High-school pupils have blocked hundreds of lycées (state secondary schools) across France for a week, and parts of the movement have turned into fires, mortar fire and assaults on staff.
Interior minister Laurent Nuñez said 356 schools were disrupted on September 30, against 338 the day before.
Nuñez said there were seven incidents on September 29 in which people threw hydrochloric acid at law enforcement officers.
Police detained 625 people on September 30, after 440 the previous day and 164 on September 28, most of them minors.
Eighty-three officers and gendarmes were wounded on September 30, against 48 on September 29 and 12 the day before that.
Education minister Édouard Geffray said 119 pupils and staff had been injured since the blockades began, 34 of them education employees, a figure he called unprecedented in the French school system. He called the attacks indefensible.
A teacher in northern France was beaten, a head was hurt by a firework mortar, and another received a death threat.
Another teacher who wanted to extinguish a fire was jumped on and pushed to the ground.
Ten education staff and several pupils were injured on one day by mortar fire alone.
In Tours, central France, a young person was hospitalised with head injuries.
The IGPN police inspectorate has opened three inquiries after pupils were hurt at Sevran and Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône, both in the Paris region, and Tours.
In Marseille, southern France, buses were attacked near high schools on October 1, and one bus driver was assaulted while others had to leave their vehicle in a hurry. A head teacher was sprayed with petrol in the same city and a journalist working for the broadcaster M6 was assaulted while covering the protests there.
The protests began in the Val-de-Marne, southeast of Paris, and spread to Lille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Rennes, Nantes, Marseille and the northern suburbs of the capital.
The stated demands, set out by the Union syndicale lycéenne (school students’ union), are substitute teachers, more staff, fewer pupils in a class, lighter timetables, repairs to buildings the union calls dilapidated, and relief from the stress of Parcoursup, the university-application platform.
A 17-year-old at Paul-Éluard in Saint-Denis told Reuters there were cockroaches and rats in the school.
The union has described the movement as the result of a decade of underfunding.
On October 1, pupils and students called an “act two”.
The Union étudiante (students’ union) said ten faculties were blocked, including Lyon 2 and 3, Strasbourg, Montpellier, Aix-Marseille, Nanterre and Paris 1. By the afternoon about 30 campuses were affected, among them sites in Paris, Reims and Poitiers.
The 2027 budget, presented the same day, sets out €54 billion of savings, freezing most spending increases and seeking contributions from pensioners and companies.
The large number of pupils of a migrant background adds an extra dimension to the blockades. Anti-Israeli chants have been recorded.
La France insoumise (LFI) has treated the blockades as a campaign of its own.
On September 28 Jean-Luc Mélenchon wrote that the pupils were “harmless”, accused Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu of ordering a crackdown with “an obvious racist aftertaste”, and told LFI elected officials and activists to “place yourselves between” the pupils and the police “wherever you can”.
Mathilde Panot, who leads the party’s group in the National Assembly, told the government it would not be allowed to make life impossible for hundreds of thousands of lycée pupils.
In Saint-Denis, LFI mayor Bally Bagayoko, elected in March 2026, stood with pupils outside Lycée Paul-Éluard and said violence could be a legitimate reaction to police action. “If I slap you, you will react,” he told reporters on September 29.
He was filmed laughing with pupils around a fire, giving high fives and dancing.
Paris police prefect Patrice Faure referred him to prosecutors in Bobigny for suspected provocation to commit an offence, saying he had presented a violent reaction as understandable or legitimate.
Bruno Retailleau, a Les Républicains senator for Vendée and centre-right presidential candidate, raised “the question of banning LFI”, speaking on BFMTV-RMC on October 1. He called them seditious and said it was a party fascinated by violence that was “trying to organise the insurrection”.
Edwige Diaz, who on September 29 became the first president of the National Rally group in the Senate, said the demands of the high school students were “perfectly legitimate”, but that “the radicalised far-left” instrumentalised young pupils and was making “violence its political method”.
A particular element of the protests has been the use of fire and arson.
In Lille, northern France, protesters set rubbish containers alight and threw bottles and paving stones.
At Le Havre, Normandy, bins were burning outside Porte Océane while firefighters worked and police held the crowd; at Claude Monet, bins and scooters were thrown on a fire.
In Manosque, southeast France, pupils from Esclangon and Martin Bret faced police amid several bin fires and projectiles.
BFM showed a fire in front of Lycée Berthelot in Pantin and mortar rounds.
In Nantes, western France, witnesses and posts on October 1 said part of Lycée Nelson-Mandela had caught fire during the blockade; other accounts said fires of branches and bins had been lit in front of Michelet and other schools.
In Haubourdin, near Lille, municipal buildings were damaged and bins burned; the lycée and two nearby primary schools were closed until Monday.
President Emmanuel Macron, speaking in Madrid during a state visit to Spain, said no fear justified violence and that political leaders must not legitimise it.
“We have seen many officials going in front of the lycées to excite the pupils. I think that is serious.”
Lycées, he said, exist to transmit knowledge, “not to be blocked or to burn bins”.
Lecornu wrote that fireworks, fires and violence near schools endangered pupils, staff and police, and accused the left-wing La France insoumise of urging the movement to widen.
He said the difficulties of the lycées “must be heard”.
Mélenchon blamed the government for ordering the crackdown, said the pupils were harmless, and answered that LFI called for non-violent methods.
The government has offered a consultation platform, and Lecornu called an inter-ministerial crisis meeting on October 1. The union wants mass funding and a further day of action on October 6.