Thousands march in Paris against university "reform"

Yeah, well, the quotation marks weren't there in the original headline, so sue me. The actual article is worth a read, though:

Some 43,000 students, researchers and professors took to streets in Paris and other French cities Tuesday to demand an increase in scholarship funds and protest government plans to cut university jobs amid the economic downturn.

The protests are the latest of several challenges piling up for President Nicolas Sarkozy, who faced nationwide strikes and protests last month by workers who say his government hasn't done enough to ease the pain of the crisis.

Some 17,000 protesters gathered at the Pantheon on Paris' Left Bank, according to police. Another 26,000 protested in cities from Strasbourg in the east to Toulouse in the Pyrenees and Nantes near the Atlantic, according to police estimates.

Source. And given the authorities' tendency to lowball these things, that's a lot of angry people. In a typical North American city you'd be lucky to get a fraction of that. I wonder why that is? It isn't like they don't have TV over there, so why hasn't it sapped their resolve the way it seems to have sapped ours?