On Monday, 19 October, protestors in Paris led primarily by students from the École du Louvre, alongside other arts and culture students and trade union representatives, blocked the entrances to the Louvre, the world’s largest museum. The demonstration forced the museum to close for the day.
Protests initially began last month in Créteil, a suburb of Paris, with students demonstrating over their substandard school conditions. Issues include chronic teacher shortages and dilapidated building facilities amongst, and protests have quickly spread around the country, escalating to cover a broader range of issues including surging living costs in the country.
The message of this blockade is abundantly clear: to place pressure on the government and to demand better for France’s students, its workers and its people. This is a message that is ever more pertinent not just in France but around the world as increasingly, cuts are made to education and healthcare and money is invested instead into warfare and arms trade.
These events in France resonate with the current state of our university and its leadership’s disrespect of teachers and students through its ruthless cuts to arts programmes in particular.
Seeing the chilling reemergence of police brutality throughout the protests in France, I have found myself thinking back to a scene in Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 film, La Haine, in which Saïd graffitis a poster on the streets of Paris and as the camera closes in, we see the phrase “Le Monde est à Nous,” “The World is Ours.” The goal of protests is always the same: to create disruption, a noise so loud that unjust governing bodies cannot ignore it any longer. Our power as students and people living in this world resides in organisation and mobilisation, a fact we should never forget.
Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
