March, 11th. While students were occupying a lecture hall in Montpellier’s University of Law, the Dean sent a fascist group helped by two teachers to beat up the students. Three of them ended up in the hospital, the girl in the picture with a fractured skull.
March, 27th. 4,000 students are sitting at Montpellier’s University of Art and Literature . We are voting the continued occupation of the University until all our demands are met. We make sure to include the French President’s resignation in our demands, to be certain that they will never be met. To this day, the university is still occupied.
April, 4th.
“Travaille, consomme et ferme ta gueule ! Et c’est quoi le message qu’on passe aux jeunes ?” “Tout est à nous ! Tout est à nous ! Rien n’est à eux ! Rien n’est à eux ! Tout ce qu’ils ont, ils l’ont volé ! Partage des richesses, partage des savoirs ou alors ça va péter !”
“Work, buy and shut the fuck up! And what’s the message you give to the youth?” “Everything is ours! Nothing is theirs! All they have, they have stolen! Share the wealth, share the knowledge or we will blow everything up!”
National day of strike. 2,700 people in Paris. 1,000 in Lyon. 2,000 in Montpellier. The workers joined the students, the hospital staff, the train and rails staff. Everyone marched, threatened by the CRS (security police) and smoke bombs. We had to stay masked because fascists groups were attacking people leaving the march.
April, 11th
Montpellier: Paul Valery University’s servers hacked, final exams pending
The Dean of my University (Art and Literature) has been a vocal opposant of our movement. In an effort to stop the occupation and threaten us, he has repeatedly refused to come to our meetins, has ignored the decisions made by the teaching staff and threatened to fire teachers who decided to march with us. His last effort has been regarding finals. Because the university is blocked since February (see the post I made), we didn’t have classes and almost no material to take exams. Final week was supposed to be from April 9th to 13th. The Dean ordered the teachers to create online exams for us to send. We received the subjects Friday 6th. I had to write an 18-page-long essay on animation in TWO DAYS. But today, something incredible happened. The plateform used by the university to communicate with students and send our exams was hacked by the protesting students. We can’t access it. We can’t send our exams. Furthermore, an assembly of teachers was held yesterday and they decided that they were going to play on a technicality. The Dean ordered them to make exams; he didn’t say if he wanted the teachers to grade them. A unanimous vote decided that they would give 10 to each student (we are graded on 20 and 10 is the minimum to pass) and bonus point if they give the exams.
Again, I’m begging you, share this around. The governement is purposefully hiding what is happening because they’re afraid it’s going to turn into another May, 1968. Reblog, repost, I don’t care. I just want people to see it. I’m 20 and I’m risking my life when I march.
I HAVE NEWS AND IT’S SCARY
Message from the video games teacher: “Hello everyone. There are rumors of police intervention in the next 48 hours on campus. I’m asking you to share the information, I will personnally be on campus tomorrow all day, as well as Friday. I don’t want to advise you to come, I’d feel too responsable if something happened to you… I do however think that the more students and teachers are here, the less risk there is that the police will come…’
[MORE NEWS]
“New information: a staff meeting is organized tomorrow at 9am by the university’s Dean. We just had Sud Eduction on the phone and they informed us that the meeting is organized in anticipation, to celebrate a very likely victory of the police against the students at 7am. I will be on campus at 6:30am with other teachers to support the students in case the police does come…”
THIS IS SCARY OK. THEY ARE DOING THE SAME THING THAT THE LAW UNI DEAN HAS DONE.
Tomorrow, I will go at 6:30. Let the police come. If they get violent against peaceful students who haven’t touched ANYONE in the two months this protest has been going on, there will be consequences. We will take pictures, we will film. I’m a fucking cinema students and you can bet I’ll send my bloodied face to every fucking news station if they ever lay a finger on me.
Again, I beg you, share this, please. If I’m about to get my face broken, it better be for the greater good.
For my non-French followers in the comments asking why/how this is happening, I will try to explain what is going on with the university/post-high-school mess that is going on in France.
Basically, the previous system was very complex. You have tons of possibiities after schools, going to bachelors, technical two-year degrees, professional two-year degrees, very expensive private schools, and everything is mixed in. You had to choose between those and if you didn’t get in what you wanted, you were waitlisted. For public universities though, people would be selected via a random roll, which imo was bad, but everyone had a fair shot (even though thousands of students would be left with nothing every year).
Therefore Macron (our current president) and his government decided to scrap the previous system and replace it with a system that would allow selection at entry level for universities. And if you can’t get in because people decide you’re “not good enough”, you’re sent for a year of classes to “put you at university level”. Not only does he want to do that, but he also wants to get rid of our three-way (literary, economic, scientific) high-school to replace it with a common core and make other subjects mandatory and limited for every student.
The government also loves guilting young students (at the age of 18 !) into choosing one and only one possible orientation, and shames those who “lost years because they chose the wrong path”. And basically, the laxity of changing orientations will be, imo, very affected, not allowing you to make mistakes, and making education more elitist in the process.
Students therefore started to block university campuses in protest of this reform, and a few days later, groups of fascists (as presented above) started to attack, some of them even being let in by professors and deans themselves.
I would almost say that I’m lucky to already be in a master’s degree, because the state of our educational system is just going downhill imo. I heavily support the students fighting for our rights of education. France has always stated that education is a right, and selection is the opposite of that. And the fact that we’re being under attack by both the police and fascists, tells a lot about what our government thinks of our right to protest and occupy campuses (by the way Campuses are under protection since 1231 and Gregory IX and the police cannot evacuate a campus without authorisation…).
TL;DR : While the previous system of university entry was really complicated and fucked up, the government is trying to make it even harder for students to access to higher education, which led to protests and students occupying campuses. However, we are being met with hostility and violence by both fascist groups and the police that is determined to make our protests stop at any costs.
Additional information : this isn’t the only bad thing that is happening in France at the moment, for example, the government is trying to privatise the national railroad system, which is only gonna make the prices higher and close the smaller lines that “don’t make enough profit”, and railroad workers are also met with the same kind of hostility in the media ; other public services such as airline workers, trash collectors, and public workers, are joining the movement to counter the right-wing politics Macron is trying to implement. The sigh of relief last year when Macron won the elections against extreme right-wing candidate Marine Le Pen was just a sigh of relief that she didn’t win ; most French people (or at least leftist folks like myself) knew that Macron was, is and always will be right-wing. But this level of violence is unprecented, and this is the reason why I support all strikers and their right, because Macron will not stop there.
I hope this explains it all, sorry for the long post but I really needed to talk about it, because everyone in the world that isn’t French and that is praising Macron right now definitely doesn’t know the level of violence we’re enduring right now just because we dare protest for our rights. Police brutality is at an all-time high and protestors can’t even go on strike without masks and first-aid kits with them in case of police forces attacking us. Please support us, we really need it.
March, 11th. While students were occupying a lecture hall in Montpellier’s University of Law, the Dean sent a fascist group helped by two teachers to beat up the students. Three of them ended up in the hospital, the girl in the picture with a fractured skull.
March, 27th. 4,000 students are sitting at Montpellier’s University of Art and Literature . We are voting the continued occupation of the University until all our demands are met. We make sure to include the French President’s resignation in our demands, to be certain that they will never be met. To this day, the university is still occupied.
April, 4th.
“Travaille, consomme et ferme ta gueule ! Et c’est quoi le message qu’on passe aux jeunes ?” “Tout est à nous ! Tout est à nous ! Rien n’est à eux ! Rien n’est à eux ! Tout ce qu’ils ont, ils l’ont volé ! Partage des richesses, partage des savoirs ou alors ça va péter !”
“Work, buy and shut the fuck up! And what’s the message you give to the youth?” “Everything is ours! Nothing is theirs! All they have, they have stolen! Share the wealth, share the knowledge or we will blow everything up!”
National day of strike. 2,700 people in Paris. 1,000 in Lyon. 2,000 in Montpellier. The workers joined the students, the hospital staff, the train and rails staff. Everyone marched, threatened by the CRS (security police) and smoke bombs. We had to stay masked because fascists groups were attacking people leaving the march.
April, 11th
Montpellier: Paul Valery University’s servers hacked, final exams pending
The Dean of my University (Art and Literature) has been a vocal opposant of our movement. In an effort to stop the occupation and threaten us, he has repeatedly refused to come to our meetins, has ignored the decisions made by the teaching staff and threatened to fire teachers who decided to march with us. His last effort has been regarding finals. Because the university is blocked since February (see the post I made), we didn’t have classes and almost no material to take exams. Final week was supposed to be from April 9th to 13th. The Dean ordered the teachers to create online exams for us to send. We received the subjects Friday 6th. I had to write an 18-page-long essay on animation in TWO DAYS. But today, something incredible happened. The plateform used by the university to communicate with students and send our exams was hacked by the protesting students. We can’t access it. We can’t send our exams. Furthermore, an assembly of teachers was held yesterday and they decided that they were going to play on a technicality. The Dean ordered them to make exams; he didn’t say if he wanted the teachers to grade them. A unanimous vote decided that they would give 10 to each student (we are graded on 20 and 10 is the minimum to pass) and bonus point if they give the exams.
Again, I’m begging you, share this around. The governement is purposefully hiding what is happening because they’re afraid it’s going to turn into another May, 1968. Reblog, repost, I don’t care. I just want people to see it. I’m 20 and I’m risking my life when I march.
I HAVE NEWS AND IT’S SCARY
Message from the video games teacher: “Hello everyone. There are rumors of police intervention in the next 48 hours on campus. I’m asking you to share the information, I will personnally be on campus tomorrow all day, as well as Friday. I don’t want to advise you to come, I’d feel too responsable if something happened to you… I do however think that the more students and teachers are here, the less risk there is that the police will come…’
[MORE NEWS]
“New information: a staff meeting is organized tomorrow at 9am by the university’s Dean. We just had Sud Eduction on the phone and they informed us that the meeting is organized in anticipation, to celebrate a very likely victory of the police against the students at 7am. I will be on campus at 6:30am with other teachers to support the students in case the police does come…”
THIS IS SCARY OK. THEY ARE DOING THE SAME THING THAT THE LAW UNI DEAN HAS DONE.
Tomorrow, I will go at 6:30. Let the police come. If they get violent against peaceful students who haven’t touched ANYONE in the two months this protest has been going on, there will be consequences. We will take pictures, we will film. I’m a fucking cinema students and you can bet I’ll send my bloodied face to every fucking news station if they ever lay a finger on me.
Again, I beg you, share this, please. If I’m about to get my face broken, it better be for the greater good.
Hello. You may remember this post I made about the brutal agression of French students, organized by the University’s Dean. I have some updates, if you’re interested. Since Thursday, we haven’t been idle. We went of several marches and protests against the violences, asking for the Dean to step down. As of today, he has been arrested, alongside the History teacher who came with the fascist group and hit the students.
Friday morning, there was still blood on the stairs leading to the Law University. At 1pm, 400 students gathered in front of the uni, where the girl in the picture in my previous post came to explain what happened, before passing out and being transported back to the hospital. Then, we marched to the Prefecture, where we asked to be received by the Prefet. We were, and he listened.
Sunday, there was a fascist march, which we stopped by simply being three times as many and making them run. The police was protecting them from us, even if they were the one who attacked and we haven’t hurt anyone in the two months our strike has been going on.
Tuesday, we held an Assembly at my university, to vote for the continued blocking of the campus, as well as our Dean’s resignation. The picture at the top of this post is when we voted (we were around 3,000 people). As you can see, we won. We vote for the unlimited blocking of the campus until all our demands are met (demands which include the French President’s resignation, only because we know we’ll never get it which means the blocking will never stop).
On Tuesday, the students who were hurt at the Law University went to the Police Station. The police officers refused to receive them, claiming their complain wasn’t acceptable and they were never attacked by fascist. So we sent about 200 students from our Assembly to the Police Station and we basically yelled them into submission. Our friends were received and their complaint heard.
Today, we marched against police violence and fascists groups. We marched fro three hours, we blocked the train station (because the train company employees are striking and we are supporting them). The police treated us like dangerous criminal, and we had to hide our faces because the fascists are taking pictures of us and compiling them to attack us in the street. We were 1,200.
Please share this around, like you did for the first post. Something big is happening. Our friends who were sent to the hospital deserve it.
wupacing 