Police in France made 1,949 arrests on Thursday, when about 900 blockades or related incidents were recorded and more than 160 schools shut. About 30 university campuses were blocked, fires hit schools in Nantes and Marseille, and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu told ministers to cancel their travel. The movement began last week over teacher shortages and decaying buildings, and the government now has to answer both the grievances and the violence.
Classroom Conditions Lit the Fuse
The students’ demands are concrete: substitute teachers, more staff, smaller classes, lighter timetables and repairs to buildings that the Union syndicale lycéenne calls dilapidated. The union also wants relief from the stress of Parcoursup, the university-application platform, while pupils cite classrooms that overheated during this year’s heatwaves. One 17-year-old in Saint-Denis told Reuters there were cockroaches and rats in the school.
The movement began in the Paris region and had reached 356 schools by Wednesday, when 625 people were detained and 83 officers were wounded. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez gave those figures, while Education Minister Édouard Geffray counted 119 injured students and school staff. Numbers of that scale make the protests hard to dismiss as the work of a few disruptive teenagers.
Violence Changes the Argument
Firefighters were forced to flee their truck at Marseille’s Saint-Exupéry high school on Thursday, and attackers then set it alight, police said. A fire spread from a bin into the entrance of Nelson Mandela high school in Nantes, and teachers in Marseille were splashed with petrol, apparently by accident. Reuters reported that one student held a sign reading: “Can we explain ourselves without being teargassed?”
Students accuse police of heavy-handed tactics, and the interior minister says internal investigations are examining brutality allegations involving three students. Those allegations sit alongside 305 injured officers, a toll the interior ministry reported on Thursday. Once buildings burn, the argument shifts from staffing towards order, which suits a government that would rather discuss arson than vacancies.
Politics Enters the Classroom
After a crisis meeting, Lecornu’s office said intelligence services had concluded that the movement was a manoeuvre orchestrated by La France Insoumise and its ultra-left allies. Jean-Luc Mélenchon said on Wednesday that his party calls for non-violent methods, and LFI coordinator Manuel Bompard urged ministers not to sink into conspiracy-mongering. Activists can exploit a protest without having created the reasons pupils joined it, and genuine anger can coexist with organised agitators.
The timing sharpens the dispute, since the government’s 2027 budget includes €54 billion of savings and cuts that sit badly with demands for more teachers. Geffray promised talks with unions, parents and student associations on Friday and urged blockaded schools to switch to remote classes. Burning schools cannot be an acceptable form of protest, yet restoring order without filling vacancies and repairing buildings would return France to the conditions that produced the revolt. Whatever part activists played, the vacant posts and crumbling classrooms existed first, and no intelligence report will fill or fix them.
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