A Marseille headteacher is doused in petrol as French school blockades spread

Attackers doused a headteacher in petrol at Victor Hugo high school in Marseille on Thursday, and fires were set at at least two schools, as a week-old blockade movement by French lycee students spread into universities and turned more violent. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu's office held a crisis meeting on the protests the same afternoon. The government, on the same day, set out spending cuts in the 2027 budget.

Reuters reported the Marseille attack and said fires had hit Saint-Exupery high school in the same city and Nelson Mandela high school in Nantes. At Saint-Exupery, hundreds of people surrounded a fire truck. Firefighters withdrew and the truck was set alight. In Nantes the fire was brought under control and no injuries were reported there. The headteacher at Victor Hugo was injured. Officials did not publish the extent of those injuries on Thursday afternoon.

The blockades began last week in the Paris region, aimed at staff shortages, missing substitute teachers and buildings that students describe as unfit. They coincided on Tuesday with a wider public-sector strike and by Wednesday had reached 356 high schools, according to a Reuters count of the spread that day. Education minister Edouard Geffray told reporters that 119 people, students and staff, had been injured since the demonstrations started, most of the staff among them principals and teachers. Hundreds of people have been arrested, most of them teenagers. On Thursday the Union etudiante said 640 lycees were affected by blockades or attempts to blockade. That is an organiser figure, not a police census, and it counts attempts as well as closed gates.

Saint-Denis, in Seine-Saint-Denis, has been the symbolic centre. Lycee Paul Eluard was closed on Thursday. Crowds of young people stood in front of police lines. One sign read: can we explain ourselves without being teargassed? Students have accused officers of using tear gas as a first response. Interior minister Laurent Nunez has said troublemakers are moving from school to school to incite violence, and he has accused far-left groups of feeding it. Politicians from France Unbowed, including Bally Bagayoko, the mayor of Saint-Denis, have joined demonstrations. Other officials have blamed the party's language for the rise in anger. Both claims can be true in part and still leave the original complaint untouched: classes without teachers, and rooms that do not work.

Geffray has told schools that are blocked to hold classes at a distance, and he said violence would not keep students from the right to an education. Lecornu chaired an inter-ministerial crisis cell at the interior ministry on Place Beauvau at 1 p.m. The geography of Thursday's trouble had already moved past the Paris suburbs. Franceinfo reported tension between police and demonstrators outside Lycee Grandmont in Tours, the largest high school in that urban area, and a burning barricade near Lycee Mounier in Grenoble. Universities have joined in places: Paris Cite at the Grands Moulins campus, Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, La Chapelle, Nanterre, Poitiers, and Gustave Eiffel in Seine-et-Marne.

The timing is the political fact. The 2027 budget, presented as the protests entered their second week, contains spending cuts the government already expected to be unpopular. A movement that started as a complaint about substitute teachers now sits on the same day as a budget the unions and the left will fight on other grounds. That overlap gives the blockades a larger audience and gives the government a reason to treat a school dispute as a public-order problem. Nunez's reading, that small groups are touring schools, is the interior ministry's case for arrests. Geffray's injury count, 119 before Thursday's petrol attack, is the education ministry's case that staff are already being hurt.

What is not yet established is how many of Thursday's fires and the Marseille assault were carried out by students in the blockade and how many by people who arrived after the gates were shut. Prosecutors had not, by late afternoon, named suspects in the petrol attack. Until they do, the verified sequence is narrower: a headteacher doused at Victor Hugo, a fire truck burned at Saint-Exupery, a school fire in Nantes, a crisis cell at Beauvau, and a budget whose cuts landed in the middle of it.

The demand that opened the movement has not been answered in public. Students want substitute teachers hired, more money for buildings, and classes that are not over size. Remote lessons, Geffray's immediate instruction to blocked schools, keep a register running. They do not put a teacher in a room that has been short of one all term. That gap is what the next week of blockades will test, against a government that has just written a budget of cuts and a police prefecture that has already arrested hundreds of teenagers.