By Ed Maltby (written on 12 November)

French students are currently engaged in the biggest mass movement the country has seen since the anti-CPE mobilisation of 2005-6. In response to a raft of government attacks on public service, education, workers' rights and immigrants, and in the teeth of massive betrayal by the major students' union, UNEF, students in French universities and Lycées are in the process of constructing a truly unprecedented strike wave.

Around a quarter of universities across France are striking or blockaded, while hundreds of students cram into mass meetings almost daily to decide the course of the movement. In cold lecture theatres across the country, elected strike committees prepare statements and plan demonstrations until late into the night, while university presidents try desperately to split the movement, sending out streams of emails to students and calling in riot police to break picket lines. As I write, Parisians are hurriedly preparing for the biggest, longest transport strike in years, as rail and metro workers take action in defence of their pensions and the right to strike. Staffrooms, too, are rowdier than usual, as teachers and students in colleges and schools across the country organise strikes in response to the elimination of 11,200 teaching posts nationwide, and in defence of immigrant students threatened with deportation.

Unrest in France has been brewing since the Summer, when newly-elected President Sarkozy started planning a series of major reforms intended to break the power of the French unions and ease the privatisation of public services. In a nod to the fascist voters he is trying to charm away from the Front National and towards his own UMP party, Sarkozy also spent the summer laying the groundwork for intensified attacks against immigrants, legal and illegal. These attacks were almost all announced in the Summer, and as many as possible were rushed through parliament before the end of the holidays, in an attempt to avert any kind of mobilisations or demonstrations. "Minimum Service" legislation attacks workers' right to strike, requiring workers taking part in a strike to identify themselves individually to their bosses 48 hours before industrial action. A proposed end to the special pension regimes of railway workers, miners and fishermen allowing them to retire at 50 comes alongside an attempt to cut state pension provision for everyone in France. As a further cost-cutting measure, Sarkozy has announced that 22,000 public service posts will be cut, half of which in public education. The Pécresse Law, or Law on the Autonomy of Universities (LRU) grants greater powers to university directors to hire and fire staff, and encourages universities to seek private funding, while giving the government free rein to cut spending on Higher Education.

The initial union response to these moves was feeble. The CGT weakly complained that the laws had been rushed through "without proper negotiation". What was more scandalous to students was that the top brass in UNEF, the major French students' union, chose to 'negotiate' with the government on the LRU, without consulting membership in any meaningful sense. After a tough-sounding but short-lived media campaign, the UNEF bureaucracy accepted every important part of the new law. This was trumpeted as a victory for students. Sound familiar?

However, recent events in France were working against both the timid careerists in the unions and the Thatcherite revolutionaries in government. Whereas in Britain, the workers' and students' movement has known nothing but defeat since the 1980s, French workers have struck a series of resounding blows in defence of their welfare state. In 1994, students defeated an attempt to introduce a new minimum wage for the young. In 1995, against virtually identical attacks threatened by the then-minister Alain Juppé, French public-sector workers unleashed a month of strikes which brought the country to a standstill. In 2006, a major movement of students and young workers defeated attempts to bring in the CPE, an employment contract which sought to eliminate job security for the young. The results of these battles, which are still very much at the forefront of the public imagination in France, is that ordinary workers and students are very much aware not only of how to fight and win against employers and the government; but also of the necessity of taking direct action to defend their jobs and conditions of work and study, rather than leaving it to union leaders. As one student remarked "the heads of unions, be it UNEF or the CGT will do whatever they can to remain intermediaries between us and the government, including selling us out. But they have to remember that they're standing on our backs, and that when we move, so do they."

Throughout September, the railway workers began to make the first steps in the construction of the current movement. General assemblies of the type used to devastating effect in 1995 were called at workplaces across the French rail network, with workers coming together en masse to discuss and vote on what action to take. These assemblies put major pressure on the union bureaucrats to call strikes and demonstrations. The first date announced was the 18th of October. Frantic efforts by workers and union activists brought several industries together for the day of action: teachers, students, public sector workers, restaurant workers and metro workers all joined the "cheminots" or rail workers as they struck and demonstrated against the government's raft of attacks. From that date, the trickle of student meetings and actions turned into a torrent.

Across France, students too began calling general assemblies to discuss the Pécresse law in greater and greater numbers. At first, such meetings only succeeded in bringing together a few hundreds of students each. But as October turned into November, mass meetings of over a thousand students became commonplace. To the horror of UNEF bureaucrats (who were met with boos and jeering whenever they stood up to speak in such meetings) and university directors, these meetings voted overwhelmingly against the LRU, and debated, sometimes for hours, the steps to take against it.

Very quickly, the rightwing newspapers and the government started trying to discredit the general assemblies, describing them as disturbances created by minorities of radical students and outside agitators. Late one evening, while we were sitting outside the Sorbonne after a long meeting, I raised this with an exhausted activist who sat smoking greedily next to me. "Not so", he replied, speaking slowly from fatigue, "People come to the assemblies who disagree, but what makes them important is that real debates happen there. I was at Tolbiac [university Paris I] last week, in a meeting of about 800. At the start, I'd say around 80% must have been against the idea of a strike, and many were even for the LRU. But after three hours of discussion – it was le bordel [bedlam] throughout – we won the vote with a two-thirds majority, and the meeting was bigger at the end than at the beginning. People changed their minds when we talked to them about the law. Together, people saw how strong they could be. That's why the assemblies are important. Directors want to organise secret internet ballots. Apart from the fact that we obviously shouldn't trust them to count the votes, we need to make decisions together, with discussion. Without discussion, how can any collective decision be legitimate?" Shortly thereafter, the strike committee voted in by that day's assembly effected the blockade of the Sorbonne, carefully piling tons of classroom furniture in the central courtyard.

The next day, at Tolbiac, one of the largest and historically most radical universities in Paris, 1,300 students filed past private security guards into a vast lecture theatre, while the chairman, a tall, fat young Arab from Saint-Denis beatboxed over the PA and young activists from different unions and revolutionary groups ran around, jittery from lack of sleep, frantically organising. The guarded doors now had to be flung wide open as the crowd spilled out into the foyer, craning to see, while a tall woman scribbled motions up on the blackboard at the front. The meeting cheered to hear the news from outside Paris – 37 universities were sending delegations to the meeting of the national student co-ordination at Rennes, and in Paris, Nanterre, Clignancourt and Paris VIII had all voted to blockade. Gales of laughter greeted the chair when he read out the director's statement about how hooded youths with iron bars were responsible for the strike and blockades. Many new students had arrived, so it was necessary to retrace the old arguments about the necessity of strike and opposition to the LRU before the meeting could discuss the most recent developments. Some argued that a strike would be wrong, as it would deprive them of their right to study. Others countered that were the law to pass, conditions of study for this and future generations of students would deteriorate permanently. As one girl pointed out "I'm not talking about martyring ourselves. But we need to move now, and unfortunately, strike is our only means of defending ourselves." An Algerian echoed her point, to deafening applause: "I'm trying to study, I'm trying to get ahead, but Sarkozy stands in my way. He slurs me as racaille [scum], he's interfering with my studies, what can I do? When his family came to France, no-one demanded their DNA!" "We're not dangerous revolutionaries," another added, "we're ordinary people defending our interests. We have to tell Sarko that he can't just do what he likes with our universities". A member of the UNEF hierarchy spoke up, calling for "moderation", and acceptance that the repeal of the LRU was "just unrealistic". He was howled down. Outside, pamphlets were being circulated, warning against fascist youth groups which were mobilising against the strikers.

Three days later, at Rennes, in a freezing lecture theatre whose walls were crowded with slogans, the meeting of the national co-ordination crawled past. Several hundred representatives from across France, the best speakers and hardest bargainers, the most wily, experienced and respected activists the movement could throw together were trying to hammer out a programme together. Inevitably, this meant hours upon hours of negotiation, as every word in the joint statement was scrutinised and the political implications of every call to action and every demand were discussed at length. Delegates snatched a few hours' sleep on damp mattresses in another theatre down the hall, only to begin again the next morning. By five in the afternoon on Sunday, after 18 hours of discussion, the press were allowed in to crowd around the podium while a committee of exhausted students read out the Declaration of the National Co-ordination:

"We call to the population to support our mobilisation, and that of the railway workers and the public service strike of the 20th of November. It is by the struggle of all for all that we will succeed in driving back the government.
"We call for students to go on strike immediately, and to build the struggle with strike pickets, blockade and occupation, and to discuss and convince those around them to build an even more massive movement. "We call all the university staff to join us in striking.
"We call for a national day of action to blockade train stations on tuesady the 13th of November.
"We call for demonstrations alongside railway workers on the 14th or the 15th of November or as is appropriate to each town. We call for mass demonstrations on the 20th of November alongside the striking public servants.
"We call for public and private sector workers to choose these dates to join us in striking, because it is all together, students and workers, that we shall drive back the government. The Co-ordination refuses to recognise, and condemns all negotiation on the part of trade unions with the government, because the objective must be the creation of massive force, which is the only means which can satisfy our demands."

For the 13th of November, for the first time in France's history, the transport unions have called a "reconductible" strike: a strike where every evening, instead of taking a vote, workers at each workplace decide in a mass meeting whether or not to continue the strike for the next day. Union leaders have never before ceded such control to the membership over the direction of a strike. When I got off the train, I walked through the bustling station to the metro stop. As I bought my ticket at a counter, I said to the man serving me, "Hey, good luck for Tuesday." He and his workmate grinned and gave me the thumbs up through the glass as I passed the barrier. "You too, man!"