High school students, the Yellow Vests, farmers and unions have joined forces in the "national convergence" this Saturday, with half a thousand demonstrations called throughout France. The Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, has convened an inter-ministerial crisis cell and the Minister of the Interior, Laurent Nuñez, has authorized the use of stun grenades in the event of violence.
The day has started with maximum tension in the big cities, due to fear of clashes with the Police that have caused more than 8,000 arrests and 1,300 injuries in three weeks in the blockades and protests over the precariousness of public education. The revival of the Yellow Vest movement against fuel taxes and the cost of living, which paralyzed the country in the fall of 2018, has added extra concern to security forces, amid harsh criticism of police repression.
In Paris, after the recent riots in the Place de la Nation and in front of the dome of Les Invalides, the organizers and the Police have maintained a fight until the last minute to authorize the march in the capital, which started at two in the afternoon from the Place de la République and will arrive at the Place de Clichy. Riot forces are deployed along the entire route, as well as around the Elysée Palace and Matignon. The Police have warned that all "undeclared" concentrations are prohibited from seven in the morning to ten at night.
The start of the march was preceded by a first police charge and a shower of tear gas. The Police have formed a police cordon and have tightly controlled access to the square, half covered by a cloud. Thousands of protesters, many of them wearing Covid masks, have chanted "We all hate the Police."
In the capital, with 133 arrests at two in the afternoon, the Police have justified the launching of tear gas "in response to a hundred violent individuals, essentially ultra-left, who attacked the officers" and caused damage to property, including a burned car.
"The Police say they respond to violence, but they do not stop intimidating us from the beginning to the end of the demonstrations," lamented Lauraine, 16, a student at the Sophie Germain high school, who attended the Parisian march with a banner that read: "Welcome to Lacrimodemocracy." "This is the third time in 10 days that they have gassed us for going out into the streets to demand our rights; this does not happen that I know of in any other democracy."
In a festive atmosphere, despite the initial confrontations with the Police, tens of thousands of protesters have headed down Magenta Boulevard in an unusual route towards the Place de Clichy, the only route authorized by the Paris prefecture. The riot police have used not only tear gas, but also water cannons to confront the first outbreaks of violence. Dozens of people, many of them wearing masks and balaclavas, have climbed up to the statue of the Republic shouting against the Police and chanting "Macron resign!", one of the most heard slogans.
At the foot of the monument, dressed as Jesus Christ with a cross on his back and dragging a cardboard pump that marked 108 euros for 30 liters of gasoline, Gilbert Delors joined "the mother of all protests." "We are reaching an extreme situation, much worse than the one that brought the yellow vests onto the streets," Delors warned. "Daily life is beginning to be a via crucis for the majority of French people, thank goodness that young people have taken the initiative."
Amaury Perrault, 52, dusted off his old yellow vest like so many of his generation "to join this new cause that affects us all, as parents concerned about the present and the future we are creating for our children." Perrault maintains that we are facing "a new movement that is going to grow and that is going to bring down more than one politician: they cannot bury their heads in the sand and say that all this is urban violence."
In Marseille, the first demonstration also started in the morning under a hail of tear gas. Already in the early afternoon, protesters forced entry to City Hall and the mayor, Benoit Payan, had to ask President Macron for police reinforcements. In Lyon, a tourist office has been vandalized and a fire broke out in Place Bellacour.
In Rennes the first signs of riots also occurred early in the morning and in Lyon there were incidents involving "a hostile group of a hundred people on the banks of the Rhône", according to the Police. The local prefecture has warned that "no blockade of main road axes or key or essential infrastructure will be tolerated." In the Canebiére neighborhood in Marseille, a group of young people - some of them wearing yellow vests - have attacked a police station and blocked traffic with a barricade of burned garbage cans in the middle of the street.
Emmanuel Macron asked the population for "calm" during a speech in Brussels on Friday night. Absent from the country during much of the student mobilizations, the president demanded "ethics and proportionality" from his ministers after the scenes of violence in recent weeks. Its prime minister adopted a more combative tone in recent days. "This no longer looks like a student movement, but rather a movement of urban violence," declared Sébastien Lecornu on Thursday. "Lately, we find it difficult to hold a demonstration in this country without violent groups infiltrating it, especially from the extreme left and sometimes from the extreme right."
Friction between the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Education, Edouard Geffray, over the police response to the student protests has come to light this week. Geffray met with the unions on Friday and said he "had come a good part of the way" in the last week. The unions allege, however, that the Government's response has so far been limited only to covering the more than 3,000 vacancies of absent teachers, without addressing other demands such as the high number of students per class, the rigidity of schedules, the dilapidated state of some institutes and the lack of transparency of the Parcoursoup, the platform for access to higher education.
"We are the students of today and the workers of tomorrow," declared the national secretary of the Secondary Schools Union Lydia Hamadene, who stressed the importance of the support received in recent days by the resurrected "yellow vest" movement. "Young and yellow" has in fact been one of the most widespread slogans these days on social networks.
Some more visible leaders of the Yellow Vest movement, such as Eric Doruet, Priscilla Ludosk, Jacline Mouraud or Jérôme Rodrigues (who lost an eye during clashes with the Police), have returned to the fore these days and have asked for support for the student demands, supported by 69% of French people, according to an Elabe poll for the BFMTV channel.
Police violence
The numbers of the student protests of these weeks say it all: more than 8,000 young people have been arrested (85% of them minors) and more than a thousand people have been injured, including police officers (937), students (248) and teaching staff (149), since the beginning of the student protests. The General Inspectorate of Police has so far opened 36 investigations into the excessive use of violence by its officers, which has caused four "mutilations" of minors (such as the amputation of a hand) due to the use of "explosive weapons" and "substantial injuries" (such as the loss of an eye) during blockades of schools and demonstrations.
The lawyers of the affected students denounce the disproportionate use of violence and "war wounds" caused mainly by the members of the CRS (Republican Security Companies), specialized in controlling riots and demonstrations with "non-lethal" weapons such as tear gas, defensive ball launchers (LBD) and stun grenades, who were once again authorized to confront the demonstrations on October 17 after several days of suspension.
The explosion of a stun grenade is precisely behind the most notorious case, that of a 15-year-old student (Evan) who lost his left hand on October 5 in Lens. His lawyer, Bertrand Wattez, has rejected the official version (which alleged that the minor tried to throw the grenades at the Police again) and has stressed that his client was simply walking to his school "without participating in the violence" and that the serious injuries were caused when the device exploded near his body. Stun grenades produce flashes and sounds of up to 180 decibels to disorient and disperse hypothetical aggressors and their use has been harshly criticized in recent years.
In Tours, on September 30, another student known as Mael (16 years old) lost an eye in the police charge against the blockade of the Gustave Eiffel Institute. The injury suffered "is compatible with the impact of a rubber ball of the LBD type." The abusive use of LBD weapons was behind numerous injuries and lawsuits during the "yellow vest" protests in 2018.
Another 14-year-old student, identified as Eden, suffered serious facial injuries, two jaw fractures and several broken teeth from the impact of a grenade launcher at a distance of one and a half meters during a student protest in Saint-Ouen. "We are talking about the equivalent of weapons of war," his lawyer, Elsa Marcel, denounced to The Guardian. The parents have filed a complaint against the security forces for "attempted murder."
"The role of the Police is to protect public liberties"
The violence of the clashes in the streets of French cities has reached such an extreme that the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has publicly expressed its "concern" and has called for "the right of peaceful assembly to be respected." "The role of the Police is to protect public freedoms and the safety of everyone," recalled Alexis Deswaef, president of the International Federation for Human Rights. "We note, however, that the police seem to be acting solely to repress democratic protests (...). The demands of young people are legitimate and the Government must listen to them."
"When a social mobilization is disqualified as urban violence, that leads to a purely repressive response," warns Nathalie Tehio, president of the French League of Human Rights, which denounces the systematic detentions of more than 6,700 minors, of which less than a third are brought to justice. "This shows that what it is really about is putting fear into people and preventing them from demonstrating."
"Repressive techniques are mainly aimed at scaring young people who are not used to demonstrations," emphasizes Vanessa Codaccioni, professor at the University of Paris and author of How States Repress. "But repressive violence does not stop social movements. On the contrary, and this is a historical constant, they serve to strengthen the commitment of protesters, as is happening here now in the additional fight against police violence."
The cries of "we all hate the Police" have been a constant in student protests against the precariousness of public education. From the first moment, the Government accused "extreme left infiltrators" close to Jean-Luc Mélenchon's France Insoumise of the violence. The presence of "troublemakers", who go covered and even with gas masks to the demonstrations, is public and noticeable at the end of the marches, when the Police resort to their entire arsenal of "non-lethal" weapons to disperse the crowd (including the deployment of the imposing Centaure armored vehicles, as this week in front of the dome of Les Invalides).
The Minister of the Interior, Laurent Nuñez, asked for a firm hand against the protesters in his meeting with the prefects on Friday, in the run-up to an especially critical Saturday for the forces of order. Rudy Manna, of the UNSA police union, launched an appeal on FranceInfo's airwaves to protesters to "deviate from the rioters at the time of a police charge, so that we can challenge the right people." "We must clearly distinguish between urban violence and legitimate demands," Lecornu warned.
