For three consecutive weekends, the streets of France have been given over to people who cannot afford to live the life their government promised them. The third of these weekends, on Saturday October 31, drew 320,000 protesters nationwide, according to the French government's own count. That was fewer than the 550,000 who marched on October 17, and the 410,000 on October 24. Emmanuel Macron's government read this as evidence that the movement was running out of energy. It was misreading the map.

The protests did not shrink. They moved. By last weekend, demonstrations had spread to Germany, where a movement calling itself Gen Z regelt organised rallies in more than 30 cities, with riots in Frankfurt, Cologne, and Hamburg. In Lisbon, thousands marched over housing costs. In Catalonia, police were placed on the highest alert level. In Milan, Turin, and Bologna, the authorities were watching. Anonymous TikTok networks were calling for gatherings in Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, and Portugal. What began as French high school students objecting to mould on the walls of their state-run dormitories had become, in six weeks, the defining mood of a continent.

The origins of the French movement are worth taking seriously because they are specific. Students began marching over crumbling school buildings, teacher shortages that left classrooms without instructors for weeks at a time, and a university admissions system that filtered out students from poor neighbourhoods before they ever sat an examination. This is not vague anger. The students could point to the room in which the ceiling was falling.

What expanded the movement was the recognition, by labour unions and others, that the students had described a broader condition. Living costs in France have risen sharply for three consecutive years. The cost of a university place, the cost of a flat, the cost of filling a shopping basket — all of them sit at levels that feel like a new floor, not a temporary ceiling. When the unions joined in late October, the protest stopped being about education. It became about what the state had failed to deliver to the people who most depended on it.

Macron's response has been to deploy 70,000 police and gendarmes, to route marches away from the centres of cities, and to impose curfews on unaccompanied minors around the Champs-Elysees. A Paris court suspended one of those curfews on Wednesday, finding it an unlawful restriction on freedom of movement. More than 560 people were arrested on a single Saturday night. Interior Minister Laurent Nunez warned of a 'very high risk' of disorder, particularly after dark on Halloween. Limoges saw its city hall set alight. None of this is the language of a government that feels it has the situation in hand.

The German protests carry a particular weight. Gen Z regelt drew 180,000 online sign-ups before a single march happened. The demands were specific: investment in education, housing, climate action, and no return to military conscription. These are not radical demands by any historical measure. They are the demands of a generation that has watched governments spend the past decade managing successive crises without resolving any of them.

The comparison with 1968 is instinctively reached for and should be set aside. That movement had a clear ideological shape. This one does not. The student in France who described mould and peeling walls in his dormitory was not talking about the fall of capitalism. He was talking about the state of a building. That is, in many ways, harder to dismiss. Ideology can be outlasted. Structural neglect accumulates interest.

Macron has perhaps five or six months before the next presidential election. His presidency has been built on the proposition that technocratic competence can substitute for political connection. Three weekends of protest, spreading across four other European countries simultaneously, suggests that proposition has reached its limit. The people in the streets know what their governments are doing. The problem is they no longer believe it is being done for them.

The question for Europe's governments is not why the students are angry. The answer to that is on the walls.