Lecornu counts 215 injured teenagers as French school marches pass 250,000

France's interior ministry said more than 250,000 people marched on Tuesday in the largest day so far of a school protest movement that began in September. Organisers put the figure at 450,000. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu told lawmakers that at least 215 teenagers and 85 school staff had been injured, which he called the heaviest toll in decades paid by the school system. Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said 715 police officers had been injured.

Police fired tear gas and water cannon at the edges of marches in Paris, Strasbourg, Rennes and Toulouse, Reuters reported. The interior ministry's count included about 56,000 people in Paris, CNN said. In the 20th arrondissement, protesters outside the closed Helene Boucher lycee tipped bins and bicycles into a barricade, the Associated Press reported. Clashes were also recorded in Lyon.

The High School Students Union said more than half of France's roughly 3,700 lycees were blockaded or closed for the day. Some local education authorities moved classes online. Al Jazeera, citing officials, said as many as 589 schools had been disrupted this week, down from 735 on Friday. The two figures measure different things: a union count of blockades on the day of the national march, and an official count of disrupted schools across the week. Both are large enough to close the argument that this is a suburb-only dispute.

What the marches are about

The protests started in September in the poorer suburbs north of Paris, at first in support of striking teachers, and then spread. Students and parents describe water leaks, rat infestations, overcrowded rooms and missing staff. Education Minister Edouard Geffray met student leaders on Friday. No agreement came out of the meeting, and the leaders called for a mass turnout on Tuesday. On Monday Geffray said at least 190 high school students had been injured. On Sunday he said 78 teaching staff had been injured and 24 schools had been burned or ransacked. CNN reported that more than 5,000 people had been taken into custody over the preceding weeks, most of them minors with no previous record, and that one student in Lens lost a hand after picking up a grenade and another in Tours lost an eye.

Amnesty International has criticised the use of force against minors, after reports of baton blows, rubber bullets and tear gas. Lecornu rejected the claim that the government had ordered police to repress the protests. He said officials had to listen to demands school by school. Hugo Vetzel, a recent graduate interviewed by Reuters in Strasbourg, said there was a gap between elites and the students on the street.

The budget sitting underneath the barracks

The school row is running at the same time as a fiscal row. Reuters noted that the government is under pressure to contain public debt in weak growth, and that basic tasks such as passing a budget have been difficult since President Emmanuel Macron's allies lost their majority in the 2024 parliamentary election. Lecornu is the prime minister who has to hold both problems in the same week: a street movement that has already injured hundreds of pupils and staff, and a legislature that has not given his predecessors a stable budget vote.

The useful distinction on Tuesday is between the size of the march and the condition of the buildings. A turnout of a quarter of a million, on the ministry's own number, does not by itself prove a maintenance backlog. The backlog is in the earlier, smaller facts: 24 schools burned or ransacked by Sunday, classes shifted online, and a union claim that more than half the lycees shut or blocked for a day. Those are the figures a budget negotiation can be checked against. Injury counts are the other ledger. Lecornu's 215 teenagers and 85 staff, Nunez's 715 officers, and Geffray's earlier tallies do not match because they were given on different days and by different ministries. They do show that both sides of the barricade are counting casualties in the hundreds.

Geffray's Friday meeting failed to produce a text. Tuesday's marches were the students' answer. The next test is whether the government puts a repair and staffing number on the table that school-level delegations can accept, or whether the blockades continue into a fourth week with the same gap between the interior ministry's crowd count and the organisers' count.