their retaliatory beatings.

With the barricades slowing the BRAV-M, the crowd managed to put a gap between themselves and the cops. We realised we were back near Saint Lazare. The sun was starting to set; crowds of thousands of masked youth were now roving the streets without a target, and the smoke from fires, tear gas, and fireworks could be seen down most streets.

We followed a crowd towards the Boulevard Haussmann, where some of Paris’ finer shops are. Initially, we discovered a JD Sports being smashed up by the crowd. Boarding had been removed, windows broken, and groups of people were running in. Piles of clothes and shoes were thrown out into the crowd, to the cheers of those outside. Further down the road, the police were attempting to push their way through to the shop. However, facing fireworks and pushback, the CRS were forced to retreat.

The crowd continued onwards until it made it to the luxury department store Galeries Lafayette. This became the central focus of all those roaming the area, who attempted to lift the shutters, break through the doors, and get at the luxury goods inside. Whilst some did make it in, a panicked group of riot police, quickly followed by the BRAV-M, dispersed the crowd. There are, of course, few differences between capitals, but the CRS clearly saw this luxury store as a higher priority than the JD Sports still being looted nearby.

With much of the crowd now running in smaller groups in the dark, we decided to head back to Place de la République and see the fallout from earlier in the day. The Place had been cleared, except for roving individuals. There were several burnt-out vehicles and stands, the statue in the centre now sporting a yellow vest. CRS vans and water cannons were placed nearby, in case the crowd decided to reform.

Now very late, CRS were roaming in small groups amongst the streets. We came across a small group of CRS singling out and beating up a few masked protesters, which spurred several people to intervene. In response, they fired tear gas, as well as a rubber bullet, which hit one of our group. We took this as a sign to begin our walk back to our hostel, before the long drive back on Sunday the 18th.

As the sun rose on the streets of Paris, the burnt husks of cars and Lime bikes littered the streets; graffiti covered larger chain shops, if their windows had not been broken. Several assemblies were held early in the morning, and sporadic actions continued throughout the day. We, however, were alternating sleeping in the car, heading back to Britain, dreading Monday’s shifts.

On the general significance of the uprisings

We write these words as the situation still unfolds, but these remain some of the points of political importance we identified surrounding the demonstrations.

These protests began initially in response to poor school conditions and have expanded into a wider political crisis for the French state. That they began in areas like Val-de-Marne and Saint-Denis is no coincidence. These are predominantly working-class areas in the Paris suburbs, often facing repeated instances of state violence and racist harassment.⁴ Demands for adequate state provision around education quickly broke out into a wider struggle as a result of the scale of the CRS attack. Notably, the CRS-8, a particularly violent unit, previously deployed to colonial territories of France abroad, was deployed within Paris on Saturday, a marked example of the colonial boomerang: where policing of colonies abroad comes to be returned within the imperial metropole.⁵

The rather churlish framing of this wave of global protests as the Gen Z rebellions is therefore inadequate. These protests were begun and are led in their most militant expression by the working-class youth of France. Many of these young people are Black and Arab, face recurrent state harassment, islamophobia, and racist violence on top of exploitation by French capitalism. However, this domination produces its own resistance. Their militancy has shifted the struggle from school conditions onto the political terrain of state violence, building on several decades of resistance here, not least of all the uprisings in response to the killing of Nahel Merzouk by French police in 2023. It is this layer of working-class youth and its actions which provides the fundamental basis for the struggle in France and elsewhere. It has been joined by youth across France, irrespective of class and race, who have united behind this. As more adults join, particularly workplaces across France, their power continues. The state will attempt to disrupt these coalitions, or reverse the direction of leadership away from racialised working-class youth.

This struggle emerges at a time in Western Europe when the ruling classes are obsessed with youth NEETs (those not in employment, education, or training). Working-class youth are forced into under-resourced classes to get worse jobs, if any at all, all the while they face a future of growing climate breakdown, repression, and war. Moral crises about youth crime and youth health malingering abound and will likely intensify as a result of these riots. But the rational kernel behind the riots is ultimately correct – why not fight a state which treats you as surplus, to be harassed, then used as cannon fodder in a noxious world? The particular way in which remilitarisation is raised by the youth represents a central problem for imperialist states like France. How will they survive the coming resource wars if their youth will not fight for them? In response, the only logic is to double down — not one penny, not one man for the death machine.

However, the riot is never quite enough. These protests, as they have spread across nations, reveal the wider capacity for mass working-class resistance. But affirmations of the riot have come and gone in recent decades, without a full balance sheet of their wider political implications.⁶ After all, May 1968 occurred, but France re-elected De Gaulle later that same year. In the face of such militancy led by working-class youth, there will be a temptation to retreat from the necessary territories of the full political struggle against capitalist states. Rightly pointing to the militancy of these youth, but counterposing it to the mediated forms of struggle around trade unions and political parties may chime with the emotions of the moment, but will leave these terrains to those attempting to recuperate the struggle within the state.⁷

This call affirms the leadership of the working-class youth of the uprisings, but repeatedly stops short of stating anything learnt from such leadership, nor how it can be brought into dialogue with a movement’s memory of recurrent riots and uprisings. Instead, it pre-emptively denounces the recuperation by the state of emancipatory energies, whilst ceding struggle over the mediated territories which threaten such recuperation (the parties, the unions, and more). This feels especially counterproductive in a situation where La France Insoumise and parties to its left have been broadly supportive of the youth protests, along with a significant section of the rank and file of unions. There is no way out but through — the point for militants is an unrelenting struggle in all spheres of political and civil society, which requires organisation which can link militants across regions and can allow these struggles to institutionalise against the state — the functions of the party.

Within the French struggle, there is already a framework for presenting the political struggle at the level of the state, that of a call for a new republic to succeed the Fifth. This demand is raised not just by the populist forces of La France Insoumise but also by Marxist forces to their left such as Révolution Permanente. Whilst union forces were present on the 17th, their bureaucracies opposed open support for the day, and there has been a sustained struggle within them to back the demonstrations, as they often failed to do during the Yellow Vests movement. The question is not a choice between the students masked and running through the street and those part of formal party and union organisations (for those of us on the ground both roamed the streets together); the problem is how these forces can continue to ally as we approach the final days of the Macron government. With not just the forthcoming presidential election, but continued struggles across all spheres of the French state, there remains the possibility of the forces of the left continuing to work together, broaden the struggles, and raise their demands in every space of the integral state.⁸

We had been jokingly calling our trip ‘riot tourism’. As with any tourism, the question is what you bring back for your loved ones. For comrades, we bring back this account to tell you the world need not be this way, and people are willing to fight. Most important of all, as protests spread across Europe, from the Spanish state’s housing movement to the 100,000s in Italy protesting remilitarisation, there are going to be more days like today.

There are further cries for action in France, with a general strike called for Thursday 5 November. On the 20th November, there will be the International Youth Strike, with several countries’ unions calling for general strikes and demonstrations. What can we build in Britain for then?

1. John Berger, G. (Penguin Books, 1973), pg 84. ↩︎
2. French section of the post-Morenite Current for Permanent Revolution – Fourth International. This organisation has grown to be the main force to the left of La France Insoumise, particularly since the 2023 pension protests, as well as the collapse and splintering of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste into two competing and dwindling groups (NPA-A and NPA-R). Révolution Permanente helpfully coordinates live feed coverage of the demonstrations on their site: www.revolutionpermanente.fr/17-octobre-suivez-en-direct-la-journee-de-mobilisation-dans-toute-la-France ↩︎
3. Sybille de La Hamaide, Clotaire Achi and Abdul Saboor, ‘Macron urges calm as France counts cost of worst unrest in years’, Reuters, 18 October 2026, available at: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/france-faces-aftermath-worst-unrest-years-2026-10-18/. ↩︎
4. Ulysse Rabaté, ‘Mobilisation des lycées : les quartiers populaires à l’avant-garde’, Politis, September 30 2026, available at: https://www.politis.fr/articles/2026/09/analyse-mobilisation-lycees-quartiers-populaires-avant-garde/ ↩︎
5. 20 Minutes avec AFP, ‘Mayotte : Entre pluie tropicale et embuscades, la CRS8 en « reconquête du terrain » inconnu’, 20 Minutes, 26 April 2023, available at: https://www.20minutes.fr/societe/4034264-20230425-mayotte-entre-pluie-tropicale-embuscades-crs8-bapteme-feu-outremer and Isabelle Mandraud, ‘At 80, France’s notorious riot police, the CRS, remain unloved’, Le Monde, 13 December 2024, available at: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2024/12/13/at-80-france-s-notorious-riot-police-the-crs-remain-unloved_6736036_7.html ↩︎
6. Some advanced theorisations of the last decade can be found in Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (Verso Books, 2019) and Endnotes, ‘A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats: Crisis era struggles in Britain’, Endnotes 3: Gender, Race, Class and Other Misfortunes (2013). A critical argument against some of the affirmation of the riot and ‘horizontal’ organising can be found in Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (Wildfire, 2023). ↩︎
7. Such a perspective can be found in artifices, ‘Leaving the Contemporary Era’, Endnotes, 18 October 2026, available at: https://www.endnotes.org.uk/palabre/leaving-the-contemporary-era, Groupe Révolutionnaire Charlatan, ‘Remarks on the Ongoing Student Revolt’, Ill Will, 9 October 2026, available at: https://illwill.com/remarks-on-the-ongoing-student-revolt, and The Invisible Committee, ‘Becoming Alive, Autonomous, and Explosive’, Ill Will, 17 October 2026, available at: https://illwill.com/becoming-alive. ↩︎
8. On the importance of this concept for our struggle, we must note the tragic passing of the great Peter Thomas and suggest comrades read Peter Thomas, ‘New Orders: Hegemony as a Method of Political Work.’, Historical Materialism, 33(3) (2026), pp 3-21. ↩︎