France counts 6,100 arrests as high-school blockades reach Rennes, Lyon and Strasbourg

Police fired tear gas at high-school blockades in Rennes, Lyon and Strasbourg on Tuesday, the largest day so far of a student movement over understaffed and dilapidated classrooms. The interior ministry said 6,100 people had been arrested since the protests began, the overwhelming majority of them minors. The justice ministry said more than 1,800 people were being prosecuted, including 1,483 minors.

The High School Students Union said more than half of France's roughly 3,700 high schools were blockaded or would close for the day. Some local education authorities moved classes online. At a protest outside the Henri IV school in Paris, a recent graduate named Roberta told Reuters the demand was money to renovate high schools, and listed water leaks and rat infestations among the conditions. The movement began last month at a single school in the Paris suburbs and spread to hundreds of sites.

Injuries cut both ways. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu's office said at least 715 police officers and 215 teenagers had been injured. The New York Times put student and staff injuries at about 300 and police injuries above 700. On Monday in northern France a 15-year-old lost a hand and part of a lower arm after picking up a police dispersal grenade, La Voix du Nord reported. Interior minister Laurent Nunez said the injury was possibly caused by a stun grenade. In Marseille, a local prosecutor said a 15-year-old was arrested after aiming a makeshift flamethrower, made from a spray container, at a health-care assistant.

Education minister Edouard Geffray has called the demands legitimate and the violence unjustified. "No demand can justify such acts," he said last week. The government says outsiders have hijacked the movement and turned it into urban violence. A union of judges and prosecutors, and a human rights group, have accused police of disproportionate force against students as young as 14. Those two claims are now the argument: a minister who grants the grievance, and a prosecution list that is mostly children.

The 1,483 minors being prosecuted is the figure that will outlast Tuesday's tear gas. The justice ministry did not specify the charges. A prosecution number without a charge breakdown cannot be read as 1,483 convictions, or as 1,483 cases of violence against police. It can be read as a decision to put teenagers into the criminal system at a scale France has not used on a school protest in recent years. Rights groups will use that number. So will the interior ministry, which presents the arrests as the response to blockades, fires and fireworks aimed at officers.

The school condition list is specific enough to test. Water leaks, rats, overcrowding and missing staff are claims a rectorat can confirm or deny building by building. Geffray has not disputed the direction of the complaint. He has disputed the means. A government that accepts the diagnosis and answers with riot police is betting that the blockades will tire before the renovation budget moves. The union's claim that more than half of 3,700 high schools were affected on Tuesday is the measure of whether that bet is holding.

The hand injury in the north is the case that makes the force argument concrete. A 15-year-old who picked up a dispersal grenade lost a hand. Nunez's "possibly a stun grenade" is the minister's wording, not a medical finding published in full. The Marseille arrest is the other pole: a teenager accused of turning a spray can into a weapon against a staff member. Between those two files, the week contains both a child maimed and a child accused of trying to burn an adult. The 6,100 arrests sit around them.