Schools on fire, principals attacked, and almost two thousand people arrested in France in the student protests that are tearing the République apart. Seven months before the 2027 presidential elections, the Hexagon returns to the center of chaos and tension, including fires and devastation in the four corners of the country. At the end of the day, the Ministry of the Interior announced that 1,949 people were stopped today by police and gendarmes. Numbers that are added to almost another thousand in recent days. At the end of an emergency crisis summit convened mid-day, the government of Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu accused Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise (LFI) of fomenting urban violence. According to sources in Matignon, the intelligence services believe that the movement to block the high schools is a “maneuver orchestrated” by LFI “and its contacts on the far left”. Accusation flatly rejected by the sender by the Insoumis. Meanwhile, at the end of the afternoon, the Minister of Education, Edouard Geffray, announced that he will receive the student associations tomorrow in the hope of calming their spirits while the executive has ordered the cancellation, at least until Monday, of all trips and movements included in the ministers’ agendas. In a long message on According to the offices of the prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, there is a “shared assessment by the intelligence services on the origin of the movement”.
It would, in fact, be a «maneuver orchestrated by France Insoumise and its far-left representatives». An accusation also supported by Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, in pole position in the polls ahead of the race for the Elysée. So much so that his dolphin and president of the far-right party, Jordan Bardella, proposes that “the damage bill, in millions of euros”, be divided “between the families of the arsonists and the party that incites chaos: France Insoumise”. «I invite the government not to fall into conspiracy theories and the infantilization of high school students», replies the coordinator of LFI, Manuel Bompard, guaranteeing that «this spontaneous movement was born from exasperation in the face of absolutely unworthy school conditions». After the fishermen’s revolt against high fuel prices in mid-September, it is now the high school students who are shaking up the French autumn.
Among the demands, more human and financial resources for public education, the suppression of the contested ‘Parcoursup’ reform, the replacement of teachers in case of absence, but also the renovation of school buildings considered old. Starting about a week ago from some schools in the Parisian suburbs, with the declared support of LFI, the mobilization has not stopped growing, to the point of also involving university campuses (about thirty according to the student union between Paris, Strasbourg, Marseille, Lyon 2, Reims, Poitiers and Nanterre). Today, the number of blockades or incidents linked to student mobilization has grown further, reaching “900 protest actions”, according to security sources cited by France Presse, according to which the movement now involves all departments (provinces) across the Alps and, since yesterday, the authorities have detected “a turning point, with a more radical change of tone” and “episodes of urban violence near high schools”. The government has been preparing for weeks for this first day of October, which at least on paper it was supposed to be almost entirely dedicated to the awaited presentation of the 2027 budget plan in the Council of Ministers. But the thorny issue of the budget was partially eclipsed by the so-called “act II” of the student protests.
The situation was particularly tense in Marseille, where at the Lycée Victor Hugo the principal and his collaborators were attacked inside the institute and doused with petrol. Also in the second largest city in France, a fire brigade vehicle was set on fire while images of the flames in the Mandela high school in Nantes went around the web. Fires also occurred in front of a school in Rouen, Normandy, where two principals were injured. Another principal of the Dregrugillier high school in Auchel, near Béthune, in the Pas-de-Calais, was hit by a fireworks mortar rocket and hospitalized. Over 200 schools took part in the mobilization in the Paris region alone, of which around fifty were “the theater of violence, clashes and damage”.