French school protests leave nearly 200 injured as clashes with police intensify

France's schools are shuttered and its streets are tense. Nearly two hundred students have been hurt since demonstrations erupted three weeks ago, according to Édouard Geffray, the country's education minister. The injuries span a spectrum of causes—some accidental, some inflicted by what authorities describe as troublemakers hurling fireworks into crowds. But the most severe incident has crystallized the stakes of these clashes in a way statistics cannot.

On Monday in Lens, a northern industrial town, a fifteen-year-old boy lost his hand. According to a police union source, the teenager picked up a stun grenade that riot officers had fired, apparently intending to throw it back at them. The device detonated in his grip. Local authorities confirmed the amputation but declined to specify exactly how the injury occurred, citing an ongoing investigation. The prefect of Pas-de-Calais, François-Xavier Lauch, noted that between 150 and 200 protesters had been hurling objects at police when officers moved in. Whether the grenade was a police stun device or something else remains formally unestablished, though the police union's account suggests a tragic miscalculation by a child in the chaos of confrontation.

The scale of the disruption has grown steadily since September 17, when students in the Parisian suburb of Créteil joined teachers striking over resource shortages and staff vacancies. The grievances are concrete: overcrowded classrooms, crumbling buildings, teachers stretched thin. The slogans capture the desperation—"More hours in class than for sleep," "Fund study, not repression." But the response from authorities has been forceful. At least five thousand people have been arrested since the protests began, and eighty-five percent of them are teenagers. Seventy-eight teachers and education staff have also been injured. In one documented case, a seventeen-year-old was arrested after allegedly throwing a stone that struck a bystander in the face, causing permanent vision loss in one eye.

Human rights organizations have raised alarms about the police response. Amnesty International released images of high school students being struck with batons, many of them minors. A fourteen-year-old was hit by a grenade in the jaw and lost several teeth. The French Human Rights League, led by president Nathalie Tehio, stated plainly that police instructions appear to contain no directive for restraint when dealing with children. "We can see that in the instructions given to the police, there is no directive to show restraint, even though they are dealing with children," Tehio said.

Education Minister Geffray has attempted to walk a narrow line. He condemned what he called "acts of extreme violence," including direct attacks on school principals, while simultaneously insisting that protest itself represents "a freedom that must be respected and protected." Yet the violence continues. Property damage is estimated in the millions of euros. Hundreds of schools remain closed. Teachers and members of the public have been caught in the fray alongside students.

Tuesday was expected to bring further disruption as multiple groups called for a national day of protests. The demonstrations reflect a deeper anxiety among French youth—a sense that the basic infrastructure of their education, and by extension their future, is being allowed to deteriorate. The anger is not abstract. It is rooted in daily experience: missing teachers, broken facilities, an opaque university admissions system that feels arbitrary and closed. For many of these teenagers, the choice between attending class and taking to the street has become a false one. They cannot do both.