In every 10th-grade English class, my teacher would greet us with, “Hello, comrades.” At the time, I laughed. We were studying George Orwell’s Animal Farm, after all. But there is something absurd about being taught a warning against totalitarianism while being greeted like a communist revolutionary. Now, watching young people take to the streets of Paris under the banners of revolution, I find myself wondering whether the joke was ever entirely a joke. What happens when an education system stops treating revolution as something to be understood and starts treating it as something to be admired? France may be discovering the answer on its own streets.
It should be no shock that this “student-led movement” mirrored a Bolshevik-type revolution. On Oct. 8, the hard-left leader of La France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Melenchon, posted on X that the Bastille had been “retaken,” a reference to the storming that began the French Revolution. In the same post, he called it a “powerful demonstration by the youth who carry their demands in the most beautiful way possible,” stating that he had “Immense pride.”
