440 detained as French teens clash with police in school protest crackdown

PARIS: French teenagers on Tuesday set fire to rubbish bins and threw projectiles at police who responded with batons and tear gas, with hundreds detained across the country over the blockades and protests demanding better conditions at schools.

The movement in the lycees, attended by students aged 15 to 18 for their final years of secondary education in France, has angered the government.

Since last week, students have staged protests outside hundreds of schools over grievances including timetables, class sizes and a shortage of teachers as well as overheated classrooms during this year's heatwaves.

The protests started in the Ile-de-France region around Paris but have now spread to other cities nationwide.

According to the education ministry, 400 schools were affected by protests or disruptions on Tuesday, out of some 3,700 across the country.

Some 40 were blockaded and 44 faced attempted blockades. Ten people, both students and staff, were wounded and hundreds, most of them minors, were detained.

"440 were detained across national territory," Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said on BFMTV. "We don't have the final tally yet, but I'm told two thirds led to police custody."

Education Minister Edouard Geffray condemned the violence.

"Legal proceedings have been initiated against these actions. This violence is unspeakable," Geffray posted to X.

"To legitimise it or ... call for an expansion of the blockades is to endanger both our students and public officials. It is irresponsible."

In one school in the Paris suburbs, teachers formed a line around protesting students in a bid to protect them from the police.

Masked pupils gathered outside the Lycee Cesar Baggio in Lille, in northern France, setting bins on fire, an AFP photographer reported.

Bus shelters and advertising billboards were vandalised, with bottles, paving stones and other missiles hurled at police, who responded by firing tear gas.

In the western city of Nantes, teens piled up dozens of bins to prevent entry to the Lycee Gabriel Guist'hau, while in Paris there was an uneasy standoff between 30 students and a contingent of police at the Arago school.

Similar clashes were also reported in cities including Marseille in the south, Bordeaux in the west and Lyon in the southeast.

- MAYOR DEFENDS PROTESTS -

Around 80 students gathered outside the Lamartine school in Paris, brandishing slogans complaining of getting "More hours of lessons than sleep."

There were tense scenes at the Lycee Brequigny in the northwestern city of Rennes – Brittany's largest high school – where around a hundred students hurled projectiles at the building, an AFP video journalist said.

The actions came as unions planned a day of nationwide demonstrations and strikes over the budget of Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu, a close ally of President Emmanuel Macron.

Union marches took place in Paris and other cities, with around one in 10 teachers striking nationwide and thousands of members of the fire services staging an angry protest in Paris.

Some 300,000 people took part in marches across the country, according to unions, including 30,000 in Paris, according to police estimates.

Lecornu said on Monday any escalation of demonstrations at high schools would be "irresponsible" and lashed out at the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) party, who he accused of encouraging the protests.

In the low-income Paris suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis, the district's LFI mayor Bally Bagayoko joined a protest of hundreds of students at the Lycee Paul-Eluard.

Leading students in a rendition of the national anthem, he described the protests as "completely legitimate" and complained that low-income areas received less resources than higher-income ones.

When a crowd formed, police with anti-riot shields struck the students and an AFP journalist with batons.

"We, the children of the suburbs, are abandoned and neglected," said 16-year-old Victoire, a student at the school, denouncing conditions at the establishment as "unsanitary."--AFP