Students Shut Paris Conservatoire in Solidarity Protest

By Daniel Okafor

The Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris is closed. More than 150 students have blockaded the country's foremost music academy since yesterday morning, and they say the siege runs until October 17.

This isn't a labour dispute or a quarrel over repertoire. The students have handed the Conservatoire's leadership a formal list of demands, and the cause sits well outside the building's walls: they are acting, in their own words, in "support for the demands of high school students and against the abject and scandalous repression of which they are the victims."

The statement, quoted by Slippedisc, doesn't pull its punches. "What they are enduring is absolutely shameful on the part of a government that is the real vandal," the students said. "It is not vandalizing a trash can or a storefront, it is destroying an entire generation of young people demanding a future."

Eh, bien. One doesn't usually look to a conservatoire communiqué for revolutionary rhetoric. This one reads more like a pamphlet than a press release.

Why does a music school walk out?

The Conservatoire (France's national higher school for music and dance) trains the country's elite performers. When its students down instruments and occupy the building, the gesture carries symbolic weight far beyond one campus. The students are explicitly aligning themselves with striking high schoolers, and they're calling for larger crowds to join them before the October 17 deadline.

The message to the institution's leadership is a list of demands, not a single grievance. The message to the government is blunter: the students accuse it of "destroying an entire generation," and they've inverted the usual vocabulary of disorder — vandalism, in their framing, belongs to the state, not to the protesters.

What happens on October 17?

That date is the protesters' own stated horizon. They have committed to maintaining the blockade until then, and they are actively recruiting bigger numbers in the meantime. Whether the Conservatoire's leadership engages with the demands, or waits out the clock, will shape what the academy's term looks like.

For now, France's foremost music school is silent in the most literal way. The students have traded scales for barricades, and they've given both their institution and their government a fixed date — October 17 — by which someone will have to answer them.

Slippedisc first reported the blockade.