It all started a few weeks ago, when the students of a school in Créteil, in the southern suburbs of Paris, decided to join their teachers in a protest that aimed to ask for more resources for the school but also for staff to deal with an emergency that the students themselves considered serious. Then, little by little, the wave of protests began to spread throughout France, affecting many students and school buildings.
Also thanks to word of mouth on social networks, the protest has spread. Several demonstrations have already taken place, mostly peacefully, but in some situations there have been clashes with the police and acts of vandalism. And, just in the last few hours, a 15-year-old student lost the use of a hand after a protest movement in Lens, in Northern France.
Since the beginning of the protests, according to government sources, 215 injuries have been reported among students and 715 among police officers. The fifteen-year-old injured in Lens lost a hand after picking up a stun grenade thrown by officers trying to quell the demonstrators' activities. Teaching activities were interrupted in 589 of the 3,700 high schools and 32 universities in the country, according to reports from the Ministry of Education and a student union. The authorities, in this sense, predict that there will be between 20,000 and 40,000 demonstrators in Paris today.
In the last few hours alone, 984 people have been stopped by the police as part of the student protests that are inflaming France. "Le Figaro" reported it. Again according to the newspaper, 65 officers were injured yesterday, October 5, in the mobilizations that preceded the large demonstration scheduled for today.
Meanwhile, among the latest serious incidents to report in the context of student protests, there is the fire at the door of the Vaquelin high school in Paris, which led to the evacuation of around a hundred students who were inside. Local authorities reported that the fire was probably set by elements outside the school building.
Edouard Geffray, the French Minister of Education, spoke of a "humanly tragic" situation, in reference to the serious injury of the 15-year-old in Lens and while waiting to better understand how the events unfolded. His colleague Philippe Baptiste, head of Higher Education, said he "fears" that the protest would spread nationwide. "The images we have been seeing for a week are worrying, horrible - he added - I think of the police who pay a very heavy price but also of the principals, the professors, the students, on strike or not, who were injured".
As mentioned, the reasons that triggered the protests are related, according to teachers but above all students, to a serious structural and organizational emergency of the school. Speaking to Euronews, Jean-Rémi Girard, teacher and president of the National Autonomous Union of High Schools and Colleges (SNALC), underlined the risks of politicizing the protests. "We must be very cautious and not turn what is happening into a political tool, because it is very dangerous. We are the ones who are on the ground and we need to be safeguarded and protected. It is already difficult enough to recruit staff, given the lack of attractiveness of our profession. If we are also not protected, it will be even more difficult to find teachers in the years to come," he explained.
Girard then confirmed the critical issues that gave rise to the protests. "We have more and more difficulty replacing absent teachers, French classes are among the most crowded in Europe, classrooms are not adequately equipped during heat waves. These are things we have known for a long time," he reported. "The starting point is that the school system is in crisis, and has been for a long time", he declared again, underlining that the demonstrations only degenerated due to "a minority of individuals who provoked many of the most serious episodes of violence".
