The norms and procedures used in French student general meetings at the end of the 2000–2010 decade were drawn from both representative institutions and contentious activist cultures. However, students seem impervious to the values of participatory democracy. If institutional participatory mechanisms and general meetings look alike, this is not due to any diffusion of participatory values in social movements, but rather to the fact that the former come partly from the very contentious cultures from which student general meetings are borrowed.