France counts 256,000 marchers as Lecornu cites 215 injured teenagers

256,000 people on the street, and Lecornu calls it the heaviest school toll in decades

More than 250,000 pupils, teachers and parents marched across France on Tuesday, the largest day so far of a high-school protest that began in September in the poorer suburbs of Paris and has since spread to cities including Marseille, Lyon, Nantes, Rennes, Strasbourg, Toulouse and Bordeaux. The interior ministry put the national figure at 256,000, with 56,000 in Paris. Education unions said 450,000.

Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu told lawmakers that at least 215 teenagers and 85 school staff had been injured since the protests began more than a fortnight ago. He called that "the heaviest toll in decades paid by the school system." His office said more than 700 police officers had also been hurt over the same stretch. On Tuesday alone the interior ministry counted 488 arrests and, in one accounting, 48 security personnel injured. Another count put Tuesday's officer injuries at 43.

President Emmanuel Macron called Lecornu, interior minister Laurent Nunez and education minister Edouard Geffray to the Elysee on Tuesday evening, according to BFMTV, Le Monde and Le Parisien. The meeting was described by those outlets as a crisis session. No new package of school spending was announced from it by Wednesday morning.

Blockades, fires, and two counts of closed schools

The education ministry said lessons were cancelled in whole or in part at 891 of the country's roughly 3,700 lycees. The secondary teachers' union USL said 1,800 secondary schools had been blockaded or closed as a precaution, and that 90 percent of universities were blockaded. The gap between 891 and 1,800 is the gap between a ministry count of cancelled lessons and a union count of blockades and precautionary closures. Both numbers were issued for Tuesday. Neither is a measure of how many pupils stayed home in a school that remained open.

Twenty-four schools have been burned or ransacked since mid-September. The justice ministry said more than 6,100 people had been arrested over the campaign, almost all of them minors, with more than 1,800 being prosecuted and nearly 1,500 of those under 18. A later justice ministry cut, released on Monday evening, put total detentions at 5,060, of whom 87 percent were minors. The two justice figures do not match. They are the official range a reader has, not a single audited total.

Police fired tear gas and, in several cities, water cannon at groups on the edge of the marches. Officers also made baton charges. Demonstrators threw fireworks and other objects. Storefronts were damaged in more than one city. A banner in Rennes read "Police officers, enemy of the people." Teachers and parents joined partly, some of them said, to stand between pupils and the police line.

What the marches are about, and where they have spilled

The stated demand is better conditions in high schools: maintenance, staffing, and the state of buildings. The protests began in September in the deprived suburbs of Paris before the marches became national. Lecornu's injury count is the government's way of framing the past two weeks as a policing and safety crisis inside the school system. Student groups have framed the same days as a response to under-resourced lycees and to the force used against blockades.

The spillover has already crossed a border. For a second day, riots in Liege, Belgium, followed student protests there, and authorities closed Guillemins railway station and asked local businesses to shut. That is a separate police problem in a second country, fed by the same fortnight.

The number that will be argued over is the turnout: 256,000 against 450,000. The number that is harder to argue over is Lecornu's injury ledger, 215 teenagers and 85 staff, which he placed on the record in parliament. The next fact to watch is whether the Elysee meeting produces a maintenance budget, a policing order, or neither.

A parent reading the two school counts should not add them. 891 is the ministry's figure for cancelled lessons. 1,800 is the union's figure for blockades and precautionary closures. A school can sit in one list, both, or neither. The arrest lists have the same problem: 6,100 over the campaign in one justice ministry statement, 5,060 in another released on Monday evening. Until those series are reconciled, the durable public facts are the interior ministry's Tuesday turnout, the 488 arrests that day, and the prime minister's injury totals.