France's school protests escalate as tear gas deployed in Paris, Marseille

The streets of Paris, Marseille, and Lyon filled with teenagers on Tuesday, their voices calling for something their schools no longer seemed to have: resources, space, and safety. Hundreds of thousands marched across France—the government counted more than 250,000 demonstrators, though student unions put the figure at 450,000—in what protesters called "Act Three" of a movement that began six weeks earlier in the struggling schools of Seine-Saint-Denis, north of Paris, and had since metastasized into a national crisis.

The original grievance was concrete and urgent: overcrowded classrooms, teaching positions left unfilled, buildings with ceilings that leaked. Alissa, a student in Marseille, explained it plainly to reporters: "We're going to the streets because they've closed our schools... schools are falling apart." Her classmate Sacha described conditions so poor that students could barely work during the day. What started as local anger had become something larger—parents joined the marches, university students added their voices, and France's largest union, the CGT, announced plans for further demonstrations on Thursday. The movement had grown beyond the schoolyard.

Police met the crowds with force. Tear gas canisters arced through the air in Paris and Marseille. Water cannons sprayed demonstrators in Rennes. In Marseille, riot officers fired gas at a group of masked protesters who had grabbed bollards and bins in an attempt to barricade themselves from advancing police lines. The clashes, however, remained relatively contained—nothing approaching the scale of violence that had marked earlier phases of the unrest. Still, the toll was mounting. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu reported that since late September, 215 students and 85 school staff members had been injured, along with 715 police officers. By Tuesday evening, authorities said 6,547 people had been stopped or arrested.

But the numbers obscured the specific injuries—the ones that would not fade. A fourteen-year-old named Eden was blockading his lycée in Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône, northwest of Paris, when a police officer fired a tear-gas grenade directly at him. The impact fractured his jaw. His upper teeth shattered. Four of his lower teeth were gone. The officer who fired the grenade was charged with violence resulting in mutilation or permanent disability. Days later, in the northern city of Lens, a fifteen-year-old's hand was torn off after an anti-encirclement grenade detonated near a school. Authorities claimed the student had picked up the device, which then exploded; students said he was hit directly after an officer fired. The grenade, classified as non-lethal, had caused irreversible harm.

The government's response had been thin. Education Minister Édouard Geffray offered a website for students to lodge complaints and promised an afternoon of internal discussion in schools on Friday. He also blamed "ultra-violent elements" for infiltrating the student movement. Prime Minister Lecornu, meanwhile, stood in parliament and accused the radical-left France Unbowed party of trying to "sow chaos" ahead of presidential elections seven months away. President Emmanuel Macron, nearing the end of his second and final term, convened ministers at the Élysée Palace on Tuesday evening to assess the situation. The political calculation was transparent: with hard-right candidate Marine Le Pen leading opinion polls and Jean-Luc Mélenchon of France Unbowed in second place, the government was as concerned with the optics of the crisis as with solving it.

Yet the protests drew people who had no partisan interest in the outcome. Alain and Michèle, a couple in their seventies, marched in central Paris. Both were former teachers. They had three grandchildren in high school, all of whom had protested peacefully in front of their respective schools in recent days—and all of whom had been tear-gassed. "We are the grandparents," Alain told the BBC, his voice trembling, "and they have protested peacefully... but they were still tear-gassed." Their presence on the street was itself a statement: this was not a fringe movement of radicals, but a broad coalition of people who believed France's schools were broken and that the state's response had been disproportionate.

France's police inspectorate, the IGPN, had opened investigations into allegations of excessive force. The concern was widespread and documented. Yet the government showed little sign of backing down, and the students showed no sign of stopping. The CGT had already scheduled more demonstrations for Thursday. What had begun as a cry for better classrooms had become a confrontation over the state's willingness to listen—and its willingness to use force when it did not.