A 15-year-old loses a hand as French school blockades reach Lens

A 15-year-old boy lost a hand on Monday morning during a clash between school protesters and police outside a lycee in Lens, in northern France. Francois-Xavier Lauch, prefect of Pas-de-Calais, said the student's life was not in danger and that he was moved quickly to hospital. The injury is the worst so far in a wave of high-school blockades that began in September in the Paris suburbs and has spread to hundreds of schools. Pupils have called a national day of demonstrations for Tuesday.

Lauch said a larger group than on previous days gathered at the start of the morning and threw stones, fireworks and mortars at officers who were already on the street. He put the crowd at about 200 to 250. He would not describe the exact mechanism of the injury. Agence France-Presse, citing a police union source, said the student appeared to have picked up a sting-ball grenade fired by riot police, which then exploded in his hand. La Voix du Nord quoted a girl who said she was standing near him and that he had not picked the grenade up. Those two accounts cannot both be right. The prefect has not chosen between them.

The scale of the school shutdown

Reuters reported that 400 to 500 of France's roughly 3,700 lycees were closed or partly closed on Monday, ahead of Tuesday's national call. The pupils' unions have framed the protest as a fight over funding, overcrowding and buildings in poor repair. The September actions started in the poorer communes around Paris and moved outward. On Monday, BFMTV showed clashes in Lille, tear gas in Toulouse, and a fire at the entrance of Lycee Vauquelin in central Paris. Carole Zerbib, the head of Vauquelin, said a group in hoods and masks tried to force the door, then lit a fire, and that the school was evacuated and classes stopped.

A sting-ball grenade, the weapon named by the police union source, is a disorientation device. French interior-ministry doctrine allows its use in public-order operations under rules that have been tightened since earlier injuries at demonstrations. A 15-year-old losing a hand is the kind of incident that forces a review of that authorisation. Lauch's refusal to confirm the device leaves the review without an official cause. The hospital record, when it is released to the family and to investigators, will show the wound pattern. It was not public on Tuesday.

What Tuesday's national day inherits

The national demonstration was already scheduled before the Lens injury. It now opens with a named victim and an unresolved account of how he was hurt. Interior minister Bruno Retailleau's office had not, in the reports available on Tuesday morning, published a suspension of the grenade in question. School heads, including Zerbib, are dealing with a separate problem: groups that are not the registered pupils' union trying to enter buildings. The prefect's count of projectiles in Lens, stones and fireworks and mortars, is his evidence that the morning was not a silent picket.

The boy's name has not been released. He is 15, he is alive, and he has lost a hand. Three hundred to five hundred schools were shut or disrupted the same day. Tuesday's marches will show whether the injury widens the protest or whether the unions keep the focus on class sizes and repair budgets. The criminal inquiry into the explosion, if one is opened, will run on a slower clock than the demonstration.

Lens is a former mining town in the Pas-de-Calais, with a lycee system that has seen repeated blockades since the September wave left Paris. A prefect's morning statement is the first official document in a case like this. Lauch gave the time of day, the size of the crowd, the type of objects thrown, the hospital transfer, and the assurance that the boy is alive. He withheld the device. That withholding is now the disputed fact. AFP's police-union source and the girl quoted by La Voix du Nord are the only two public versions of the explosion. Investigators can test both against residue on the wound and against the lot numbers of grenades issued to the unit on the street.

Tuesday's national day will be counted in closed schools and in arrests, not only in marchers. Monday's range, 400 to 500 lycees shut or disrupted out of about 3,700, is the baseline. A higher figure on Tuesday would mean the Lens injury widened the action. A lower figure would mean the injury did not travel. Either number is a better measure of the protest than a minister's adjective. The boy's surgery, and the question of a prosthesis, will outlast the march.