France school protests escalate into ‘urban violence’ as PM calls crisis cabinet meeting | France

A growing protest by high school students over long working hours, teacher shortages and dilapidated facilities has escalated into “urban violence”, warned the French government, which said many schools would move to online classes to protect teachers and students.

The Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, convened a crisis cabinet on Thursday and asked ministers to cancel their travel plans to deal with the protests, which erupted in the Paris region last week but snowballed across the country.

Lecornu’s office said: “This surge in violence makes it virtually impossible to maintain the continuity of public education and exposes staff and students to danger. » The Minister of National Education, Édouard Geffray, is due to meet student representatives on Friday.

About 900 protests, blockades and related incidents were underway outside high schools across the country, police said, and more than 160 of them were closed. Access to around thirty university campuses was also blocked on Thursday, notably in Paris and Marseille.

Nearly 3,000 high school students – aged 15 to 18 – have been arrested since the protests began, including 1,949 on Thursday alone, the Interior Ministry said. More than 300 police officers and dozens of firefighters, teachers and students were injured.

Student grievances range from overcrowded schedules and overcrowded classes to insufficient teachers and unbearable temperatures during heatwaves earlier this year. Riot police have been deployed to deal with the increasingly violent protests.

The injuries mainly came from thrown objects but also from anti-riot projectiles fired by the police, the Interior Ministry having announced an internal police investigation after accusations of excessive force and brutality by police officers against three students.

Trash cans were set on fire outside many schools and more serious arson attempts were reported inside some buildings. The damage caused by the fire at a school in Nantes, in the northwest, was so extensive that it will remain closed for a month, authorities said.

In Caen, in the north of the country, Maelle, 16, said she wished those who burned trash cans would protest “with words.” The students were protesting “against this government which does not invest in heating, air conditioning or teachers’ salaries”, she told AFP.

In Strasbourg, in the northeast of the country, tram services were temporarily suspended to “restrict the movement of rioters and demonstrators”, the regional prefect said, after protesting students blocked the tracks with crowd control barriers.

“There are 35 of us per class,” says a 17-year-old Strasbourg student. “There aren’t enough toilets and there are water leaks in some rooms. The building is collapsing, the cafeteria is too small. There is no budget, no resources.”

Several trash fires were also reported in Toulouse, in the south of the country; while in Lille, young people in black hoodies destroyed a bus stop. In Marseille, fire attempts took place inside two schools. In one of them, a teacher was doused with gasoline.

While many teachers and several school principals report having been physically threatened and sometimes attacked, some support their students. Juliette Estiville, a Spanish teacher at a Paris high school, said the police response disgusted her.

“I’m actually here just to provide protection, to form a barrier between the police and the students,” she explained. “Today it went well, it’s going well, but I think that the teachers who come to the roadblocks are really there to protect our young people.”

The government accused the radical left party La France Insoumise (LFI) of encouraging the protests, with several LFI MPs and mayors, including Bally Bagayoko, LFI mayor of the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, applauding during the demonstrations.

The party’s candidate for the 2027 presidential election, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, insisted Thursday that LFI supported “non-violent methods of struggle” and added that his “greatest concern was an unbearable level of police violence against these young people.”