On Monday more than 400 of France’s 3,700 lycées, the high schools for students aged 15 to 17, were partly or completely closed, the education ministry said, according to CBS News and AFP. On Sunday the education minister, Édouard Geffray, had put the figure at “400-500” and said lessons would be “totally or partly suspended” because security conditions “have not been fulfilled.” That works out to somewhere between 11% and 14% of the country’s lycées. In the Île-de-France region around Paris it is worse: the regional president, Valérie Pécresse, told Franceinfo that more than a third of its 468 schools would be shut, so at least 156 of them.
The students are protesting about the state of their schools. The list is long and specific. They complain about teachers who are often absent and posts nobody has filled, school days that run too long, classes of up to 40 students, and buildings that leak, have cockroaches or have had ceilings fall in, according to The Guardian. Classrooms are unbearably hot in heatwaves, and Parcoursup, the online system for applying to university, is opaque. Bilal Narjissi, a 17-year-old protester, told CBS News that his school had a rat infestation. Outside the Turgot lycée in central Paris, one cardboard sign read: “We’re missing our lessons to give you one.”
So here is the shape of the thing. Students are protesting partly because they don’t get enough lessons, and the government’s immediate answer is to cancel their lessons. That isn’t as silly as it sounds, and Geffray described the closures as mainly a security precaution ahead of large protests that organisers have called for Tuesday. He promised a “partial, progressive return to lessons.” Still, the students were right about missing their lessons.
The security worry has real numbers behind it. Geffray said 24 schools had been “burned or ransacked” since the movement began and 78 education staff had been injured, “something we have never seen before,” adding that “they were deliberately targeted because they were employees of the national education system.” More than 5,000 people have been arrested, 85% of them minors, which means roughly 4,250 children. The Guardian reports that hundreds of people have been hurt in clashes with riot police. The government’s explanation is political infiltration: “There are activists – particularly from the far-left – who have infiltrated the high school student movement, hijacked it from the students themselves and engaged in extreme violence,” Geffray said.
Lens, La Ciotat, Belfort
On Monday a 15-year-old in the northern town of Lens lost a hand. A police union source told AFP that he appeared to have picked up a sting-ball grenade fired by riot police, and that it exploded in his hand. That account is not settled. The local prosecutor was reported as saying it had not yet been established whether the teenager picked up the grenade or whether it was thrown at him. Geffray called the injury “personally and humanely dramatic,” and politicians across the spectrum have demanded answers, according to the parliamentary channel LCP.
Rights groups were already raising alarms. “We can see that in the instructions given to the police, there is no directive to show restraint, even though they are dealing with children,” said Nathalie Tehio, president of the French Human Rights League. Last week Anne Savinel-Barras, president of Amnesty France, said: “Authorities must allow young people to exercise these rights without fear of being hit by tear gas grenades or batons, or being arbitrarily taken into police custody.” The interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, says the police “are not cracking down on young people” and are instead “protecting” students who want to “peacefully voice their demands.” Internal investigations have been opened into at least three cases of alleged police brutality.
The violence has gone the other way too. In La Ciotat, on the southern coast, a 59-year-old teacher was struck and doused with petrol on the sidelines of a protest on Friday, as reported here earlier. A 16-year-old was detained on Sunday. In Belfort, in eastern France, youths were filmed beating and kicking a policeman on the ground. Two Bulgarian nationals aged 15 and 17 have been arrested on suspicion of aggravated violence, the prosecutor said. One of them, whom the officer had been trying to arrest, has filed his own complaint for attempted murder, according to his lawyer.
Who pays for the bus shelter
The movement started on 17 September at a lycée in Créteil, in the Paris suburbs, in support of teachers who were striking over staff and resources. It grew into national blockades last week. On Sunday Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu responded with a timetable that urges local authorities to prioritise filling long-term absences and empty posts. He also called a Tuesday meeting with regional presidents about overhauling the often-crumbling school buildings. The organisers say there are still no “concrete measures,” so Tuesday’s protests are going ahead.
The most concrete thing on the table is a bill that would make people who damage public property pay for the repairs themselves, so the cost doesn’t fall on public funds. Lecornu says the draft law, which he first presented before the protests, would let the money be recovered from family allowances and housing benefits while a minimum income is protected. Government spokeswoman Maud Bregeon defended it: “When you have 14-, 15-, 16-year-olds who, at 9 a.m., are burning bus shelters or — perhaps even more seriously — the high school where they study, that raises the question of parental responsibility.”
It’s worth looking at how this would actually work. The students’ complaint is that the state isn’t spending enough to maintain school buildings. The proposed fix for damaged buildings is to take the repair money out of payments the state already makes to households. A collection system that runs through benefits can only collect from families who receive benefits, and the families who depend on housing benefit are, more or less by definition, not rich. Sophie Binet, head of the CGT union, called it a “populist announcement” that would “end up targeting the most vulnerable families.” The CGT is separately pushing Lecornu on budget cuts and on some kind of wealth tax on the super-rich, which is another view of who ought to pay.
All of this comes months before next year’s election to replace President Emmanuel Macron. The Guardian calls it his worst crisis in months. On Monday Bregeon told CNews the priority was to “restore order.” The government also says the grievances are legitimate, and that makes the bill an odd thing to lead with: it treats the buildings as worth sending someone a bill over, but not yet as worth a budget line.