Geffray says 400 to 500 French high schools will shut on Monday after 24 were ransacked

Education minister Edouard Geffray said on Sunday that lessons would be totally or partly suspended in 400 to 500 French high schools on Monday. He said the security conditions for a normal day had not been met. He called the closures a precaution, aimed at a partial and progressive return to class, ahead of a larger day of protest that organisers have called for Tuesday.

The count of damage is already specific. Geffray said 24 schools had been burned or ransacked since the movement began. He said at least 170 students and 78 education staff had been injured since the demonstrations started in the Paris region in mid-September. The ministry had already reported that at least 400 of France's 3,700 lycées were closed on Friday, and that 560 faced protests or disruption. Monday's 400 to 500 is a planned closure, not a count of schools already shut by students at the gate.

The students' list of complaints, as Al Jazeera and AFP reported it, is about the school day itself: high rates of teacher absence, days they say are too long, and buildings in poor condition. Organisers said they were returning to large demonstrations on Tuesday because they had not had concrete measures from President Emmanuel Macron's government. Geffray's announcement does not answer that list. It moves Monday's register.

A lycée in France is the upper secondary school, roughly ages 15 to 18. Closing 400 to 500 of them for a day takes several hundred thousand pupils out of class, on top of the Friday closures. The ministry has not published a department-by-department list in the statements carried on Sunday night. Principals were left to apply a national instruction locally, which is how a range of 400 to 500 appears in the minister's own sentence. The range is the tell. Paris does not yet know, school by school, which buildings will open.

The injury figures are the part of the file that will outlast the Monday timetable. One hundred and seventy students and seventy-eight staff is a ratio of a little more than two to one. Geffray did not say how many of those injuries came from clashes with police, how many from fires, and how many from fights between students. He did say the closures were chiefly about security. AFP described the protests as having become increasingly violent. Getty photographs from Thursday showed students and police outside a lycée in Aubervilliers, in Seine-Saint-Denis, which has been one of the centres of the Paris-region actions.

Tuesday is the date the organisers chose, not the ministry. A Monday closure is an attempt to break the sequence: a disrupted Friday, a shut Monday, a called Tuesday. If students treat Monday's closure as a gathering day rather than a day at home, the precaution produces the crowd it was meant to avoid. Geffray has not said what the ministry will do if Tuesday matches Friday's 560 disrupted schools.

The underlying complaint is measurable, and the ministry has not answered it in the Sunday statement. Teacher absence rates, length of the school day, and the state of the buildings are administrative facts. A count of 24 ransacked schools is also an administrative fact. The two lists now sit in the same week, and only one of them has a number attached in public.