Injuries and arrests as French high school student protests spread

Dozens of people have been injured and hundreds arrested, most of them teenagers, officials said, in a wave of French student protests against teacher shortages and dilapidated buildings that on Wednesday spread to more schools across the country.

The demonstrations and blockades, which began last week and coincided on Tuesday with a broader public-sector strike, have become a political flashpoint at a sensitive moment for France, as they spread to 356 high schools and turned more violent.

On Thursday, the government will unveil the country's 2027 budget, which is expected to involve spending cuts aimed at easing pressure on government finances.

In Saint-Denis, a suburb north of Paris, students stood outside the gates of their school near a fire that had been set as police looked on, while in Lyon and Lille television images showed people throwing projectiles at lines of police officers.

"There are cockroaches and rats everywhere in the school," Fadila, a 17-year-old student, told Reuters. She said temperatures in classrooms could swing from sweltering to below freezing, depending on the weather.

SCORES INJURED OR DETAINED

According to the OECD global policy forum, French spending on education was in the middle of the range among member countries and increased between 2015 and 2022, but its share of the budget has slightly decreased.

France's Education Minister Edouard Geffray told reporters that there had been 119 injuries, both among students and school staff, since the beginning of the demonstrations.

He added that most of the affected staff were school principals and teachers.

Politicians from the hard-left France Unbowed party, including Bally Bagayoko, the mayor of Saint-Denis, have joined the demonstrations.

Other officials and politicians have denounced the party for rhetoric they said was stoking students' anger, while Interior Minister Laurent Nunez accused far-left groups of inciting violence.

"We observed that, in certain places, there were individuals acting as agitators — people who, moreover, moved from one school to another to stir up high school and other students and incite them to commit acts of violence," he said.

Nunez told reporters at a press conference that some 625 people were detained on Wednesday and more than 440 people the day before, most of them minors. Nunez said there were seven incidents in which people threw hydrochloric acid at law enforcement officers.

The government has criticised violence that has broken out at some of the demonstrations but said that difficulties in high schools should be acknowledged and addressed.

"High schools are meant to be open and to share knowledge. They are not meant to be blockaded or to have trash cans set on fire," French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters in Madrid.

Gamze, a 17-year-old student in Saint-Denis, said students in the historically working-class suburb were treated unfairly compared with students elsewhere.

"It's always us ... who are suffering when, in Paris or in the countryside, they're not in such a situation," she said.