France Suspends Stun Grenades After a Boy Loses His Hand

The figures Mr Nuñez gave parliament are the scale of it: 215 teenagers and 89 school staff injured, 761 police officers wounded, more than 6,600 arrested and almost all of them minors, more than 1,800 facing prosecution of whom nearly 1,500 are under eighteen, twenty-four schools burned or ransacked, and eighteen internal police investigations opened — one into a protester who lost several teeth, another into one who lost the use of an eye. He maintained that talk of “police repression” was “excessive”, because officers do not intervene where protests are peaceful; the authorities say up to two hundred people were throwing projectiles at Lens, and the boy’s mother denies he picked the grenade up. More than 500 schools and colleges were wholly or partly shut on Wednesday, a fall of 41% on Tuesday, leaving 86% of institutions open, while eighty university campuses were blockaded, Sciences Po among them. Amnesty’s French president Anne Savinel-Barras called the suspension “an important first step” and wants the devices banned from all protest policing: “Protests should not be battlefields.” Emmanuel Macron, after an emergency ministerial meeting, asked the police for “empathy” and more “pedagogy”; Mr Nuñez, himself a former chief of the Paris police, observed that “we don’t deal with a movement of highschoolers like we deal with a movement of adults”. Mr Lecornu has told lawmakers that lessons will be replaced to the end of the week by a “period of internal democracy” in which pupils air their grievances — the device Mr Macron reached for during the Yellow Vests. The other half of tonight’s address is money. France ran a deficit of 5.1% of GDP last year against an EU reference value of 3%, and its ten-year borrowing cost has risen more than a hundred basis points this year, now trading above Italy’s. The IMF’s Kristalina Georgieva put it plainly: “my message is — get your house in order.”