France Detains Nearly 2,000 Pupils in a Day as Schools Shut
Police counted about nine hundred demonstrations and blockades outside French high schools on Thursday, with more than 160 schools closed and access blocked to around thirty university campuses. The interior ministry said nearly three thousand pupils aged fifteen to eighteen have been detained since the protests began, including 1,949 on Thursday alone. More than three hundred police have been injured.
The grievances are mundane and material rather than ideological. A seventeen-year-old in Strasbourg put it this way: “There are 35 of us per classroom. There aren’t enough toilets, and there are water leaks in some rooms. The building is falling apart, the cafeteria is too small. There’s zero budget, zero resources.” The prime minister Sébastien Lecornu called a crisis cabinet meeting and told ministers to cancel travel, his office warning that the violence “makes it virtually impossible to maintain the continuity of public education and is exposing staff and students to danger”. Bins have been set alight outside schools, Strasbourg suspended trams after students blocked the tracks, and in Marseille a teacher was splashed with petrol. The interior ministry has opened an internal police investigation after accusations of excessive force against three pupils. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose party the government blames for encouraging the protests, insisted it backed non-violent methods and said his “greatest worry is an unbearable level of police violence against these young people”. Watch today’s meeting between the education minister and pupil representatives.