France faces a second day of school blockades after a 15-year-old loses a hand in Lens

France went into Tuesday with a national day of school protest already called, after Monday closed more than 500 schools in whole or in part and a 15-year-old boy lost a hand in a confrontation near a school in Lens. Education minister Édouard Geffray gave the school figure. Officials said the Lens injury was not life-threatening and that the boy had been moved to a nearby hospital. The Union Syndicale Lycéenne, a main organiser, said the government had offered nothing concrete and accused police of using too much force.

The movement is a month old. It started in Paris and has spread. Geffray says 24 schools have been burned or ransacked since it began, and that 78 staff members have been injured. At least 190 students have been hurt. One of them, a 14-year-old named Eden, was struck in the head by a tear-gas grenade last week and suffered a double fracture of the jaw that needed major surgery. Justice ministry figures put arrests since the start at more than 5,060. Of those, 87 percent were minors and 13 percent adults. Prosecutors have opened cases against 1,802 people, 319 of them adults and 1,483 of them minors. Fourteen people are in pre-trial detention.

What Lecornu put on the table

Prime minister Sébastien Lecornu used Sunday to announce a set of measures for secondary students and school staff, and promised visible changes in schools. He also drew a line on force. "We will make no concessions to violence," he said. "We stand by students and staff who have been assaulted, as well as police officers and gendarmes who have been injured." The lycée union's answer was that the package did not meet the demand. Organisers had already set Tuesday as the next national day because, in their words, the weekend had produced no concrete measure.

The demands are ordinary and expensive. Students and staff describe classes of up to 40, buildings in poor repair, teacher pay that does not hold people in the job, and frequent absences when a post is unfilled. They also name Parcoursup, the online system that allocates university places, as opaque, and they name heat. Classrooms without cooling became a grievance during the last hot spell, and the union has kept it on the list. None of this is new as a complaint. What is new is the scale of the closures and the injury count in a single week.

The Lens case changes the week

A lost hand is a different order of fact from a blocked gate. Officials have not said in public what device caused the injury, only that it happened during a confrontation near the school and that the boy is alive. That gap will matter in any later inquiry. For Tuesday's organisers it is already the fact they will carry. For the interior ministry it is the fact that makes a concession on policing harder, because Lecornu has tied the government's standing to injured officers as well as injured students.

Monday's street picture, carried by Reuters, included fireworks thrown toward police near Paris, barricades at school gates, and closures as far as Marseille. In Lyon, students blocked the entrance to the Ampère lycée. In the Paris suburbs, clashes were reported near the Lycée Berthelot in Aubervilliers and in Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône. The pattern is not a single march on a ministry. It is hundreds of local gates shut at once, which is why the education ministry's count of closed schools is the number that describes the day better than any one crowd estimate.

A government already thin on votes

Lecornu is governing without a settled majority, in a National Assembly that has not produced a durable coalition since the last legislative election. A school revolt does not fall on a quiet desk. The education budget is one of the larger lines he has to defend, and a visible change in schools costs money that the current fiscal argument in Paris does not have spare. The euro's slide, a separate market story, has already been pinned in part on doubts about France's deficit path. A week of burned school offices does not settle that argument. It does make a quiet budget harder.

Tuesday's test is simple to state. If the union's call fills gates again, Geffray's Monday figure of 500 closed schools becomes a floor rather than a peak. If the police keep the same posture that produced the Lens injury and the Aubervilliers clashes, the injury list will grow, and the 1,483 minors already facing prosecution will not be the last cohort. The government has said the offer is on the table and that violence will not move it. The union has said the offer is empty. Those two sentences are the whole negotiation as of Tuesday morning.