PARIS — Attackers doused a principal with gasoline and started fires at at least two schools Thursday, officials said, as increasingly violent student protests raged across France over understaffing and dilapidated buildings.
Hundreds of young people surrounded a fire truck in the morning that arrived to put out a fire at the Saint-Exupéry high school in Marseille, police said.
The attackers forced the firefighters to flee the vehicle, then set it on fire.
The director was attacked at the Victor Hugo high school, in the same southern city, and was injured, the prosecution said, without further details.
Another fire hit a school in the city of Nantes, in the west of the country, firefighters said.
PM HOLDS CRISIS MEETING
The protests and blockades, which began last week, have become a political flashpoint at a sensitive time for the government, which announced a series of deeply unpopular spending cuts in its 2027 budget on Thursday.
The services of Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu held a crisis meeting on Thursday afternoon on the demonstrations which left dozens of people injured. Hundreds of people were also arrested, most of them teenagers, authorities said.
In Saint-Denis, in the Paris suburbs, crowds of young people gathered in front of a cordon of police officers. One student held up a sign that read, “Can we explain ourselves without getting gassed?”
The students accused the police of using heavy-handed tactics, including the use of tear gas.
The government has criticized violence that has erupted during some protests, but said difficulties at high schools must be recognized and addressed.
Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said that in some places troublemakers were moving from school to school to incite violence.
The Minister of Education, Edouard Geffray, called on schools to teach remotely if demonstrators blocked their premises.
“Violence will not stop our students from enjoying their fundamental right to education,” he said in a post on social media platform X.
In Nantes, Olivier Château, deputy mayor, told franceinfo that the fire at the Nelson Mandela high school was under control and that there were no injuries.
People in the building were evacuated, while students who were due to arrive at the school were turned away, he said. The town hall declined to comment further.
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