French high schools block gates as arrests pass 1,000 in two days

French high school students have blocked gates at hundreds of lycées over teacher shortages and the state of the buildings, and the interior ministry's count of detentions has passed a thousand in two days. Education Minister Edouard Geffray said 119 people had been injured since the demonstrations began, students and staff together, most of the staff among them principals and teachers. A government spending plan is due on Thursday.

Reuters reported from Saint-Denis, on the northern edge of Paris, where students blocked the entrance to the Lycée Paul Éluard and demanded substitute teachers, more resources and usable classrooms. The actions started last week and spread. By Wednesday they had reached 356 high schools. Tuesday coincided with a wider public-sector strike. Wednesday was the students' own day, and it was the more violent of the two on the police account.

Interior ministry spokesman Nunez said about 625 people were detained on Wednesday and more than 440 the day before, most of them minors. He said some of the violence was driven by people moving from school to school to pull students into clashes. Geffray's injury figure of 119 covers the whole run of the protests, not a single morning. The two numbers describe different things: one is custody, the other is hospital and school infirmary.

The demand is concrete. Students and staff want substitute teachers hired into empty posts, and they want rooms that are not closed for leaks, heating failures or overcrowding. France's education ministry has spent the decade arguing that the substitute pool is a budget line, not a right. The students have treated the empty post as the grievance. A blockade at the gate does not hire a teacher. It does make the empty post visible on the day before a budget.

That budget is the government's problem. Ministers have signalled spending cuts for Thursday's text. A cut to the education line, or a freeze that leaves substitute posts unfilled, will land on a movement that has already produced 356 blocked schools and more than a thousand detentions. The public-sector strike on Tuesday gave the students a wider frame. The interior ministry would prefer to treat the clashes as the work of mobile agitators. Geffray's own injury list, heavy with principals and teachers, is harder to file that way.

Most of those detained are minors, which shapes what happens next. Custody for a minor in France is short, and the charge that follows is often a lower-level public-order offence. The political count is the one that remains: 356 schools, 119 injured, roughly 1,065 people held across Tuesday and Wednesday. The budget text on Thursday will show whether the ministry treats that count as a reason to fill the substitute posts or as a policing problem that ends when the gates reopen.