French schools close as student protests escalate, teen injured by tear gas grenade

On Monday, up to 500 French schools remained shuttered. The closures were not the result of a holiday or weather event, but a precaution taken by the government in response to escalating student unrest that had swept across the country over the previous week. Education Minister Edouard Geffray announced the decision on Sunday evening, citing security concerns that had not yet been resolved. More large protests were scheduled for Tuesday, and authorities decided the risk was too high to keep students and staff in buildings.

The movement had begun modestly enough. On September 17, students at a Paris school started complaining about conditions they found intolerable: teachers absent for long stretches with no replacements, school days that stretched too long, buildings falling into disrepair. As summer temperatures climbed to 40 degrees Celsius in some French towns, many schools lacked air conditioning—a luxury few French buildings possessed. The grievances were concrete and rooted in daily experience. But somewhere between that first protest and the following week, the movement transformed. What had started as teenagers voicing legitimate demands about their schools mutated into something more volatile, with violent clashes erupting in cities across France.

The human toll became impossible to ignore. In the northern town of Lens, a 15-year-old boy suffered a catastrophic injury on Monday when he apparently picked up a police tear gas grenade—sometimes called a sting ball or blast ball—and it detonated in his hand. He lost the hand entirely. The incident crystallized the danger that had come to define these protests. Since the movement began, more than 5,000 people had been arrested, with 85 percent of them minors. Twenty-four schools had been burned or ransacked. Seventy-eight education staff members had sustained injuries. On Sunday in the southern town of La Ciotat, a 16-year-old was detained after a 59-year-old teacher was struck and doused with gasoline during a protest. In Belfort, in the east, video footage showed young people beating and kicking a police officer on the ground.

Geffray blamed what he called infiltrators from the far left for hijacking the student movement and steering it toward extreme violence. "There are activists—particularly from the far left—who have infiltrated the high school student movement, hijacked it from the students themselves, and engaged in extreme violence," he said. He framed the school closures as necessary protection for both staff and students. In the Ile-de-France region surrounding Paris, regional president Valerie Pecresse announced that more than a third of the 468 schools under her authority would remain closed on Monday.

The security forces themselves had become a flashpoint. Amnesty International's French branch characterized police actions as disproportionate, citing the use of tear gas and batons against young protesters. Interior Minister Laurent Nunez pushed back, insisting that security forces were not cracking down on young people but rather protecting those who wished to voice their demands peacefully. The framing revealed a fundamental disagreement about what was actually happening on the streets.

Meanwhile, the original demands of the students had not been addressed. Protest organizers called for demonstrations to continue on Tuesday, saying the government had still failed to offer any "concrete measures" to fix the problems that had sparked the movement in the first place. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu responded by urging local authorities to prioritize filling teaching positions left vacant by long-term absences. He also scheduled a meeting for Tuesday with regional presidents to discuss renovating school buildings that were often in poor condition. Whether these steps would satisfy the protesters, or whether the movement would continue to escalate, remained unclear.

The timing added another layer of consequence. France was only months away from presidential elections that would choose a successor to Emmanuel Macron, who was approaching his term limit. The student protests had begun to dominate the country's political debate at a moment when the nation was already in transition. What had started as complaints about teacher absences and broken air conditioning had become a test of how the government would handle civil unrest, how security forces would respond to young people in the streets, and what the country's political leadership would prioritize in the months ahead.