France keeps up to 500 lycées shut after 24 schools are burned or ransacked

France will keep between 400 and 500 lycées fully or partly closed on Monday, 5 October, after a week of student protests that education officials now describe as violent. Education minister Édouard Geffray said on Sunday that lessons would be totally or partly suspended where security conditions had not been met. He said 24 schools had been burned or ransacked since the protests began. He also said 78 education staff had been wounded, which he called something the system had not seen before. At least 170 students have been injured since the demonstrations started in the Paris region in mid-September.

The interior ministry's numbers are larger than the school-closure count. Justice minister Gérald Darmanin said on Friday that 735 of France's 3,700 lycées had been affected in some way. Interior minister Laurent Nuñez said 1,747 people were arrested on Friday alone. Over the past week, the interior ministry's tally of arrests passed 5,000, and Geffray's office said 85 percent of those arrested were minors. The education ministry said at least 400 of 3,700 high schools were closed on Friday, with 560 facing protests or disruption.

Pupils have named three complaints: not enough teachers, overcrowded classes, and buildings in poor repair. The protests began in the Paris region in mid-September and have since reached Montpellier, Nantes and Marseille. Friday brought riot police onto streets around school gates. Critics of the police response have called it disproportionate. The government has answered with closures and arrest figures, not with a published plan to hire the missing teachers or to fund the repairs the pupils are citing.

A closure is a different instrument from an arrest. Geffray's Monday list is a safety call: staff and pupils should not be in buildings where the minister says conditions are not met. It also empties the site the protesters were trying to blockade. For a pupil in one of the 400 to 500 lycées, Monday is a lost day of class. For a pupil in a school that stays open, Monday is a day with riot-police posture still in place from Friday. The two experiences will sit in the same national argument.

The injury count on staff is the figure that moves this out of a routine student strike. Seventy-eight wounded employees, by the minister's number, is a labour and criminal fact, not only a political one. Twenty-four burned or ransacked schools are a facilities fact. Insurance, temporary classrooms and the next set of baccalauréat weeks all now have a damage list attached. The ministry has not published the names of the 24 schools or the cost of the damage.

Nuñez's arrest total needs the same caution. More than 5,000 arrests in a week, most of them minors, will include releases, formal charges and cases dropped. The Friday figure of 1,747 is a single-day peak. Neither number is a conviction count. Both numbers are large enough to mark the week as the heaviest school unrest French officials have described this term.

The underlying complaint is measurable in principle and still vague in the public statements. Class size, vacant teaching posts and building condition are recorded by the education ministry every year. Geffray has not, in the remarks carried so far, tied the closures to a specific vacancy figure or a repair budget. Until he does, the Monday shutdown is a security decision sitting on top of an unresolved staffing argument. Parents will see closed gates. Pupils who blocked those gates will see the same thing and call it a result. The 78 injured staff will see neither version as the point.

Monday's map will not be even. Geffray spoke of a partial, progressive return to lessons, which means some of the 400 to 500 lycées will run a reduced timetable rather than a full closure. A pupil in a burnt building has no classroom to return to. A pupil in a school closed because a blockade is expected may be back on Tuesday. The ministry has not published the list. Head teachers will. That list, when it comes, is the document that turns a national range into 500 local facts.