Heroes on the Wall, Targets in the Street
We make a mistake when we think of sports as nothing more than exercise or recreation. Sports are also small laboratories where an era reveals its obsessions: its relationship to authority, rules, the body, risk, freedom. This publication has a point of view: we look at the world through climbing. Not because we have a chalk fetish, but because a sport that constantly celebrates independence, commitment, and the ability to make your own decisions offers a pretty good vantage point on our contradictions. What is happening outside some French high schools right now is a striking example. We love young people’s boldness. Right up until the moment it stops being a show.
Climbing likes to think it teaches people to be independent. When a 15-year-old leaves the ground, reads a sequence, weighs the risk, and decides to go for an uncertain hold anyway, we think it’s great. We talk about confidence, judgment, responsibility. We marvel at young people learning to be afraid without letting fear make the decision for them. We even have an almost sacred word for it: commitment. But when those same teenagers walk out of school to challenge decisions being made for them, their independence suddenly becomes suspect.
Since the movement began, the French government has accused the left-wing party La France Insoumise, or LFI, of “instrumentalizing” the protests. On October 1, the prime minister’s office went so far as to suggest that high school students were being manipulated by LFI and “its proxies on the far left.” Education Minister Édouard Geffray, for his part, said the movement had “changed in nature.” Their demands can be debated. Violence can be condemned. But the shift is revealing: as soon as young people become political actors, the temptation is to start looking for whoever must really be speaking for them.
We love seeing young people reach new heights, as long as they don’t raise their voices too much. The contradiction would almost be funny if it didn’t sometimes end with batons and grenades to the face.
Point-Blank Belay
Let’s get one thing out of the way: this is not an argument for pretending teenagers can do no wrong. Firing a mortar at police officers, setting a trash can on fire, or damaging a school is not heroic. A high school protest does not erase the law or individual responsibility. But precisely because those acts can be condemned, they cannot become a blanket license for brutality.
One person breaking a rule to push their own limits becomes an adventurer. A thousand young people breaking a rule to challenge an institution become a problem that needs to be contained.
Since late September, several minors have been seriously injured during police operations. In Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône, a 14-year-old suffered a broken jaw and lost several teeth after being hit at close range by a round fired from a grenade launcher. In Tours, a 16-year-old high school student lost sight in his right eye, with injuries that the prosecutor said were consistent with an impact from a LBD, the rubber-ball launcher used by French police. In Lens, a 15-year-old lost a hand after a police grenade he reportedly picked up exploded. Investigations have been referred to the IGPN, France’s internal police oversight agency.
The public debate then takes on a strange geometry. Violence by a few young people is readily used to discredit an entire movement. Violence carried out by agents of the state, meanwhile, is almost always treated as something that must be examined case by case: one action to review, one investigation to wait for, one set of circumstances to reconstruct. Two standards. Two kinds of vertigo.
That is the backdrop against which Alain Robert’s recent video takes on a meaning it probably was never meant to have. On September 27, France’s own “Spider-Man” free-soloed the TotalEnergies tower at La Défense, climbing without a rope or protection. Police officers were waiting for him at the top. Smiles. A handshake. A relaxed conversation. A few days later, Robert posted the footage on Instagram with the caption: “The cops in France are more than cool.”
Placed next to footage from outside French high schools, the scene starts to look almost like a sociology experiment. An adult man climbs a nearly 650-foot corporate tower without permission, ropeless, on the headquarters of a multinational corporation: charming eccentricity. Teenagers block the gates of their high school to protest their learning conditions: public-order problem.
The point, obviously, is not that every police officer applauds climbers and beats high school students. The contrast says something more interesting about the way we collectively rank different kinds of rule-breaking.
Our society loves boldness when it is individual. It loves the person who takes risks to pull off a feat, break a record, reach a summit, or make a good story. That kind of boldness can even become a core value in sports, business, and advertising: get out of your comfort zone, push your limits, dare to try.
We are much less comfortable when boldness becomes collective and political. One person breaking a rule to push their own limits becomes an adventurer. A thousand young people breaking a rule to challenge an institution become a problem that needs to be contained.
The Right Kind of Independence
Maybe this is what climbing lets us see differently. Our community likes to say that climbing teaches independence. But independence is not a skill you can keep inside a climbing gym and leave behind when you walk out the door.
We cannot spend years telling teenagers that they need to learn how to observe, understand, decide, and take responsibility for their choices, then suddenly act as though their judgment disappears the moment they become political actors. That does not mean a high school student is always right because they are a high school student, any more than a climber is always right because they climb. It simply means we cannot celebrate their independence when it suits us and declare them manipulated as soon as they do something we did not expect.
At the crag, no serious climber judges the strength of an anchor by its color. You look at the bolts, the rock, the setup, and the forces acting on it. Policing deserves at least the same level of scrutiny: look at the facts, look at the injuries, question whether the level of force used was proportionate.
And reject the reflex that turns every criticism of the police into a defense of rioters, and every expression of teenage anger into evidence of political manipulation.
