Nearly 90,000 March in France as Half the Schools Are Blockaded
Some 86,000 people marched this morning in Marseille, Nantes, Lyon and elsewhere, with tens of thousands more expected in Paris, as 1,800 of France’s 3,700 high schools were blockaded or closed. Official figures put the toll of the past week at 715 police officers, 215 teenagers and 85 teaching staff injured, with 6,100 arrests, almost all of minors, and more than 1,800 prosecutions.
Of those being prosecuted, 1,483 are under eighteen. That number, more than any other, is what has turned a dispute about overcrowded classrooms and decaying buildings into something the government cannot easily settle. Two injuries have become emblems: the fifteen-year-old whose hand was blown off in northern France on Monday, and a sixteen-year-old in Tours who lost the use of his right eye last Wednesday, where the prosecutor Catherine Sorita-Minard said the wounds were “compatible with the impact of a defensive bullet of the blast ball type”. The interior minister Laurent Nuñez says ten internal investigations into police conduct are open. Anne Savinel-Barras of Amnesty France said the images and testimony “raise alarming concerns about the dangerous use of teargas, batons and policing techniques”. A seventeen-year-old in Paris put the asymmetry plainly: “We’re teenagers with wheelie bins, and the police have heavy weapons.” The adult unions are now moving in behind the pupils — the CGT has told members to protect them, and the Green leader asked parents to wear white and come and stand with their children. Twenty-four schools have been burned or ransacked. The placards are consciously quoting 1968. Watch whether the teaching unions call a strike of their own.