French government scrambles as student protests enter 10th day with 71,000 marching

On Thursday evening, as darkness fell over Paris, tens of thousands of high school students converged on the Place de la Bastille, climbing the monument that marks France's 1830 revolution and singing the national anthem. It was the tenth consecutive day of demonstrations across the country, a sustained uprising that had drawn more than 71,000 protesters into the streets and left hundreds injured. The students had come to demand something straightforward: money. Specifically, they wanted €10 billion invested urgently in their schools—money for teachers, for repairs to crumbling buildings, for smaller classes, for shorter school days. What they got instead was tear gas and riot batons.

The scale of the movement had become impossible to ignore. On Thursday alone, demonstrations unfolded in Lille, Rennes, Nantes, Lyon, Toulon, and Marseille, with the Paris march drawing an estimated 25,000 young people. Most of the day had been peaceful. But as evening came, riot police moved in with tear gas and crowd-dispersal rounds, charging repeatedly at the crowd. Some protesters threw bottles and paving stones; the police responded with force. It was a pattern that had repeated across ten days of protests, and the toll was mounting. At least 215 teenagers had been injured, along with 89 school staff members and 761 police officers. One teenager's hand had been blown off by a stun grenade—an injury so severe that the government suspended the use of those weapons the following day, though officials insisted it was "excessive" to speak of police repression.

The government, sensing the political weight of the moment, scrambled to respond. Education Minister Édouard Geffray announced that 3,000 substitute teachers would be deployed to roughly 100 high schools with the most acute staffing crises by Tuesday. He also said the government would authorize recruitment of several hundred additional teachers and proposed amendments to the 2027 budget to address some of the students' core demands. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu framed these measures as concrete steps toward meeting the protesters' concerns. But the students were unmoved. Ryad Rani, president of one high school students' union, said flatly that the government had offered "no concrete measures whatsoever, no response to our demands." Sabrine Kharbach, from another students' association, was more specific: the protests would continue "for as long as €10bn hasn't been put on the table." The movement, she and others promised, would not stop.

The underlying crisis was real and had been building for years. Schools were understaffed, with chronic teacher shortages forcing remaining educators to work longer hours and manage overcrowded classrooms. Buildings were deteriorating. School days were long. These were not abstract complaints—they were the daily experience of hundreds of thousands of young people trying to get an education in a system that had been starved of resources. The blockades reflected this desperation. On Thursday morning, 224 high schools had been forced to close; by lunchtime, that number had dropped to 157, meaning roughly 95 percent of the country's schools were at least partly operational. But the disruption was real, and it was deliberate.

The government faced a peculiar political bind. A public opinion poll showed that 72 percent of French people believed the students' demands were legitimate. Yet 55 percent of those same people thought the protests should stop. The country was caught between sympathy for the cause and fatigue with the disruption. More broadly, the government was trapped between two pressures: the students and their supporters demanding massive new investment in public education, and financial markets demanding that France reduce its budget deficit and debt, already among the highest in the European Union. With a presidential election six months away, politicians were already positioning themselves. Marine Le Pen, the far-right frontrunner, was calling for parents to pay for school repairs. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, her hard-left rival, was praising the protesters as "incredible" and denouncing police brutality. The education system had become a campaign battleground.

On the streets, the students showed no sign of backing down. Eliane, a 16-year-old on the Paris march, said she had come to "defend and encourage high schools in an even worse state than mine," and she planned to continue protesting until real progress was made. One banner captured the bitter irony of the moment: "Too young to be listened to, but old enough to be teargassed." Teachers' unions called for another national day of action in support of the students for the following Tuesday. The government had made its opening offer. Whether it would be enough to end the protests remained to be seen.