Teenager Loses a Hand as France’s School Protests Enter Week Three
A fifteen-year-old’s hand was blown off during a confrontation between school protesters and police at Lens in Pas-de-Calais, in an incident the prefect called “very serious”; the boy’s life is not in danger. The police watchdog is investigating. The protests over teacher shortages and school conditions are now in their third week, with teachers on strike and other unions threatening to join them.
What began as pupils protesting about the state of their schools has become a national industrial dispute with the school year itself on hold. Up to five hundred schools were shut on Sunday on the education ministry’s own safety advice, and a high school in Metz was gutted by fire last weekend, though authorities have never established whether that fire was connected to the protests. The watchdog inquiry is the thing to follow, because the central question is what caused the blast: if it is attributed to a police munition, a dispute about staffing and buildings turns into a dispute about policing, which in France has a way of widening very quickly and drawing in unions that have so far only threatened to act. The government has so far framed the closures as a safety measure rather than a concession. Watch whether the other unions move from threatening action to calling it, and whether the watchdog reports before they decide.