Why French students are trashing the streets in protest

There's fire in the streets of France again. This is Lille near the Belgian border. For weeks high school students here have forced a chaotic confrontation over the government's priorities demanding the state start investing more in them. France may be a country of revolution and constant protests but one of the things that makes these demonstrations different is how young so many of the protesters are. Some of the protest leaders here are just 14 years old, so young that we needed their parents permission to talk to them. What do you hope this accomplishes this morning? What do you hope comes of this? We hope that the school will close. It also helps put pressure on the government because if everything is burning the government can't ignore us. To understand what's driving this shutdown we went inside the protest movement with one of the main organizers in Lille. in Lille, 16-year-old Souane Roche. We can see respect, respect, respect in different languages. He took us to his high school to show us what the students are fighting for. We're asking for more funding in high schools, classrooms that are much less crowded. We're 35 per class. We have problems with the hallways and boilers. It's very hot in the summer and very, very cold in winter. We just want dignified conditions. As the disruption spread through Paris and beyond, the Macron government offered a temporary fix. Thousands of new substitute teachers. The students called that an empty gesture. But the reality is, France has no room to spend more. The country is facing a precarious debt crisis, with financial markets flashing red. It's an economic burden these teenagers say they refuse to inherit. We've been left an enormous debt. So it'll be up to us to manage that. Except that we don't agree to manage it. It's up to them to pay back this debt because we did not want it. France has one of the most generous social safety nets in Europe where citizens can begin collecting state pensions in their early 60s. Paying the public pensions of France's retirees chews up more than a quarter of the national government's budget. That's more than twice what Canada pays. When the Macron government tried raising the retirement age in 2023 to keep the system solvent, it was met with ferocious resistance and political paralysis that lasts to this day. Yet, when we sat in on a strategy meeting called by the little students, there was little interest in balancing the books by cutting the pensions of their parents and grandparents. I don't think the government should reduce its social spending at all, but they should rather try to increase them and probably decrease budgets to the army and, for example, subsidies to big corporations. They could find the money on the army. And also because we know that a lot of money of the government goes to rich people, so we also think that the money has to go to us, to education. This morning at the school, teachers were blocked from going to their jobs. But many are on side with the students. Basically we want to be with the students, because we want first maybe to protect them and to show them that we are together. But there are no magic solutions to France's debt crisis from the faculty either. Reducing entitlements, they say, should be off the table. People worked a lot and they thought that they would earn this money. So saying to them now, you've worked a lot and you thought that you would have your pension, but no, because we need to give more money to young people, I'm not sure it's the right solution. The stakes are dangerously high. After a student lost part of his arm when a police stun grenade exploded in his hand, authorities stopped using them to try to dial down the violence. The protests come at a time of acute political polarization, with a presidential election coming in six months that could usher in France's first far-right leader. It's a shifting landscape that's fueling a deep sense of fear. We have a lot of fear. We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. Right now, though, there's gridlock. Students are exhausted. With a two-week holiday ahead, France's government is counting on that to freeze the protest's momentum and clear the smoke.