This week, I sweep my self-indulgent talk of YA freedom aside to reassure you all that even here in gay Paree, whips are being cracked, sleeves rolled up and finger welts reformed as the school year regains its hold over the city.

As you rummage for your gowns, stock up on cheap college wine and yearn for that saviour of a text from Student Finance, students all over Paris are doing more or less the same – except with fewer gowns and better wine, at least.

It seemed remarkable at first to find myself somewhere where the current of student life moves as palpably in the air as it does back in Cam. But then again, when a mammoth quarter of the French population is made up of students, nothing less could really be expected.

With the greatest Higher Education sector in all of Europe (over 600,000), Paris is unquestionably as much the city of the scrambling student as of the pioneering artist or the lavish fashionista. And last weekend, these numbers revealed themselves en masse as an almighty street carnival saw thousands frolicking about to the tunes of trippy techno and pleasantly impromptu jazz (damn, you got me: some gluttony continues to prevail in the unforeseen joy of Parisian serendipities.)

Yet it’s not for carnivals that Parisian students have historically gained a rep for taking to the city’s streets en masse. The ‘68 protests that brought De Gaulle’s government to its knees have indeed left their mark, and left me feeling that I need to lose my protest virginity before I can really call myself a true student here.

Whilst supporters of anarchy are nowadays scarce (students have enough brains to see that the economy needs no further help in damaging itself), the spirit of the protestors in many ways holds strong. Their call for “structures that serve people, not people serving structures” continues to define an attitude of personal responsibility for one’s own academic progress; I spy no begrudging lecture-goers around here, that’s for sure.

The French education system is a bloody minefield of subcategorisation, especially where Higher Education is concerned. The division and disparity between the public universities and the prestigious grandes écoles seems to cause the greatest confusion and spark the most criticism internationally, as public-uni students find it harder and harder to secure themselves jobs post-graduation (a socialist country, you say?).

But be that as it may, all forms of education are still valued pretty highly here, and the importance of scholarship and culture is instilled from a very young age.  Whilst the vast majority of us grew up on an after-school diet of CBBC, French tots settle down to an evening’s worth of word-games or doodling in their mini-Kandinsky workbooks.

So, it seems like Paris in no hurry to shrug off its secure intellectual standing. And whilst student culture may not be all-singing-all-dancing-all-striking every single day in Paris, as the year goes by, I sure as hell will be trying my best to make a valiant stab at the three.