Protest Art Demonstrators are upending the country’s public landmarks to denounce police violence, under-resourced schools, and a worsening cost-of-living crisis.

October 21, 2026 — 4 min read

A yellow vest placed by protesters on the statue of Marianne on the Monument à la République in Paris reads, “2026: The police mutilates high schoolers.” (photo Carl Court/Getty Images)

When students in France took to the streets in 1968 to protest the country's crumbling education system and Gaullist government, they transformed public statues into participants in their cause. After the May 2 shuttering of Paris Nanterre University, where anti-imperialist students began protests in late March that year, demonstrators took to the Sorbonne, where they hung portraits of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Chairman Mao Zedong from the 17th-century facade’s pillars and lodged red revolutionary flags into the statues of scientist Louis Pasteur and writer Victor Hugo .…