Petrol thrown at headteacher, fires, protests. High school pupils in France storm schools

Paris. A shortage of teachers and staff, overcrowded classrooms, dilapidated school buildings and increasingly heavy timetables. These are the main reasons behind the protests by French secondary school pupils, who for days have been stepping up their actions against the government, accused of not doing enough and indeed of worsening their conditions with the new budget (presented today by Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu), which provides for a total of 43 billion in cuts to bring the deficit back to 5 per cent of GDP by 2027: cuts that are hitting the public sector hard, including schools.

The first protests erupted shortly after the start of the school year. First of all in Brittany, at the Théodore-Monod secondary school in Le Rheu, near Rennes, where pupils complained of “problems of a human and material nature”. But it was in Créteil, on the south-eastern outskirts of Paris, that the movement intensified. In the wake of a teachers’ strike over a lack of resources and staff, on 17 September, pupils at the Saint-Exupéry secondary school decided to block access to the school, claiming they had been neglected by the Ministry of Education. “The teachers explained the reasons for their discontent to us and we decided to join them,” Cheick Sanogo, a first-year sixth-form student, told France Info. From Créteil, the epicentre of the uprising, the movement spread throughout Île-de-France, the Paris region, and gradually across the whole country, involving a total of over 400 schools.

Social media has accelerated the spread of the protests. “The mobilisation has taken on unexpected proportions,” a student from Saint-Exupéry told France Info, thanks to the many videos circulating “on TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram, which are racking up huge numbers of views”. In recent days, the situation has deteriorated, with fires, attacks on school staff and clashes with the police across the country. In Nantes, a fire devastated the entrance and façade of the Nelson Mandela secondary school, and in Lille, numerous rubbish bins and electric bicycles were set alight near the César Baggio secondary school. But the most serious incident occurred at the Victor Hugo High School in Marseille, where “the headteacher, deputy headteacher, head of administration and head of security were attacked and doused with petrol”, according to a statement from the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region.

According to official figures released on Wednesday by the Ministry of the Interior, 625 people were arrested and 83 police officers and gendarmes were injured. Meanwhile, 85 students and 34 members of school staff have been injured since the start of the protests, according to a statement from the Ministry of Education. In Tours, in particular, a young man was seriously injured in the head and rushed to hospital after being struck, presumably by an LBD (‘defensive projectile launcher’) fired by the police.

Faced with the radicalisation of the protests and their spread to universities, Prime Minister Lecornu convened an emergency inter-ministerial crisis meeting. According to the secret services, the student mobilisation is a “manoeuvre organised by France Insoumise (LFI) and its far-left representatives”, Matignon reported in a statement following the meeting. The accusation was contested by the party led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who in turn accused the government of “sinking into conspiracy theories”, describing the students’ movement as a spontaneous one born of exasperation. Yet it is Mélenchon himself who has been capitalising on and inciting the protests from the very beginning, pointing the finger at the police and their methods. “We are proud to be standing outside secondary schools to defend our young people from police brutality,” declared the LFI leader. The LFI-affiliated mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, also joined the protests, dancing with the young people and stating that “a violent reaction may be legitimate or understandable in the face of the actions of the police”.

The government’s fear is that the protest, which began in secondary schools and has since spread to universities, could extend to other groups that have already voiced their discontent in recent weeks over high fuel prices and the freeze on public sector pay: from motorists to fishermen, from farmers to civil servants. Demands arising from different sectors could thus find common ground in their opposition to the government’s policies, transforming a series of sector-specific protests into a movement of nationwide discontent.