Protests by French secondary-school students have spread nationwide and turned increasingly violent, with bins set alight, clashes with riot police and well over a thousand arrests in a single day, according to reports from French and international media.
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said on Friday that France was "sliding into riot and urban violence" and that authorities were using all intermediate means to stop it. A separate official, Darmanin, said 735 of France's 3,700 schools were affected "one way or another". RFI reported 1,747 arrests on Friday 2 October. At least 65 education staff have been injured, the education ministry said. In Belfort, in north-eastern France, a 17-year-old was arrested on suspicion of attempted homicide after a police officer was attacked; BBC Verify authenticated two videos showing the officer being beaten. Police also charged protesters in Pantin, near Paris, after projectiles were thrown, and used tear gas in Strasbourg and Lille. Bins were burned in Paris, Rennes and Toulouse.
The movement began as a demand for better conditions: overloaded timetables, dilapidated school buildings, teacher shortages and concern about young people's mental health. Education Minister Édouard Geffray met three pupil unions on Friday but offered mainly an online consultation platform for pupils. Louis Letoublon of the union Les Lycéens said they had received no concrete commitments and that the mobilisation must continue. The organisations are calling for a third day of action, with a large national demonstration, on Tuesday 6 October. Geffray has argued the movement was hijacked by non-students, citing teachers who said the people in front of their schools were not their pupils. Some protesters say police tactics are making matters worse. "It makes us even angrier," said Lola, a 16-year-old.
The political backdrop is a tense budget debate. Commentators such as taz's Paris correspondent argue that the government's plan to find roughly 50 billion euros in savings, in a country with public debt above 3.4 trillion euros, has fed a sense among young people of being a "sacrificed generation". The government has pointed to the hard-left La France Insoumise of Jean-Luc Mélenchon as stoking the unrest, an accusation critics regard as a way to deflect from budget choices.
Why this matters: historian Stéphane Sirot says the key question is whether the protests link up with universities and, in turn, trade unions. That, he suggests, would resemble the 2006 movement that began in schools and ended up forcing the withdrawal of a youth employment contract. So far, he notes, university mobilisation is far smaller than in the lycées, though the student union Union étudiante has urged students to join, saying both groups share demands for more youth funding.