France Faces a National Day of School Protests Today
Organisers have called nationwide action for Tuesday after rejecting the government’s concessions as “nothing concrete”. More than 190 students have been injured and over 5,000 people arrested in a week; more than 500 schools were closed by Monday’s protests, and the education minister says 24 have been burned and ransacked since the movement began. A teachers’ union is urging members to join.
Sébastien Lecornu announced measures on Sunday promising “visible changes” in schools while drawing a hard line on disorder: “We will make no concessions to violence. We stand by students and staff who have been assaulted, as well as police officers and gendarmes who have been injured.” The main student organisation answered that the government had offered nothing concrete and called for mobilisation against “this political deadlock and what we describe as unprecedented repression of the movement”. The injuries are what has radicalised it. A fifteen-year-old’s hand was blown off near a school in Lens on Monday, and last week a fourteen-year-old was badly hurt at Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône, reportedly struck on the head by a tear gas grenade. The grievances are unglamorous and old — overcrowded classrooms, decaying buildings, too few teachers — which is part of why the movement has spread from Parisian secondary schools in September to universities and now, potentially, to staff. Jean-Luc Mélenchon calls it the most powerful student movement since 1968, which is the sort of claim that is either rhetoric or prophecy depending on who turns out. Watch whether the teaching unions actually strike, because that is the difference between a protest and a shutdown.