High schools across France have closed, thousands of teenagers have been arrested, and hundreds of people have suffered injuries as unrest over conditions in the lycée system has spread and erupted into violence in recent days.
Roughly 3,000 people have been arrested since the protests began nearly two weeks ago outside of Paris, with nearly 2,000 being detained on Thursday alone, the French interior ministry announced.
As demonstrations have at times escalated into violent clashes, 170 students and 65 school staff members have been injured, according to education minister Édouard Geffray. Nearly 400 police officers have also reportedly suffered injuries.
And the protests showed no signs of abating on Friday, when roughly 900 demonstrations took place around France, according to police. More than 500 French schools remained closed as students set fires, blockaded schools, and clashed with riot police around the country.
“High school students must be listened to. Their difficulties call for concrete responses, both in their schools and at the national level,” Geffray wrote on X. “This is the purpose of the dialogue initiated in high schools and academies, which I am continuing today with representatives of staff, parents, and high school students.”
He announced a platform students can use to submit proposals for education reform, which he said will be evaluated and used for a “national report.”
High school student organizations, however, have called for continued demonstrations following their meetings with Geffray, citing a lack of “concrete measures” from the French government to address their complaints.
The education ministry found that during the 2024-2025 school year, nearly 10% of teaching hours went untaught in public secondary schools. About 7.5% of those lost hours were due to a failure to find substitutes.
"Today our school is paralyzed due to a lack of resources, teachers, and not enough desks,” one student told the French outlet Agence France Presse (AFP). “We don't have nurses or supervisors, and all they do for us is take away our phones.”
"We are 35 per class, we don’t have enough chairs in classrooms,” a 15-year-old student told Reuters in the Paris suburb of Pantin as demonstrators clashed with police deploying tear gas in an effort to quell the protest.
“There are 35 of us per classroom. With 35 degrees Celsius [95 degrees Fahrenheit] in summer, it’s unbearable. There aren’t enough toilets, and there are water leaks in some rooms,” a 17-year-old said while speaking to AFP at a protest in Strasbourg in the northeast of France. “The building is falling apart, the cafeteria is too small. There’s zero budget, zero resources, not enough supervisors.”
“We’re also protesting about the conditions in the heatwave,” the 19-year-old said. “Young people just want to study and learn in decent conditions. The French state seems surprised about worsening school results, but they’re doing nothing to remedy that.”
A series of deadly heatwaves hit Europe over the summer, with Western Europe experiencing its hottest summer ever. In France, nearly 8,000 people died over the course of the summer as a result of the high temperatures.
Student protesters have also expressed grievances with the country’s online university application system, Parcoursup, which they have described as a source of stress and mistrust in the education system.
Geffray characterized this as a complicating factor in addressing the roots of the unrest. "One of the difficulties of this movement is that there are no national demands. It all started with local demands,” the Education Minister said Friday morning.
In the days that followed, protests spread throughout the Île-de-France region, which includes Paris and its surrounding metropolitan areas, as students attempted to set up blockades at dozens of schools.
The demonstrations have escalated still further this week, spreading outside of Paris’ surrounding area and into regions around the country. Tracking from Reuters also showed that protests have sprouted across western France in Rennes, Nantes, Quimper, and Brest; around the southern part of the country in Bordeaux, Toulouse, Toulon, Marseilles and Grenoble; as far east as Strasbourg; and as far north as Lille.
By Monday, 180 schools were disrupted by the expanded demonstrations, according to the interior ministry. That number had risen to over 500 at week’s end.
Fires were started at at least two French schools that day. Several teachers were accidentally splashed with gasoline at Marseille's Victor Hugo high school. At Saint-Exupery high school, also in Marseilles, hundreds of students set ablaze a fire truck that had arrived to put out a previous fire from the morning. Firefighters were forced by students to exit their vehicle before it was burned. In protests around the country, confrontations broke out between students and police, who fired projectiles in attempts to control crowds of demonstrators.
As of Friday night, the protests show no signs of stopping. Two student unions, the Student Union and the High School Trade Union, have jointly called for continued protests next week.
“Students and high school students, while the authorities seek to drive us out of our places of study through budget cuts, the closure of places, dilapidated buildings, selection, or repression, let's not let them: let's block and retake the universities and high schools!” the unions wrote in a press release.
