Between face-to-face encounters with the police, entrance gates licked by flames or trash cans set on fire, tensions continued on Friday around schools where high school students were mobilized, with the authorities carrying out more than 5,000 arrests since Monday. Early Friday evening, the Minister of National Education, Édouard Geffray, announced that 735 establishments had been disrupted on Friday, “30% less” than the day before.
“We had urban violence near 158 establishments: projectile throwing, attacks on law enforcement, teachers, journalists, passers-by,” Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez detailed on TF1, announcing 1,747 arrests on Friday and more than 5,000 since Monday. High school students are demanding more human and material resources for their establishments, denouncing the unsanitary conditions of the buildings, overcrowded classes and a lack of staff. Students joined the movement which hardened in many cities in France and was punctuated by incidents.
In Bouches-du-Rhône, where 1,800 people took part in gatherings in front of schools on Friday and 59 were arrested, “a teacher was intentionally doused with gasoline, then physically attacked by two individuals” in front of a high school in La Ciotat, according to the services of the delegated police chief. In Oise, 54 police custody cases were recorded, according to the prefecture, which reported seven people slightly injured, including three soldiers from the gendarmerie, an assistant principal "victim of a physical attack" in Breuil-le-Vert, and three injured among high school students and students in the department.
In Marne, 45 people were arrested, four members of the police were slightly injured, a demonstrator was “hit by a private vehicle while crossing the public road”. And in the North, 49 people were arrested on Friday, according to the prefecture. In the south-east of Paris, in the 13th arrondissement, the entrance to a vocational high school was damaged by a fire which spread to the gates of the establishment, the police headquarters said. Firefighters also intervened in a high school in the 15th arrondissement to extinguish the flames at the foot of the entrance gate.
Since the start of the movement, “we have had 65 staff injured, 40 principals among them. Forty, all the same,” declared Édouard Geffray on BFMTV, without specifying the importance of the injuries. The principal of Giocante college in Bastia filed a complaint against
In the Lyon metropolitan area, the prefecture indicated that eight high schools, two colleges and the Lyon 3 university had been “impacted” in the morning by trash fires or even mortar fire. “Our country is facing a wave of savage violence on the fringes of schools,” denounced Laurent Nuñez, during a recorded speech broadcast to the firefighters' congress, referring to “several police officers and gendarmes” injured, but also firefighters, “deliberately targeted while they were carrying out their mission”.
A little earlier, he had reported on The police officer was in plain clothes and was hit on the ground, according to a police source. The Paris prosecutor's office, for its part, indicated that it had opened an investigation after "the dissemination on social networks of images of a police officer attacked on the sidelines of the high school blockades" on Thursday.
More than 300 police officers and gendarmes were “injured in intervention” on Thursday, according to Mr. Nuñez. A young man injured Wednesday in Tours during the blockade of a high school lost the use of his right eye, according to city prosecutor Catherine Sorita-Minard. She indicated on Wednesday, following medico-legal examinations, that the injuries to the eye of this 16-year-old were “compatible with the impact of an LBD-type defense bullet”.
The CGT denounced a “repression” of “unprecedented scale”, calling on “the government to put an immediate end to it” and indicated that it had “contacted, with the Human Rights League and the FCPE, the rights defender to alert him to this violent repression”. “Amnesty International denounces the disproportionate use of force against high school demonstrations and calls for the suspension of the use of LBDs,” the organization declared in a press release.
Damage to high schools is already costing several million euros, according to the latest estimates from the Ile-de-France, Grand Est, Hauts-de-France and Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes regions.
