France needs a Mai 68: rise up and start over soundly

Y. Bensalem — Alger, Algérie — 2026-11-02

The assessment: a country that counts its dead

Let us revisit what this week has administered. A racist attack strikes Trappes. Deaths. And the government — thirty-six members — could not find one hour for the victims' tribute. A deputy from the majority even found the right word, without meaning to: « racism is not fought with marketing symbols ». There is the admission. The France of 2026 no longer counts its living: it counts its dead, and draws from them the lessons it sells abroad. A country that treats its own dead as « marketing » is not governed: it is administered by contempt.

Mai 68, the reminder: when France knew how to rise

There was a time when France did not look away. In May 1968, it rose — not to destroy, but to say no. Ten million strikers, the largest general strike in its history, a society that stopped to look itself in the face. Mai 68 was not a civil war: it was a cure. A purge through the street, through the strike, through the word. And that is precisely what today's France lacks: not Molotov cocktails, but millions of broken silences, machines that stop, and a government that remembers to whom it must answer.

What must be swept away

And there is plenty to sweep away. The State that sorts its children. The State that made Islamophobia a policy. The State that lectures Algeria and the Sahel while its banlieues die. The State that calls the tribute to its dead « marketing ». This is not a government crisis: it is a crisis of legitimacy. When contempt becomes the official language, the answer is not a motion of censure — it is a street that rises. A Mai 68 is not a putsch: it is the people reminding the State that it is only its employee.

The conclusion

France will not start over soundly through a reform, a reshuffle, or a « national tribute » presided over with the fingertips. It will start over through an uprising — the kind of uprising it knew in 1968, and has forgotten since. Let it rise. Let it stop. Let it sweep away what rots at the top — not through hatred, but through truth. You do not heal a country by changing the curtains; you heal it by opening the windows. And France's windows have been closed for sixty years.