It Began on Mayotte

I'm sorry that Leeja Miller misuses the term Fascist, and that she makes a publicity for lewd toys and I still link to her.

When that begins, skip forward to the 5 min mark, exactly 5:00.

Why Are The French Protesting So Hard?
Leeja Miller | 21 Oct. 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caot5aBLoFk

On August 31st, on the island of Mayotte, a French colonial holding in the Indian Ocean, a group of teachers, parents, and students went on strike, protesting the deplorable and deteriorating conditions at the local high school, which was built for 900 students yet enrolled over 2,200. A week later in French Guiana in South America, another French colony, students began protesting and shutting down their local secondary schools supported by teachers and parents to protest the often dangerous conditions in their schools and the severe teacher shortage caused not by a lack of teachers but by a lack of funding. In Mayotte, for example, over half of public secondary teachers do not have a permanent teaching job. The protests lasted weeks in the French colonies before spreading to mainland France at the end of September when a protest at one school spread, resulting in hundreds of thousands of high school students walking out, shutting down their schools, and taking to the streets to peacefully protest the abhorrent conditions in their schools

In French Guiana and on Mayotte, school is the ticket to a better life in France, sometimes then coming back to form the élite of these countries.

While most lose that lottery, it's still worth taking if it means a theoretic chance to vastly improve your life.

For those protesting in France, the chances are probably (my personal ad hoc assessment) lower.

Many would have been better off in a job for boys or in marriage for girls, if the lycée had just not been compulsory as education if not school presence, and if girls had just still been able to marry from 15.

And in complex jobs, start the apprentissage (apprenticeship) at 15 instead of after the high school at 18.

If anyone when I was 16 had just offered me an apprenticeship on a newspaper (outside school) with some writing assignments, or a pilgrimage or anything rather than my staying at a High School where I actually did get very good grades, my chances would have been better. And I knew for a fact when voting yes to one of my students getting most of his Eighth Grade time reduced to spend time as apprentice with a cook, I was doing him a favour. He is probably a chef by now, but he was so bored, when calculating the area to be covered in paint for a rectangular door with a round hole for a window, he instead calculated a square hole in a huge ellipse. If he has any trouble finding a decoration for his restaurant, I'd be happy to show how his math result would actually look so he could use that for decoration. Unless someone else already did so. Including himself.

Probably he thought, very correctly, that you just make sure you have enough paint, and then you'll have paint left once the door is painted. No need to calculate. He did correct the result when I pointed it out, he wasn't dense, he was just uninterested, and very justifiably so, in school subjects.

People from Mayotte or French Guiana are not just counting on the leverage that education as such may give them, they probably have quotas.

Meanwhile, High Schools apparently really are in a bad shape, and having fewer students, shorter hours (which would reduce class size) is apparently not up for debate, even if I suggested it.

Macron after early protests tried to get petrol. Now, that resource is becoming scarce due to the situation in the Persian Gulf. Some who raised Palestinian flags during the riots are conscious of what role IL played herein.

And high fuel prices are raising prices and so devaluating the monetary resources they had previously. Going local might not be bad, like Harrys is made in only four places in France, while the baker is making bread in every street corner. Meanwhile, that has made it less easy to pay for good High Schools. When Macron left after early protests to get more petrol, that was not tonedeaf, he was actually looking for a solution.

I'm not inviting anyone to protest tomorrow, and especially not to riot.

But I am also not saying police can continue things like the blinded girl or the boy who got hands destroyed in repressing riots.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Roman of Rouen
23.X.2026

Rotomagi sancti Romani Episcopi.

I might add that compensating small business is not a bad thing and compensating those hurt by police, as hands or eyes, won't make that too expensive./HGL