Deterioration in high schools: Valérie Pécresse and Gérald Darmanin react

“Ravageds”. This is how on X, Friday, the president of the Île-de-France region Valérie Pécresse described the damage in high schools committed on the sidelines of the protests underway for a week.

And she puts forward a substantial bill: 7 million euros “already gone up in smoke”, in the Ile-de-France region alone. In Nantes, where the Nelson-Mandela high school caught fire, the first estimates for the restoration currently amount to 2 million euros.

Faced with the multiplication of this damage, Gérald Darmanin, Minister of Justice, toughened his tone on Friday, on RTL, expressing his desire to “make the parents of the thugs pay”. “When we destroy high schools, when we attack bus shelters, when we attack transport, we are now demanding civil liability from parents,” he declared on the radio.

Article 1240 of the Civil Code stipulates that “any act whatsoever of man, which causes damage to another, obliges the person through whose fault it happened to repair it”. And when it comes to minors, the Civil Code adds that parents are “jointly and severally responsible for the damage caused by their minor children”, except in exceptional cases, namely when the children have been “entrusted to a third party by an administrative or judicial decision”. Adult high school students are responsible for themselves.