French police hold 625 people as school protests spread beyond Saint-Denis

French police detained about 625 people on Wednesday, most of them young, as high-school protests over missing teachers and decaying buildings ran into a second day of fires and clashes. Interior minister Laurent Nunez gave the detention figure. The government counted 83 injured police officers. It counted 159 injured students and teaching staff across the days of protest, including one student who lost part of the use of his hand after setting off a firework. Videos said to show two teachers being attacked drew condemnation from the president, from officials and from teaching unions.

The protests have run for nearly a week. Students say teachers who leave are not replaced, and that buildings are in serious disrepair. The centres of the clashes have been high schools in poorer suburbs: Toulouse, Nantes, Rennes, Lyon and Lille, as well as the Paris belt. In Saint-Denis, north of Paris, students set fires outside the gates of Lycée Paul Éluard and tore down a section of fencing. Saint-Denis is the epicentre of the Paris-area violence. It is also one of the poorest departments in mainland France.

What a student at the lycée described

Fadila, 17, a student at Paul Éluard, told Reuters the school has no windows in places, that prefabricated toilets have no water, and that cockroaches and rats are in the building. She said the canteen is too expensive, that toilet paper is not stocked, and that students have to ask supervisors for it. The school is in the middle of renovations. A renovation that leaves a working school without water in the toilets is the concrete complaint behind a fire at the gate. It is not a slogan. It is a maintenance failure with an address.

Police fired tear gas at students outside César Baggio secondary school in Lille on Tuesday. Arson on or near school property was reported in several of the cities listed above. The interior ministry's injury count separates officers from students and staff, which lets a reader see both sides of the street. Eighty-three injured officers in a day is a riot figure. A student losing part of a hand to a firework he set off is a self-inflicted injury inside the same count of 159. The ministry did not say how many of the 159 were hurt by police, by other students, or by the fires.

The staffing gap the protests name

The demand that has stayed constant is replacement of absent teachers. French secondary schools in priority neighbourhoods have carried vacancies for years. A class without a teacher for weeks is the grievance students in Saint-Denis, Lille and Toulouse have repeated. The fires and the fencing do not create that vacancy. They do change the ministry's day from a staffing argument into a public-order argument, which is why Nunez's detention number led the coverage.

Teaching unions condemned the attacks on the two teachers in the videos. That condemnation splits the protest. A union can demand replacements and also refuse a beating of staff. The presidency's condemnation did the same political work: it answered the videos, not the toilets. Fadila's list, windows, water, rats, canteen prices, toilet paper, is the list that does not require a video. It requires a site visit the education ministry has not published this week.

What Thursday changes

Thursday's clashes meant the Wednesday detentions did not end the movement. A protest that survives 625 detentions and returns the next morning is past a one-day walkout. The open administrative question is how many of the 625 were charged, how many were minors released to parents, and how many schools did not open. Those figures were not in Nunez's first count. The open building question is simpler and sits in Fadila's account: a lycée under renovation, in the department that led the Paris violence, still sending students to a supervisor for toilet paper. Until that building is fixed, the staffing demand and the public-order bill will keep arriving on the same day.