France’s other schools problem – the teens violently smashing up their old primaries: ‘They think it’s not worthy of respect – so they trash it’

Like most French primaries on Wednesdays, Marcel Pagnol school, in the eastern suburbs of Lyon, was shut on 19 June 2024. But at 6.30pm that evening, two boys turned up late for school – by two years. Former pupils there, the 13-year-olds struggled to break through the crispy lattice of the front-door window with a garden fork and a broom. Using a window-breaker, they finally created an opening large enough to force their way in without hurting themselves.

What happened next is captured in a video the pair subsequently posted on Snapchat. Once inside they prowl the classrooms, corridors and canteen, slinging around scooters and smashing up computer equipment, setting off fire extinguishers and upending furniture. They help themselves to pouches of Capri‑Sun from the fridge: “I don’t give a fuck – I’m taking the lot.” The boy not filming sets small fires as they move through the building, squirting each one with a little jet of lighter fuel. “I love what’s happening here!” says his accomplice. “I love fire.”

But the exhilaration soon turns to panic. With a thick black canopy of smoke creeping along the ceiling of the main corridor, they realise it’s time to go: “Come on, come on, there’s smoke everywhere. Fuck, I can’t see a thing!” They’re soon scarpering into the surrounding streets in broad daylight, the cameraman sipping his Capri-Sun as a column of smoke rises from the school, and police cars converge on the site.

The Marcel Pagnol arson was perhaps the most serious incident of a phenomenon that has swept the whole of France in recent years: comprehensive trashings of school premises that go well beyond isolated acts of vandalism. There were at least 15 cases in 2025; a similar number in 2024. The damage inflicted on at least 24 high schools across the country during this month’s student protests seem to some extent to fit this pattern – though these actions are fuelled by particular shared grievances, including dilapidated facilities and endemic staff shortages. Perhaps attacks on schools like Marcel Pagnol should have served as canaries in the coalmine for rising tension, resentment and nihilistic feeling among students towards the institutions supposedly there to guarantee their future. Such events crop up in other countries, but here they seem to fit a pattern of carnivalesque destruction – like the mass burning of cars during urban riots – that seems distinctively French. In a sense, trashings are the country’s equivalent of school shootings in America – though obviously far less deadly and generally perpetrated by groups, not loners.

To highlight a few: smashed computers and broken windows at Rabelais secondary school in Vitry-sur-Seine in March 2024, the fourth break-in in six months; graffiti of a swastika, an anarchist symbol and anti‑Rassemblement National (RN) slogans left behind by ideologically confused hooligans at André Malraux secondary school in Baignes-Sainte-Radegonde, near Bordeaux; “Foke les profs” (Fuck the teachers) scrawled amid the devastation at Jean Moulin primary school in Montgeron, on Paris’s southern edge; one primary school and two nursery schools laid waste to in 2025 in working-class neighbourhoods of the Provençal city of Arles.

In a strikingly large number of cases, it is primary schools that are attacked. When the perpetrators are caught, they are often children of early secondary-school age returning to wreak havoc. In many cases, they’re trashing the same schools in which their younger siblings are still taught. “My sister’s got school here tomorrow,” crows one of the intruders in the video from École Marcel Pagnol. On the one hand, there’s a festive misrule in such acts: the paint-lashed walls, the upturned shelves, the rainbow debris of playbricks strewn across play areas. On the other, there’s an aspect of psychological self-harm in play, akin to destroying the family home, that’s also visible in this month’s lycée attacks. It’s hard to square this beguiling clash of motives.

What’s clear is the impact on the surrounding community. Two years after the attack, on a humid June Monday morning, the final one before the summer holidays, pupils and parents are ambling up to Marcel Pagnol to start the school day. It’s situated in the suburb of Meyzieu, a relatively well-off and unremarkable commuter dormitory of Lyon set in the arable land that sprawls towards the city airport. The school’s cream, two-storey blocks have been restored to pristine condition – at a cost of €1.9m to the Meyzieu municipality (partly covered by insurance).

But the attack caused a real sense of violation. “I’m sad,” six-year-old Lino told reporters from TV station BFM right after the arson. “All my drawings burned.” And the feeling still lingers. “They set the school alight with a toxic product,” says Evan, a boy of eight or nine with thumbs inside his backpack strap. “There were flames.” Audrey Granger, a member of the parents’ association, points out the children had to process seeing their charred drawings on the walls, the burnt exercise books. She didn’t tell her daughter, who attended the nursery school next door, what had happened. “We wanted to leave her in her own little bubble,” she says.

“It was as if you left your office and someone said to you: you have no right to come back,” Juliane Fauriat, the headteacher, says. “You didn’t anticipate it, you have to leave everything behind, which is very difficult.” Her staff removed salvageable equipment in crates provided by the town hall; two traumatised teachers walked out with empty boxes from their entirely burnt-out classrooms.

The following academic year, Marcel Pagnol’s 240 pupils were housed in prefab annexes on an empty field opposite – a novelty for some of them. But with the canteen severely damaged, lunchtime had to be split between two other school sites: one a bus ride away for the younger children; another 15 minutes’ walk away for the older ones. “They had to do it in the heat of summer and in winter,” says Sabrina, a mum in a flowery dress lingering at the end of the school run. “Can you imagine? My daughter was crying sometimes – she was always running late.”

The two 13-year-old perpetrators – one of whom shows his face in the video and names the other – were caught almost immediately. They had no criminal record and were unknown to the police; one had an “irreproachable” academic record, says Sandrine Carroz, a coordinator with the municipality’s education services. The other was going through a “fragile period, where communication with his parents was complicated”. But there had been nothing to indicate he might erupt in this way. Sylvie Normand, the deputy mayor of Meyzieu, the area served by École Marcel Pagnol, says: “I think these were young people who dared each other to do something and who came up with a bad idea, which went through their heads without them thinking about the consequences.”

The online lynch mob assembled: “Give them another chance – they were just expressing their anger at having to retake year 3 for the fifth time” is one sarcastic comment under a news report posted on YouTube. Others hint at the societal and ethnic tensions inflaming French public life – heightened in Lyon, which is a centre of far-right activity: “Kick them out of the country, along with the parents who are taking our family allowances.” (Based on the name mentioned by one of the boys in the videos, and their slang, many commenters assumed they had immigrant origins; their identities as minors are of course protected by law.)  Tiffany Joncour, the local RN candidate, was quickly on the scene to film a video declaring: “It’s time to stop these delinquents who act with impunity and spoil all our lives.”

The pair received four-month suspended sentences and were placed under special court supervision for 18 months. The municipality agreed with the two families to send their siblings to other schools. Over the road from École Marcel Pagnol, boulangerie worker Miriam is more circumspect than most: “It could have been my child – because you never know, especially with the influence of social networks these days. I hope it knocks some sense into them. And their families, too, because they have to take some responsibility.”

As the Marcel Pagnol perpetrators are minors, it’s impossible to ask them the crucial question: what led them to break down the front door on that day? But perhaps it’s possible to pursue a second one: what do these messy tremors from the teenage subconscious collectively say about French society?

‘They think it’s not worthy of respect – so they trash it.” Outside Louise-Michel primary school in Arles earlier this year in March, parent Etienne Becker suggests it was a fundamental disdain for national institutions that led four youths, aged between 11 and 13, to break and enter and do approximately €30,000 worth of damage there in July 2025. He’s dropping his six-year-old son off at a squat, tan complex with a barracks-like air. Louise‑Michel is on the edge of Griffeuille, a marginalised neighbourhood dominated by hal‑rendered blocks of public housing in which 57% live below the poverty line.

The values of the French state – “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” – are displayed on insignia outside almost all the country’s schools (as Becker points out, they are curiously absent at Louise-Michel). It’s in places like Griffeuille where it’s easiest to assume that school trashings may be a form of aggression, conscious or not, towards how these lofty ideals translate in practice. Éric Debarbieux, a veteran researcher who formerly directed the International Observatory of Violence in School and has advised the French government, corroborates this, suggesting that for the attackers, “it’s a way of saying: schools don’t keep their promises. The values displayed aren’t the same as the values in reality.”

That might explain why this form of mayhem occurs so consistently in France, where schools are adorned with the livery and rhetoric of the Fifth Republic. But it’s hard to exactly quantify it, as the national annual statistics on school violence don’t list incident numbers. Only a percentage breakdown for property damage (3% in primary schools and 4% in secondary schools/sixth-form colleges in 2024-25) among total incidents reported is given. Verbal and physical violence are far more common (45% and 34% of incidents reported in primary schools).

Just because school trashings are statistically less frequent doesn’t mean they aren’t significant. It’s precisely their intensely visible character – the unbridled violation of a public space – that gives them power. Debarbieux emphasises the particular character of these acts: “They’re a kind of game. There’s possibly a kind of group jubilation behind them: it’s these children’s manner of expressing themselves.” He believes such incidents have been occurring at least since the 1990s – when statistics on French school violence first began – and have steadily risen since.

As in Lyon, silence has gathered around the series of incidents that hit the east side of Arles last year. The municipality won’t comment, and one teacher I encounter says they have been forbidden by the education board from talking about them to the press. The parents outside Louise-Michel speculate about the motivations of the invaders, who were caught after tripping an alarm and in some cases were forced by their parents to participate in the clean-up. But no one here today knows their identity, or anything specific.

The same is true at Victoria Lyles nursery school in the neighbourhood of Trébon, 2km to the north. It was ransacked, along with a nearby primary school, by eight secondary school pupils from the area in February 2025, who were caught on security cameras and convicted of vandalising school property. Again, some had younger siblings at Victoria Lyles; they urinated in the classrooms where pupils studied.

Lazy brown mosquitoes swarm the parents picking up their offspring on this March lunchtime. A general air of incomprehension and resignation reigns regarding the break-in. “We were afraid for our children, as there isn’t any proper security here,” says one of a group of three mothers. Resources are strained in the commune; France’s largest by surface area, with lots of schools, but a low tax base. In the wake of the three 2025 trashings, the Arles municipality invested €650,000 in better security for the affected schools, including linking their alarms to a central surveillance centre.

In the cornershop down the road, I’m told no one in Trébon will break the general “omertà” regarding the eight offenders. Neighbourhoods like this and Griffeuille are hotspots for the driving factors behind school violence. Laurent Mucchielli, a specialist in the sociology of delinquency at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, points out three key indicators for troublemakers: academic failure; coming from “poor or stigmatised” neighbourhoods; and difficulties within the family. But he insists the first is paramount: “Until they’re 18 years old, school is the essential structure of collective social integration for young people, what you might call the society of children. So academic failure is the first form of exclusion from society.” It’s not hard to see why such children might react by channelling their anger against the site of their humiliation.

Mucchielli stresses that overall levels of school violence in France have remained stable since the 1990s – counter to the media and political narrative of feral youth. He also downplays the effect of social media, saying it doesn’t create new forms of behaviour. But it’s clear that it shapes some individual incidents; providing not just, as in École Marcel Pagnol, the means of dissemination, but also of incitement. Two sources tell me that the break-in at Louise-Michel was in response to online “challenges” teenagers set each on social networks; one of them, from Arles town hall, says the offenders came from outside Griffeuille to vandalise the school. But it’s not easy to track this social network peer pressure, often posted as ephemeral Snapchat or TikTok stories, with generic, algorithm-bait hashtags. Normand, the deputy mayor speculates that online content has a desensitising effect: “They see stuff like that, it’s virtual, but then they identify with it and they make the leap.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity, two teachers who have had to deal with such incidents agree on another explanation that pre-dates 21st-century social media: boredom. They believe that this is the primary motivating factor – especially with many trashings taking place during school holidays that stretch out for two months. “Given the long period without anyone in school buildings, it’s maybe easier to spontaneously decide to get up to some mischief,” says one. Parental neglect exacerbates this, says the other: “When children have nothing to do during the holidays, it’s too young to be left to their own devices the whole day.”

The first teacher offers yet another interpretation: over the last decade, she has seen a rise in a desire among her pupils for a sense of belonging. “It’s wanting to be part of a group, to share the same codes,” they say. Perversely ironic though it is to take it out on a community asset, perhaps this need for togetherness can take more destructive forms: the urge to go and smash up school property together, whatever the origins of the participants.

Debarbieux thinks the concept of the solidarity of vandals has merit. He remembers going to school in the 1960s in the northern city of Tourcoing and taking part in a phenomenon he calls le chahut: collective heckling of certain unforunate teachers. Almost nostalgically, he says this ritualised torment helped cement bonds between working-class pupils. And perhaps school trashings, in a 21st century dominated by identity politics, are a resurgence of this bonding through anarchy – only this time, out of classroom hours.

There is no official recognition of school trashings as a national problem, or any kind of problem, by the French ministry of education. When I send the ministry a list of the 16 incidents reported online in 2025, it replies via a spokesperson: “You refer to 0.3% of school buildings. It’s difficult to talk about a ‘phenomenon of trashings’.”

But statistics don’t tally the impact on the ground. The official emphasis on property, not people, is telling. There is no will at government level to analyse this wave at a deeper emotional level; to understand the juvenile offenders individually or as a group phenomenon. With local authorities reluctant to draw further attention to themselves after such incidents, and teachers generally bound by a duty of confidentiality as public servants, they are quickly swept under the carpet.

France’s network of Maisons des Jeunes et de la Culture and Maisons des Adolescents should in theory provide support services for troubled children and a sounding board for the psychological health of French youth overall. But, as with British youth clubs, these organisations, in part state-subsidised, are under increasing financial pressure, and many are closing. In the absence of any wider grasp of the problem, the response remains piecemeal. The ministry of education stresses each local municipality – the owners of school premises – must investigate, prosecute, reinforce security and find other solutions.

Shocking terrorist attacks on teachers, such as the beheading of Samuel Paty in Éragny in 2020 and the fatal stabbing of Dominique Bernard in Arras in 2023, have accelerated the trend in recent decades towards bolstering school security. Following Bernard’s murder, 1,000 “at risk” French schools were earmarked for beefed-up protection – such as alert buttons, CCTV, and alarms linked to video surveillance centres and security gates. But Debarbieux believes such measures reinforce the sense of “bunker-fied” Republican institutions defined in opposition to the communities they serve, which is counterproductive: “The more schools close in on themselves, the more you ‘protect’ them from the surrounding neighbourhood, the more they look like the enemy.”

The ministry of education says it takes all incidents of school trashing seriously, stresses its spokesperson. They point out how Laurent Nuñez, minister of the interior, and Édouard Geffray, the education minister, recently visited Champollion secondary school in Dijon following an arson attack in December last year. Reportedly a reprisal for anti-narcotraffic operations in the surrounding Grésilles neighbourhood, it was in the small minority – 5% – of cases where violence in French schools is committed by external perpetrators (the Paty and Bernard attacks being at the extreme end of this). The other 95%, including many school trashings, stems from actors within the system itself: teachers, pupils, other staff. So a response beyond perimeter security is required.

Seated on a bench in a small park down the hill from École Marc Bloch, on the north-western edge of the southern city of Montpellier, the president of the parents’ association, Manuella Delbecq, talks of her anger and exasperation in the face of attacks there: “We knew in effect it was kids from the neighbourhood who were breaking in, setting fire to, stealing from and trashing schools. So the message we wanted to get across was: this is your little brother’s, your cousin’s school.”

The most serious trashing at Marc Bloch occurred over the weekend of 5-6 August 2023. The intruders had an easy entry point, thanks to scaffolding that had been erected to upgrade the premises. They deactivated the alarm, then set about the usual mayhem: laying waste to seven classrooms, spraying them with paint from the cupboards and overturning an aquarium, in which luckily there were no fish.

A teacher at the school says the interlopers left a few calling cards: a half-eaten salad with a fork still in it; an opened but untouched beer bottle. The tags of “DZ” – the international abbreviation for Algeria – sprayed on the wall suggested their background. The police took fingerprints from the desecrated classrooms, but no arrests or convictions were made. A nightwatchman and a dog surveilled Marc Bloch for the rest of the summer, while the renovations continued; they stopped yet more intruders before the start of the school year in September. Most pupils, shielded by their parents, had no idea about the destruction.

Delbecq is accompanied by Naïma Hamada and Nadia Abzaoui, the parents’ association’s secretary and treasurer, respectively. Their neighbourhood of Les Hauts de Massane is the comparatively affluent tip of the larger, rundown La Mosson district on Montpellier’s west side. The trio, along with other parents, had already protested outside the school after an earlier trashing in 2020, in which intruders caused €30,000 worth of damage in a new annexe. No one has ever been held responsible for any of these incidents.

As much as demanding reinforced security at Marc Bloch itself, the group said they were signalling their outrage to the perpetrators themselves – that such disrespect of community property wouldn’t stand. In doing so, they wanted to show they were the kind of parents who took active interest in the quality of their children’s education. “We don’t drop them off and then they can do whatever they want,” says Abzaoui. “No – we’re involved in their lives.” Their aim was counteracting stereotypes of disenfranchised, disengaged families with immigrant backgrounds. “It’s that kind of stigmatisation and fingerpointing that means a lot of parents don’t get involved,” she says.

They hoped to shift the mood among the parents. “There’s a kind of shame,” says Delbecq. “They think they don’t have the right to be heard.” Before arriving in the southern city in 2002, she grew up in the 1980s in the underprivileged Parisian district of Vitry-sur-Seine. “There was a mutual respect between parents and schools then,” she says.

The association tried to organise a silent march in March 2021 after other schools on the west side of Montpellier were similarly targeted. But the parents from those schools, who had initially approached them, never showed up; only the trio and a handful of other mothers from Marc Bloch marched with their banners towards the hulking tower blocks in La Mosson. Hamada was crestfallen; people seemed unwilling to turn out for fear of reprisals from the drug gangs, who were either protecting the teenagers involved in the trashing, or didn’t want any spotlight on the neighbourhood that might interrupt their trade.

This inertia is mirrored within the walls of Marc Bloch itself, the trio believe – something else they wanted to shake up through protesting. Delbecq describes a pattern of self-imposed silence from the school after disruptive incidents like the trashings: “They don’t want to talk about them.” She adds: “It doesn’t say anything, in the hope that it will buy peace. But, in fact, it’s led to something else, which is that disruptive youth are able to take up more and more space.”

The stonewalling the group describes seems consistent with the culture of #pasdevague (don’t make waves), to quote the ironic hashtag under which French teachers have for years posted on social media about the lack of support from their hierarchy when faced with school violence, especially when caused by ethnic and cultural conflicts. In the case of École Marc Bloch, the parents’ association claims it was told to stop speaking to the media and frozen out. The school did not reply to inquiries for this article.

The association has ceased its activities now; a rift that seems to be typical of what Debarbieux describes as the “catastrophic” levels of parental input into the French education system. In Meyzieu, Normand, the deputy mayor, says rebuilding these links between schools, support workers and parents is her priority in the wake of the Marcel Pagnol arson. “You have to get down on the ground,” she says. “It’s those people who’ll help you improve things.”

Outside École Marcel Pagnol, the heatwave has broken, the school year is winding down, and all is back in good order. The fire damage has been erased; the gate monitors watch the perimeter for disruptions (they interrogate one annoying Guardian journalist). But once the stream of excited faces have passed inside, what happens there? Maybe not even those in uniform can tell us. Before they melt away into the suburbs, two mothers marvel at what really disturbed their offspring: “The only thing they were shocked about was the fact it was other children who did it.”