How institutionalisation of a movement fosters protest: The case of student protests in France Open Access

This paper explains how institutionalisation can go hand in hand with the use of more disruptive tactics by social actors. Inspired by a feminist conceptualisation of the social movement institutionalisation process, we adopt a fluid definition of the state–society division and attend to how institutional actors and groups negotiate their relationships at different scales of protest. To illustrate our argument, we take a closer look at the student movement in France. Based on the analysis of higher education policies between 2005 and 2016, and 16 semi-structured interviews conducted with key actors, we identify a process of partial institutionalisation whereby student organisations are regulated by different material conditions depending on the scale of protest. These material conditions, translated through institutional arrangements, shape the ways in which student organisations build identity boundaries among them, thereby leading to the use of different tactics of protest.

Grassroots social movement activists often view institutionalisation with suspicion. They fear being coopted into state institutions, being forced to accept the rules of negotiation with state actors, and losing their autonomy. The political process approach to the study of social movements has generally supported this tendency. Defining movement institutionalisation as

This line of work has traditionally equated the consequences of institutionalisation with a change in movement tactics towards less disruption¹ (Ancelovici & Chicoine, 2021).

Like other movements across Europe (Klemenčič et al., 2015), the student movement in France² has become highly institutionalised since the 1980s, especially after the adoption of the Jospin Law in 1989. In fact, this law constitutes a turning point in the institutionalisation of the student movement in France by legally recognising student unions, providing institutional arrangements to sustain them financially, and formally defining their representational functions in different institutions, including university governance. While this high degree of institutionalisation should have typically led to a decline of protest, the student movement has continued to mobilise significantly, as evidenced by large-scale mobilisations that have marked the last decades (in 2006 and 2016 for example). For this reason, the French student movement represents an informative case study. To unpack this process of institutionalisation and its impact on protest, we focus our analysis on different scales at which the process of institutionalisation has unfolded, namely local and national, as well as on student mobilisations that have taken place between 2005 and 2016. To do so, we rely on a public policy analysis of the higher-education sector and on 16 interviews with key actors of institutionalised student and university organisations.

The literature on social movement institutionalisation has traditionally questioned the relationship between one specific aspect of institutionalisation, namely the funding of social movement organisations, and the tactics used by social actors (Jenkins & Eckert, 1986). Relying on a vast data set for Canada (the Federal Public Accounts), Corrigal-Brown and Mabel (2017, p. 1615) show that the funding of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) by the state will differently impact movements and organisations, depending on the sector at play and on the nature of the groups funded. For instance, when one looks at the sector related to the advancement of women, funding appears to have varying effects on how groups organise advocacy activities. Under the Canadian Conservative government, more service providers received support from the state, but fewer advocacy groups were funded (even if the total amount was higher than what the previous Liberal government had provided). This has had an impact on the capacity of the whole sector to mobilise contentiously, with the ability to protest being further limited by the cutting of funds for advocacy groups which had planned and routinised their work based on a recurrent amount of funding. In the French student movement that we detail here, the impact of funding on nationally represented student unions is twofold. First, funding allows them to have paid or compensated staff to focus on the work of representing student interests at the university and at the state level. Second, it provides them with resources to carry out their associational work, including being active within their national federation, providing local services to students, and to some extent mobilising politically.

Beyond funding, scholars have also considered the (collective) interest of the actors involved in ‘making’ institutionalisation happen. Several studies from Quebec and Canada have done this by proposing the idea of ‘conflictual cooperation’ to describe the way in which some social movement organisations play the government’s game in order to modify the rules from the inside, while at the same time leaving open the possibility of protest outside the state (Laforest, 2000; Lamoureux, 1994; White, 1992, 2012). Focusing on South Korea, Kim (2016) also stresses the coexistence of conflicting trends; one leading towards the institutionalisation of social movement actors and the other in persistent defiance of institutionalised politics. Kim defines defiant institutionalisation as a process in which protest activities are routinised within policymaking but in which social movement actors have not completely embraced the norms and practices of the political establishment. According to him, defiant institutionalisation is possible when social movements are characterised by both strong internal cohesion and a high level of autonomy vis-à-vis political parties and the government. Different proportions of these two qualities will result in different patterns of institutionalisation.

This line of work attempts to open the ‘institutionalisation process’ box, looking at it in a more detailed and empirical way, and considering both the relationship between actors and their behaviours, as well as the context in which it happens. As White aptly summarises: ‘institutions are not at the heart of institutionalisation histories’ (our translation) (2019), meaning that the effect of institutionalisation will also depend on the social relations that exist at a specific moment in time. In this paper, we propose to follow this line of inquiry, further inspired by a feminist conceptualisation of institutionalisation. As Jenson and Lépinard (2009) argue, feminist perspectives can be applied to non-feminist objects (like student movements) and are not limited to gender variables. They can also have a theoretical contribution, highlighting other political dimensions (like scales of protest) and conceptualisation (like the state) (Lovenduski, 2015). The theoretical part of the paper returns to this alternative way of looking at and conceiving of institutionalisation.

Accordingly, we look at both the ‘material’ aspects of institutionalisation—how it is translated into rules, norms, and institutional arrangements, as well as what kinds of relationships it creates among social actors—and its cultural and collective identity dimension (Staggenborg & Taylor, 2005)—and what it opens up in terms of the internal collective identity of the social movement. We argue that a certain type of institutionalisation, which we hereby call ‘partial institutionalisation,’³ offers favourable conditions for protest actors to choose, and continue to choose over time, disruptive tactics, as opposed to other less contentious tactics. To illustrate our argument, we take a closer look at the student movement in France. Our objective is not to establish a single causality, nor is it to offer a direction to this causality; rather, it is to trace the (relational) changes that have been induced by changes in the governance of student representation.

The paper is divided as follows. First, we outline our feminist conceptualisation of institutionalisation of social movements, and in the second section we detail our methodological design. Third, we briefly expose the historical process of institutionalisation of the higher-education movement in France and elaborate on the evolution of the student movement between 2005 and 2016. In the final part of the paper, we unpack the process of ‘partial institutionalisation’, focusing on the material and cultural dimensions at play among student groups and on their differentiation by scales of protest.

For a long time, feminist perspectives on social movements have proposed to re-interpret the notion of ‘institutionalisation’ as a continuum between insiders and outsiders and have pointed out that the separation between state and society is not as clear-cut as some scholars contend (Katzenstein, 1998). They thus posit that social movements potentially cut across the state transversally and simultaneously pressure decision-makers to effect change from within and without relying on the state (Banaszak, 2010; Bereni & Révillard, 2012, 2018). They also evoke how institutionalisation processes can also lead to resistance from within institutional frameworks (Leboucher, 2023; Romerio, 2022). In the same vein, Masson (2015) argues that debates about institutionalisation in the social movement literature are built upon an idealised representation of the emergence phase of movements and do not adequately consider the fact that movements continue to change over time. She proposes a more relational, non-linear understanding of institutionalisation. Furthermore, authors such as Suh (2011) have advocated for approaching institutionalisation as a dynamic social process, a relationship in which both state actors and social movement actors play a role and negotiate their interactions. It follows that the relationship between disruption and institutionalisation is unclear.

Institutionalisation provides resources, not only in terms of grants but also in terms of recognition, that could be used by activists to foster protest (Blanchard et al., 2018; Stoffel, 2007). As these authors stress, the process of institutionalisation changes not only the material dimensions of a movement but also the way in which a movement defines itself in relation to others and to state institutions. In her work, Stoffel shows convincingly how the Chilean feminist movement progressively entered an institutionalisation process that also fostered its capacity to act autonomously. Several authors have also highlighted the importance of taking into account and analysing this cultural dimension of institutionalisation. For example, in her work on gay and lesbian activists in Poland, Chetaille (2013, pp. 20–21) shows that because Polish local organisations depend on Western European partners for funding, their discourse is mainly oriented towards these Western partners, creating at some points confusion about what their main target is (the Polish government or the Western world) and what it is they are fighting for (advocacy for gay and lesbian rights in Poland or fighting against Western stereotypes about homophobia in Poland). Studying women's NGO networks in the European Union, Lang (2012) shows how ‘the specific governance culture within the EU provides specific access points, and these in turn shape the advocacy repertoire of activists’ (p. 167). Building upon Monforte (2010), Paternotte (2016) also demonstrates why movement identity is as important as other factors (like institutional opportunities) to understand why a civil society group transforms into an NGO. In essence, the way a group imagines its own activism should be taken into account (Paternotte, 2016, p. 398). The process of institutionalisation thus comprises material and cultural implications for movements which must both be analysed.

Building on these studies, we look beyond static indicators and treat institutionalisation as a dynamic, non-linear process in which social and political actors are constantly confronting one another, negotiating their statuses and their privileged modes of interaction. We add to this theoretical perspective a concern with the scale of protest, very present in critical feminist studies (see Masson, 2009). A scale of protest is different from an institutional level, which is a given, established by institutions. The former is the result of struggles among social movement actors and their environment (including institutional actors) and illustrates the scope of their actions (Brenner, 2004; Jessop et al., 2008; Peck & Tickell, 1994). As such, three dimensions are to be considered if we want to analyse the process of institutionalisation from a feminist perspective: the material, cultural, and scalar dimensions. Of course, feminist scholars are not the only ones who insist on the importance of unpacking the cultural dimension (Staggenborg & Taylor, 2005). In line with Melucci (1995, 1996), social movement scholars have also advocated for a ‘more “processual” approach that uses the concept of collective identity as an analytical tool . . . to better understand how collective mobilisation can occur and be sustained in complex societies’ (Maddison & Shaw, 2012, p. 416). In that sense, as Maddison and Shaw stress, ‘conflict and disagreement play an important role in these processes of collective identity’ (2012, p. 418). In the following sections, we explore how conflicts around ‘us’ versus ‘them’—a fairly common mechanism for understanding the reproduction of social movements—along with differently regulated scales of protest allow us to see a different dimension of the institutionalisation process.

In the case studied herein, we can see that the French student movement is partially institutionalised, in the sense that the degree of institutionalisation varies depending on the scale of protest that is being considered. Such disjunction generates tensions and contradictions that shape the movement’s repertoire of actions. To begin, the legislative framework pertaining to student groups concerns associations on a national scale. It designates which student groups will be recognised by the state and by university bodies and determines how many resources they will receive. Typically, federations that represent local associations tend to be designated as national representatives, meaning that they are the ones that receive funding; the federations then redistribute the money locally, according to their own internal rules, to their affiliated local association. Aside from the national federations, a myriad of other formal associations and affinity groups can and do exist, but they are neither financed by the state nor formally recognised and/or included in university governance bodies; they do, however, participate in local student elections (see Dufour et al., 2021). Thus, what goes on at the local scale (i.e. at the university level) partially escapes the regulation of the legislative framework. As such, student protests at a local scale happen outside the institutional arrangement, which is established at the national scale, and additionally take place outside formal university structures. In this sense, because the institutional arrangement oversees what happens outside university structures and overlooks unrecognised student groups and their protest activities, the institutionalisation process does not appear to be complete, but rather partial.

Beyond the scalar dimension, this partial institutionalisation process includes a materiality dimension (through funding and legal recognition by institutions), as well as a cultural dimension (the identity-building dimension that defines an ‘us’ versus ‘them’). We argue that, taken together, they contribute to explain the trajectory of the student movement in France during the period considered. We further show that two processes are at play. First, competition for national representation has led to two main federations that compete for funding and recognition (one of them had a quasi-monopoly on representation before 1989). These national federations tend to mostly provide services to members and to cooperate with the state and university institutions. This first process leads to a second one, whereby non-affiliated and decentralised actors at a local scale (university) gain visibility as they occupy the space of protest left vacant by the national organisations. Some of these actors favour disruptive tactics and confrontation with the state through direct actions such as occupations, as well as confrontation with university institutions orchestrated through local, and more or less informal, networks.

Considering this and building upon a feminist neo-institutionalist argument as detailed earlier, we contend that institutional frameworks have produced the conditions that have sustained student contention because of the partial institutionalisation of the student movement. In so doing, not only do we operationalise institutionalisation as a dynamic process (like most of the recent literature on the subject), but we focus our analysis on institutionalisation at different scales of protest and on its translation into specific tactics of protest, which has been much less investigated in the existing literature.

The period hereby considered is marked by the two largest student mobilisations that emerged after the adoption of the Jospin Law in 1989. As we explain below, this law changed the institutional set-up of student representation, as evidenced by the protest in reaction to the Contrat Première Embauche (CPE) in 2006 and the protest in response to the Loi Travail⁴ in 2016. The largest mobilisation that had happened before that was in 1986, namely before the adoption of the Jospin Law. The period chosen for the analysis is also marked by smaller protests that took place before and after those two large mobilisations (2005, 2008, 2009, 2014); their regularity is equally striking.

This paper relies on three kinds of data. First, we conducted a Protest Event Analysis (PEA) for the period covering 2005–2016 by drawing on data from one national newspaper, Libération. The PEA research was conducted to identify patterns and trends of student protest during the chosen period. This allowed us to establish a relationship between the intensity of protest and the use of disruptive (and less disruptive) tactics with potential governance changes.

In order to select relevant news articles, we used a range of pre-determined keywords for identifying tactics (i.e. demonstration, occupation, petition, blockade), the main actors, the targets, and the claims. We then coded the articles systematically using a coding sheet. Since a PEA depends on media coverage of protest events and thus cannot provide an exact and exhaustive portrait of mobilisations, we are well aware that this instrument presents several methodological concerns (for a discussion of the merits and limits of PEA, see Fillieule, 2007; Hutter, 2014). Nevertheless, the newspaper we have chosen, Libération, remains the newspaper that is more likely to discuss student protests, in part because of its anchoring at the left of the political spectrum and its proximity to social struggles (which is not the case of Le Monde, a more mainstream newspaper, or Le Figaro, which is more conservative). Considering the lack of other available data, PEA remains crucial for understanding the intensity of student protests, but it was just a point of departure. With this set of data we were able to verify the puzzle: that despite having been institutionalised over time, the French student movement continues to be a major contentious actor in French society.

Second, we conducted a public policy analysis of the higher education sector in France between 2005 and 2016. We looked at the main reforms, legislative changes, and parliamentary debates and commissions. At some point, it appeared necessary to look at what had been put in place earlier, for example to understand why the funding of national student associations was the way that it was in 2005 and after. For these reasons, laws adopted before the period under consideration are mentioned throughout the rest of the paper. Finally, the public policy analysis focused on three elements: institutional recognition of student associations, funding, and changes, both financial and administrative, in the management of universities. This research step was crucial to understand how the governance of student representation changed during the period considered herein, further constituting a (changing) public intervention regime in the postgraduate education sector (Dufour, forthcoming). These data are mainly used in the third part of the paper.

Third, we rely on 16 semi-structured interviews conducted with key actors involved in the student movement (see Appendix for details). Most of them were involved in the two most important national student organisations, namely Fédération des associations générales étudiantes (FAGE) and Union nationale des étudiants de France (UNEF). Meeting with these national associations’ former presidents and vice-presidents was particularly heuristic for our research strategy for two main reasons. First, it allowed us to better understand the collective strategies decided and implemented by the national associations in their representation work with the state, as well as the internal relations established with their affiliated local groups. Second, because we met with them after they had left office, they were able to put their actions into perspective and to offer an a posteriori analysis which enabled us to grasp how they positioned themselves in terms of the tactics they chose and what they expected from them. At the time of the interview, most respondents were pursuing a professional career, either in their main field of studies (for example: social sciences, management, engineering), or, for some of them, in politics. As the Appendix shows, a majority of student associations’ former presidents were men.

The interviews were coded using NVivo to facilitate a thematic analysis. For this paper we specifically used the following themes: relations with universities, relations with government, allies, and claims. In analysing the interview material, we isolated three types of data: the actors’ own conception of their political work; how they situate themselves in relation to other organisations and within their own organisation; and the internal considerations and procedures that have preceded the different strategic choices that were made at specific moments of mobilisation or negotiation (generally at the time of reforms). With all these data, we focus qualitatively on the lobbying work at play at the national and the university levels to better understand the impact that institutionalisation has had on the relationship between and within student organisations.

Student movements are shaped by the social density and ecology of campuses. They are peculiar in that participants are biographically available (McAdam, 1986); however, their presence on campus is transient. Because of this temporary character, formal student organisations play a crucial role in ensuring continuity across student cohorts (Ancelovici & Dupuis-Déri, 2014, pp. 9–13). The first national student association, UNEF, was created in 1907, and was initially a federation of the local student general assemblies (Assemblée Générale Étudiante, AGE). Other student associations have existed over the years, but UNEF has always been the most representative organisation. The first recognition of student associations by the state—primarily UNEF—occurred through the creation of the Conseil Régional et National des Œuvres Universitaires et Scolaires in 1955 (CROUS and CNOUS), which are local and national councils that provide students diverse goods, such as housing and scholarships. The executive boards of these councils were composed in equal parts by public authorities and by students. They have served as a major source of funding for UNEF.

The history of the French student movement since the turn of the 20th century has mainly been the story of UNEF, which presented itself—and was seen as—politically neutral. However, after World War II, and especially during and after the events of May 1968, UNEF became more politically committed (Monchablon, 1983). It was in this context that the Faure Law (Loi Faure), adopted in 1968, formalised student participation in decision-making processes. This law created councils in which students are represented at the university level. Members of student associations are elected to these councils, from which they can also serve on a national council (Conseil National de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche, CNESER). The implementation of the Faure Law structured the debates within the student movement (Ferhat & Poucet, 2016), particularly within UNEF. Student associations have traditionally been closely aligned with political parties and, until 1989, they were mainly organised along a left–right cleavage. The political division between the Union nationale interuniversitaire (UNI) (aligned with right-wing parties) and UNEF (aligned with left-wing parties) has, for instance, been amply acknowledged within the literature (Argibay, 2014; Bargel, 2009; Muxel et al., 2004).

The election of the Socialist Party in 1981 was accompanied by a strong desire to deepen student representation in decision-making processes within higher education. For example, the Savary Law (1984) included student representation within three councils: the Conseil Supérieur de l’Éducation (CSE), CNESER, and CNOUS. Moreover, the motivation for the Jospin Law in 1989 was to confer a legal status on student organisations, similar to the status of professional organisations and unions (Morder, 2007a, p. 133). At the time, UNEF was divided into several factions, which were formally recognised by the organisation. The main faction of UNEF, UNEF–Indépendante et démocratique (UNEF-ID), supported the law and participated in the student elections (Morder, 2007b), while UNEF–Solidarité étudiante (UNEF-SE) (the minority faction) was against it. This law created the label of ‘representative national associations’—with at least one seat in the national councils, CNOUS and CNESER—and also allocated subsidies to these associations. At the same time, FAGE was created and became the first national representative association, ahead of UNEF, in 2015.

Before the Jospin Law, funding was mostly provided through the allocation of premises and ‘indirect subsidies’ and was mainly managed at the local level. With the legislative changes of 1989, student organisations were required to band together nationally to compete for funding. Since the leftist government wanted to gain national supporters through this reform, it also ensured that the national level would be the main field of action for student organisations. The higher-education sector in France has been traditionally—since the Loi Savary—recognised as highly centralised, with the state regulating the sector through funding, recruitment, and even property management (Cytermann & Aimé, 2019). Since all important decisions were made at the level of the state, negotiations with different actors, including student representatives, were organised at this level. Henceforth, with the funding of their associations now being dependent on election results, the student movement increasingly focused itself on the quest for representation through electoral competition (Legois et al., 2007).

During the period under consideration, the student movement was composed of several national associations. There was UNEF, traditionally and openly close to the Socialist Party, and the UNI, which was closer to the conservative right. Between 1980 and 2001, there were two UNEF branches: UNEF-ID (closer to the socialist party) and UNEF-SE (closer to the far-left). In 2001, a redesigned UNEF was created, but political streams continue to exist within it.⁵ Other associations included the FAGE and the Promotion et défense des étudiants (PDE), which presented themselves as non-partisan. UNEF and FAGE were the two main national associations competing in the CNOUS and CNESER elections during the period under study; the FAGE has in fact been winning more seats than UNEF since 2015 (Leboucher & Dufour, 2022). As previously mentioned, other associations were also active at the local level, such as Solidaires Étudiants, but they were not formally recognised by the legislative framework in place.⁶

A new game was therefore being played at the national level among the actors involved. This was not only because of the dependence on electoral results for financial subsidies⁷ but also because it provided them access to a form of representation within the arena of university governance, be it at the national level (on national councils) or at the local level, within individual universities and local councils. For national student associations, this implied being less oriented towards protest work and more towards representational work (Morder, 2020^,8; see also Dufour et al., 2021). A similar pattern can be found elsewhere. For example, Brooks et al. (2015) show how the role of student unions in the UK has changed over the last decade, with more emphasis being placed on representation, more importance given to permanent staff rather than elected staff, and greater congruence between the interests of managers and the interests of student unions. All these changes have had an impact on the role and place of student organisations, which tend to engage in more cooperative work with national and local university representatives.

After 1989, because funding was entirely dependent on student participation, local ‘corporatist’⁹ associations created the FAGE as a way to obtain subsidies (Leboucher & Dufour, 2022). Since then, the FAGE has come to be considered the primary representative student association,¹⁰ after decades of monopolistic representation by UNEF. The federative form of the FAGE emphasises the separation between local and national work. For a long time, local associations were hardly even identifiable as members of the national federation (the FAGE). As a former FAGE president said:

As our interviews with former UNEF and FAGE presidents indicate, election campaigns were important moments for national associations to make their presence on local campuses more noticeable to student members. In the history of the FAGE, elections were seen as an opportunity to become more visible as an entity at the national level, thereby distinguishing itself from other ‘apolitical’¹¹ groups, such as the short-lived PDE, which lost its claim to representation at the national level in 2018. As that same former FAGE president explained: With this new game being played, the FAGE progressively appeared to be better equipped than UNEF, mostly because it presented itself as a reformist organisation, willing to negotiate and cooperate with university presidents and administrators. FAGE was, as a result, in a better position to find support for its organisation amongst university decision-makers. In fact, most of the local associations gathered within the FAGE were seen by their opponents as ‘corpos’, i.e. organisations exclusively dedicated to student life and activities. As another former FAGE president explained: Indeed, the FAGE worked hard to acquire expertise in subjects pertaining to higher education and as such developed training groups for its members. With the exception of protesting against far-right candidates in 2002, and against the CPE campaign in 2006, they rarely took part in demonstrations. Blockades or occupations have furthermore never been part of their repertoire of action. With the FAGE becoming UNEF’s main opponent and France’s main national student association, the polarisation between the two has deepened. What is more, with the political competition moving towards a bipartite game between UNEF and the FAGE, political divisions between the left and the right (between UNI and UNEF), as well as within the left (especially between the two UNEFs) have been largely relegated to the margins. Alternatively, the tension between ‘apolitical corporatism and politicised trade unionism’ (Le Mazier et al., 2014) has become a new identity boundary between the two main national associations, crystallized through the ongoing institutional arrangement described earlier.

If this was the end of the story, what the extant literature predicts as ‘classic’ institutionalisation would most likely be right: that more incorporation into institutions will bring about less disruptive tactics on the part of social actors. But because the institutionalisation process of France’s student movement remains partial, this is not the end of the story. As national associations began devoting a lot of energy towards campaigns and elections (both at a national and a local level), primarily to access and secure state funding, they also worked at distinguishing themselves from other associations. This process, involving both a relationship between national and local members and a relationship amongst associations, further spurred a boundary identity-building process that crystallized each organisation’s label, having an impact on the main tactics used by the movement. With the FAGE investing more work into its role as a national representative association and having a growing presence at the national level, UNEF became constrained to follow FAGE’s footsteps. Not only did it invest more time into its representative work at a national scale, but in doing so left open a space for protest at the local scale.

Our PEA data provide a clear illustration of the recurrence of student protests between 2005 and 2016. As Figure 1 shows, there are important peaks of mobilisation in 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2014, and 2016. These instances of significant mobilisation illustrate the capacity of student groups to coordinate and strongly mobilise for a specific period. The tactics used are often very disruptive—including demonstrations, occupations, and blockades. As Figure 2 shows, 70% of the tactics reported by the Libération newspaper were of that kind. As previously mentioned, these figures should not be taken as ‘hard data’ because some protest events reported by newspapers did not contain information on the modes of actions used. We can only conclude that among the protest events reported by newspapers and for which we have information relative to the specific mode of action used, disruptive tactics were a major part of the student movement’s arsenal during the period under study. Nevertheless, even if the information reported by the newspaper does not allow for the attribution of one or more tactics to a particular student organisation, we know that the FAGE does not use demonstrations as a tactic, nor blockades or occupations. With this in mind, how can we make sense of this data?

The incomplete character of the institutionalisation process opens the possibility for student organisations to equate their identities with their preferred strategies.¹² While FAGE and UNEF progressively turned towards adopting lobbyist/cooperation strategies and engaging in service provision to members, others continued to use more disruptive tactics, particularly at the local scale of protest. It is in this regard that the partial institutionalisation of the student movement in France has done more than intensify the electoral competition between associations: it also intervened in the identity-building process and on how collective actors define themselves versus the others. Differently put, it shifted the protest work from the national to the local scale, with national representative associations being more focused on electoral competition, even at the local level. These changes have made it possible for disruptive tactics to become more visible, to occupy the local protest space, and even rally non-affiliated activists. In fact, student associations in France have to count on the fieldwork of their activists to recruit local membership. It is important to clarify that the political cleavage still exists inside UNEF between the ‘majo’ (the majority), which is the camp that obtains the most seats on the national committee, and the ‘mino’ (the minority), which is generally aligned with the far-left-wing organisations. This internal structuring still affects the mode of action that student activists develop. The ‘majo’ favours negotiation with the government, whereas the ‘mino’ dedicates most of its time and resources into mobilisation on campus. The following remark of a member of the ‘mino’ camp highlights its repercussions on student actions and illustrates the vision that activists have of their political work inside the union, which is further entrenched in the internal division of UNEF:

UNEF has continued to support mobilisations and, thanks to the local mobilisation work of the minority current, was in a position to do so by transforming local actions and occupations (not organised by UNEF) into bigger demonstrations at the national scale, as they had done in 2006 and 2016. But these mobilisations no longer begin at the national level of organisation; they are instead started by local groups that are often non-affiliated with these national associations. Indeed, the progressive decline of UNEF has led to the emergence of independent and autonomous groups and associations more visible and more able to occupy the local scale of protest.

According to several of our respondents, the relative weight of formalised student organisations, such as UNEF, within national coordinations¹³ created at the time of major mobilisations, has changed over the period. As Le Mazier (2014) notes, national coordinations bring together delegates from general assemblies held at the university level. As a former member of Solidaires Étudiants recalled:

One of the consequences of this change is that autonomous and non-affiliated students have been able to impose forms of self-mobilisation, relatively far from what the UNEF used to do, at local general assemblies where affiliated and non-affiliated activists rub shoulders. Several of the local university blockades that have happened during the period under study are linked to this particular structuring of student mobilisations (see also Dufour et al., 2021).

The 2007–2009 mobilisation against university reform (Loi sur la Réforme de l’Université, LRU), which resulted in the autonomisation of ‘competitive’ universities, is a good example of the mechanisms created by the institutionalisation of the French student movement. At the time—and just after huge strikes and demonstrations against the labour reform of the CPE in 2006—the right-wing government threatened to make master’s degrees selective and to increase tuition fees. UNEF’s National Bureau chose to negotiate with the government and for a while publicly refused to call for widespread mobilisation. Yet, blockades were being set up in some universities—with some UNEF activists mobilising within their own universities—and an independent national assembly was created to bring together student actions.

For the majority of the UNEF members that we met, 2007 was a turning point for the association in terms of strategy, in part because the law had an impact on the structure of negotiations that they did not anticipate. As a former UNEF local President explained:

As another former UNEF local President added: With the reforms adopted from 2005 onwards, in particular the laws adopted in 2007 (LRU law) and 2013 (Fioraso law), university management changed drastically. More power was transferred to university presidents in terms of human resources and real estate management, as well as in terms of curricular offerings. In other words, universities have become more autonomous in the managerial sense. These changes have not only modified the relationship between the state and universities but have also modified the relationship students and student associations have with universities, with the latter obtaining managerial power over their institution, including repression.¹⁴ As such, starting with the conflict over the LRU, things began to change and several university presidents gave evacuation orders, sometimes in a very coordinated way (in 2009 and 2016 in particular). As a former university President explained, ‘in Paris, in the end, it was only the EHESS that reaffirmed the issue of the university's openness, saying no, the CRS are not coming in. At Nanterre it's systematic. The first threat is that we're going to evacuate you. So there's something that's changing in this student movement’ (Interview 14).

Thus, the role of local associations as instigators of protest within the movement has strengthened, making local (autonomous) student protest more visible. This trend is not entirely new. Jalabert (2020, p. 137) found a similar result for the 1995 protest in Toulouse-Le Mirail University, which served as a prelude to the protests that ensued in Toulouse and more broadly across France. This form of protest seems to have become much more common in the period under consideration (2005–2016). It expressed a real internal conflict between university actors that went beyond opposition to government policies. The local scale of protest expressed not only a local grievance towards a national issue (a public policy) but also revealed divergences inside the student movement within each university.

Although occurring outside the period under study, several protest events that have been observed after 2016 appear to confirm this finding. In 2018, for example, student protests against the Loi relative à l’orientation et à la réussite des étudiants (ORE law) were observed in several universities, with numerous blockades organised in Toulouse, Lille, Rennes, Nantes, Montpellier, Bordeaux, and Paris. These were for the most part organised by local autonomous groups but were sustained by UNEF and other student associations—like Étudiants Solidaires (Calfuquir-Henriquez & Coléou, 2019; Melchior, 2018). Furthermore, the new repressive powers granted to university presidents¹⁵ through the successive university governance reforms of the last decades have reinforced this trend whereby the local scale has become the space in which contention happens. To go back to the 2018 example cited above, police forces have been called to evacuate university campuses in several locations. This particular moment of observed repression has come to define in part student movement dynamics, rendering the local scale the ‘hot-spot’ for conflict.

This paper attempted to show that institutionalisation is a dynamic contentious social process in which a variety of actors (local and national, state and non-state) are engaged in constant negotiations about their respective statuses and obligations, as well as their relationships. In France, the 1989 Jospin Law opened the possibility for electoral competition among national student associations and produced underinvestment in terms of protest at the local level by the traditional main national association, UNEF. Of course, the organisational collapse of the political left (especially the Socialist party) with which UNEF was very closely aligned, did play a role in this story, but this on its own remains insufficient to explain why the FAGE emerged, why it succeeded, and above all, why disruption is still very much present. After all, changing governing rules should have created conditions conducive to the use of less disruptive tactics.

Looking at processes of institutionalisation can help us understand how state–society relations have developed over time in a given sector. This implies that we take path dependency processes seriously. Indeed, the development of the student movement shows that some events and moments were critical in shaping interests, strategies, and interactions. These moments are generally linked to changing public norms that transformed the sector within which the movement is operating. The argument here, however, is that to understand the form of student process and its trajectory, we must look beyond specific public policies and their content. Student protest is not only a mechanical response to (conservative or right-wing) public policies, but also the result of the changing framework of student representation in the sector of higher-education and the dynamics such change creates between different actors. It also indicates that if student protest is alive, it is not only due to an ongoing renewal of the movement’s energy by the generational effect produced by iterative student cohorts. While that particular characteristic of student protest does play a role in explaining the radical dimension of protest and its reproduction, our study shows that student protest does not happen in a vacuum and that some immaterial and cultural dimensions are also important to consider. The feminist conceptualisation of institutionalisation we were inspired by allows us to explain why disruptive tactics are still used by part of the movement. Distinguishing between scales of protest further proved to be very relevant. As partial institutionalisation shaped the division of activists, work among student organisations, the work of political representation evolved on a national scale, while the work of protest occurred at a local scale, targeting national public policy through local disruptive actions set within universities.

Finally, looking at trajectories of institutionalisation helps us see how contention and institutionalisation can co-exist and even feed from one another. In view of cultivating a better understanding of why the student movement in France has developed as it has, we are able to propose two further avenues for research. First, in the sector of higher education, it would be very interesting to explore other societies in which student movements figure at the forefront of protest and social changes in order to consider the extent to which they too have developed a process of partial institutionalisation. In Quebec, Britain, and Spain, student social movements have played and are playing a leading role in contentious politics, not just in the sector of education but also in environmental struggles, housing and labour issues, and in the struggle against police repression and/or democratic claims. It would be important to study such national contexts in order to better understand how movement tactics and strategies are developed. Our comparative research on Quebec’s higher education sector and student movement advocates for the relevant use of this inspired feminist conceptualisation of institutionalisation. With this comparative research, we have seen that partial institutionalisation does not happen in the French context only; Quebec also has a similar structure, even if the formally recognised scale for student associations is local rather than national. Interestingly, in the two cases (France and Quebec), the student movement appears to rebuild itself along the line designed by formal regulation of student representation. It pushes the local Quebec associations to recreate a new national coalition, while in France some national associations merged (UNEF and the Alternatives) in the hope of winning student elections. We might investigate whether the kind of partial institutionalisation that we have identified here can be found in other sectors of society. In other words, can we identify an institutional frame that shapes protest in society generally, or is it specific to education and student activism?

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

This research received the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Grant number RNH00633).

The ethics certificate delivered by the University of Montreal Committee for this research does not allow the publication of interviews in their entirety. So, we could not make these qualitative data available for the public.

Interview 1: National elected member of UNEF between 2004 and 2009, woman.

Interview 2: National elected member of UNEF between 2007 and 2009, woman.

Interview 3: President of UNEF between 2011 and 2013, man.

Interview 4: Vice-president of UNEF between 2013 and 2015, woman.

Interview 5: President of UNEF between 2013 and 2016, man.

Interview 6: President of local section of UNEF between 2014 and 2015, woman.

Interview 7: President of local section of UNEF in 2018, man.

Interview 8: President of the FAGE between 2006 and 2008, man.

Interview 9: President of the FAGE between 2008 and 2010, woman.

Interview 10: President of the FAGE between 2010 and 2012, man.

Interview 11: President of the FAGE between 2012 and 2014, man.

Interview 12: National elected member of the FAGE between 2005 and 2007 and member of the European Student Information Bureau (ESIB) (2006), man.

Interview 13: President of a Parisian university between 2008 and 2012, woman.

Interview 14: President of a Parisian university between 2007 and 2016, man.

Interview 15: Ex-vice president of UNEF (1994-1995) and Social Affairs and Student Life Advisor of the Ministry of Higher Education between 2012 and 2014, man.

Interview 16: Ex-member of Solidaires Étudiants political science researcher in unionism and student unionism, man.