Violent student protests in France: Over 1,200 high schools affected

“The children are in danger,” warned French Education Minister Édouard Geffray on Friday in Paris. The French minority government is losing control in the face of violent protests at more than 1,200 high schools across the country. According to Geffray, there are blockades and other protest actions at every third public high school, high school and vocational school.

The Education Minister, who appeared visibly desperate, addressed the parents on the BFM television station. He asked them not to let the young people go to the blockades because they would not be safe there. "I am responsible for twelve million minors. They are in danger during the school blockades," he warned. At many high schools, lessons will therefore temporarily no longer take place in school buildings, but rather digitally.

There is no end to the protests in sight. Next Tuesday, the most important trade unions and the left-wing party LFI have called for a big day of protest.

The student movement, which began last week with peaceful sit-ins in the Parisian banlieue, has spread like wildfire throughout the country. In many places there is a frenzy of destruction, with arson and serious damage to property occurring. Teachers and principals who called for calm and opposed the students were physically attacked or fired at with fireworks.

Education Minister Geffray said 65 teachers were injured, including 40 principals. Around a hundred high schools were badly damaged. “Initially there were no violent students or very few,” the minister said. In the meantime, outsiders, often masked rioters, have mingled with the students to incite the unrest.

In Nantes, part of the Nelson Mandela High School, which was only inaugurated in 2014, went up in flames. A large picture of the namesake in the entrance area burned down completely, students filmed it. According to the school management, the fire was deliberately set and damaged the entire entrance area and the adjacent boarding school. The local press said that young people from other high schools in the Nantes area had set the fire.

Also in the outskirts of Toulouse, the entrance area of ​​the Roland Garros vocational school, which had just been renovated for one million euros, was destroyed by an arson attack. The police arrested two suspicious students. The fire brigade also had to be called out in Paris because fires in the entrance area of ​​two high schools got out of control. In Marseille, a school principal and his deputy were sprayed with gasoline.

Firefighters were also attacked during an operation; a firefighter suffered a broken nose. A journalist from the M6 ​​television station was also injured and his camera was destroyed. In Paris, a female police officer was chased by a dozen teenagers, pulled to the ground and beaten. Several attackers are said to have held her and shouted “Kill her,” according to the police prefecture in Paris.

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez complained about “unbridled violence”. Intelligence findings were discussed at an emergency meeting on Thursday afternoon called by Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu. Accordingly, the student protests degenerated into “urban violence,” which was deliberately incited “by the left-wing party La France insoumise and its proxies,” the newspaper “Le Figaro” quoted from the confidential report.

Around twenty national elected representatives of the left-wing party LFI are directly involved in the movement, including in Lille, Rennes, Toulouse, Albi, Rouen, Clermont-Ferrand, Bègles and Avignon. LFI coordinator Manuel Bompard rejected this representation. It is a “spontaneous protest movement in the face of undignified conditions in the school system”. He called on the government “not to fall into conspiracy theories.”

One of the most famous faces of the Left Party, Mayor Bally Bagayoko of Saint-Denis, showed solidarity with the protesting students and danced and sang with them. Bagayoko tried to move out of a burning pile of rubbish in front of the school entrance, but he told journalists: “Violence can be legitimate.”

The regional council president Valérie Pécresse from the Republicans then accused him of being “an arsonist in a fireman’s costume”. LFI presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon said: "We do not direct popular movements. (…) We want our youth to come out of this episode with their heads held high." He accused the government of “repression”.

There is also a debate within the ranks of the police leadership about whether the same methods for suppressing the yellow vest protests are also appropriate for 15 to 19 year old high school students.

The high school student representatives, who belong to union-like organizations, were received by the Education Minister on Friday. “We are protesting against overcrowded classes and against the government spending millions on locking up cell phones, but not on heating, air conditioning and teachers' salaries,” said one of its spokesmen.

The protests began at high schools in socially disadvantaged areas with a high proportion of immigrants. There, the shortage of teachers, dilapidated buildings and a lack of furniture are particularly acute, says educational researcher Fabien Truong. It is a fiction to believe that all high schools are equally well equipped. The socially least desirable high schools in the banlieue would be the last to be equipped with teachers.

The founder of the Quidam student aid association, Ulysse Rabaté, said that in many socially disadvantaged neighborhoods with a high proportion of immigrants, the educational offering has collapsed.