Since last week, French teenagers have been blockading schools and demonstrating against a range of problems, including overcrowded classrooms, high teaching loads and teacher shortages.
Protests at French lyceums began in the Ile-de-France region around Paris, where incidents of vandalism and fireworks being launched towards police were recorded. Protests spread to other regions on Monday, with four high schools locked down in the southern Alpes-Maritimes and Var regions, according to AFP, while protests were also reported in Marseille, the Lille region in the north of the country and Sedan in the north-eastern Ardennes.
On Monday, French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said any escalation of demonstrations in high schools would be “irresponsible.”
“Fireworks, fires, violence near high schools: nothing justifies endangering students, staff or police officers,” Lecornu wrote in X.
He sharply criticized calls by the far-left France Unconquered party to expand the movement. “This escalation is irresponsible,” he said, adding that “the concerns of secondary schools must be heard and addressed.”
In response, party leader Jean-Luc Melenchon accused Lecornu's government of "ordering the suppression" of the protest, adding that the high school students involved were "harmless."
Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said the demonstrations and blockades could not be considered “typical protest movements.”
“This is much more like a street riot involving masked men armed with fireworks in tubes and projectiles who were clearly intent on confronting internal security forces,” he said. “This was not about making demands, but about real violence in its purest form.”
Nunez told reporters that 164 people were detained and 180 schools were damaged on Monday.
He said 12 security forces, 12 students and three school staff were injured on Monday.
“We are clearly dealing with urban violence that is trying to divert what was originally a classic high school movement and introduce violent disruption into the process of school democracy,” Education Minister Edouard Geffray said Monday evening.
French union Syndicale Lyceenne, which advocates for high school students, said it would call for a nationwide blockade of schools on Tuesday, as unions announced a day of strikes for civil servants.
“Shortages of teachers and staff, dilapidated schools, overcrowded timetables and classes, stress caused by Parcoursup [a web platform used in France for first-year applications for higher education]... These problems are by no means inevitable, but simply the result of ten years of Macron's policies and the lack of resources in the national education system,” it said.
France's largest primary school teachers' union said it estimates around 40% of teachers will not report to work on Tuesday.
The protest of high school students took on a political character seven months before the presidential elections, turning into a confrontation between the government and the Invictus France party.
“There is a political usurpation of the blockades by the elected representatives of the French Unconquered party,” the education minister said.
“Let the authorities come and talk to high school students and see for themselves whether these young people are being used or whether they are simply capable of thinking, organizing themselves and defending their educational conditions and their future,” the city hall of the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis, led by the Invictus France party, responded in a statement, calling the students’ demands “legitimate.”
