Reminder: Térence is not an AI, and what he writes comes from his octogenarian human brain. As such, he speaks in the first person, using "I."
A Devastated Youth
A title that could speak for itself.
So great is the scale of the devastation that it is appalling. Although the phenomenon is global, it particularly affects Europe and even more so France. This beautiful country of great culture that has impressed the entire world seems to have embarked on a process of decline, even of self-destruction, which cannot leave one indifferent.
At the time this reflection is being written (mid-October 2026), young people having set out to protest against the deterioration of their living and educational conditions, a vast social movement has shaken the capital and numerous cities across the country. Significant damage to public facilities, even fires at heritage monuments, and hundreds of shops given over to the wrecking and looting of seasoned wreckers ("casseurs") have raised questions about the public-order strategy deployed by the representatives of the state. All the more so since the violence of the police repression against predominantly peaceful demonstrators — and in particular very young high-school students — was out of all proportion to this abandonment, the degree of premeditation of which, and the objective thus pursued, one may well question.
Mael's Testimony
The media and social networks have been full of accounts of these catastrophic events, and will continue to be, and I have no desire to echo them here — knowing, moreover, that more are still to come. This chronicle of past or future disaster is simply debilitating. To see the image of that boy drawn into the demonstration by a more aggressive classmate, a boy barely out of childhood and mutilated for life — knowing that he is not the only one, that others have lost a hand or an eye like him — is simply unbearable, so completely at odds with the cheap values that French society still claims to embody. For we must admit it, each one of us: by conforming to the precepts of this inept republic and its repulsive political class, forever oscillating between manipulation and corruption in order to seize that accursed "power" of which Louise Michel said it is cursed, each of us, thus summoned to identify with a citizenship undergoing accelerated digitisation that increasingly conditions our enslavement, does nothing but validate and ratify the mourning of our own humanity.
These young people are rising up and want to be heard. And let us not forget: while still children, they were severely mistreated during the Covid scam (hand sanitiser by the gallon, social distancing, masks, jabs, guilt-tripping: "You don't realise it, but you're contagious and you're going to kill Grandpa or Grandma"). Now forced to refer constantly to Pronote while at the same time being forbidden to use their phones inside school premises: always the contradictory injunctions of a perverse system. And let us speak of these poorly maintained establishments — no heating, no air-conditioning, overcrowded classes, missing teachers, and so on. There is no need to return to the collapse in results already mentioned on this site.
Criticism is not lacking; National Education is even called a "factory of idiots," the educationists and "pedagogism" are vilified, and proposals for adapting or renovating (?) the formatting abound as well. And one can always trot out the eternal question: "How did we ever get to this point?"
Today people speak of Generation Z: the "zoomers" (as opposed to the "boomer" that I am?!). According to an AI overview, it is "the cohort of people born between 1997 and 2012, these young people who grew up as digital natives, shaped by the omnipresence of the internet, smartphones and social networks." In the 1970s a nihilistic slogan of the British punk movement, "No Future," had flourished. In 2026 this No Future has a painful acuity.
As everyone knows only too well, the most mistreated high-school students are those of the suburbs and especially those of the famous "9-3." Yet we have seen the young people of the great Parisian elite high schools: lycées of "excellence" (!) — Louis-le-Grand, Henri-IV, the Catholic Institute… — show solidarity with these banlieue youth. This solidarity is of course entirely to their credit, but one must also read in it the uncertainty they share with the "disadvantaged" about their own future. For the mutations underway in societies no longer seem capable of being mastered: AI, wars, economic manipulations, the ontological corruption of many of those who govern, the almost uncontrollable cost of living, environmental disasters, the so-called global warming/climate change, and, as far as France is concerned, its quasi-bankruptcy — all of it in an anxiety-inducing cocktail that painfully updates the No Future of the 1970s.
And it is no coincidence that these youth revolts are currently affecting several European countries. The young Chinese-American journalist Danny Haiphong (see A voice... A path ?...) seems to have been particularly shocked by the images of Paris and the major French cities on 17 October 2026. He offers a very pertinent analysis and returns to the deep causes of these events. At present Israel, the United States and the whole of Europe, vassalised to them, are sowing chaos across the world. They are engaged in endless wars, deploying a model of total economic terrorism, thereby provoking maximum austerity and reducing people to absolute poverty.
Yet "Every nation has the government it deserves." This formula, attributed to Montesquieu, is in fact by Joseph de Maistre. In the end it hardly matters. I would willingly update it in light of what is becoming of our culture, our "civilisation" (?), and more particularly, as far as France is concerned, of our youth and our future… What share of responsibility do we bear, individually and collectively, in this drift, this devastation — since, it would seem, we live in a "democracy" and the people of the French nation have indeed brought to power a corrupt elite that is deliberately setting about destroying the country. And this is nothing new!
Thus I feel like quoting Albert Libertad, an anarchist of the late nineteenth century, who does not mince his words, for according to him "the criminal is the voter"… Which may perhaps be connected to the catastrophe and the ambient catastrophism…
The following text:
But I reiterate: I do not define myself as an anarchist. I have no other identity than that of my humanity — this humanity that I have shared with cohorts of children from all over the world and which, in the already advanced autumn of my existence, prompts me to continually renew the call that this site carries: Start at the beginning.
And still with regard to France, if I may, I will add the words of that wonderful singer that was Jean Ferrat: