Today, police used tear gas against protesters near French high schools as students, teachers and parents took to the streets on the day of the largest demonstrations in the protest movement, which Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu called the most severe in the education sector in decades, UNN reports, citing Reuters.
The outlet notes that these protests, during which a teenager lost his hand on Monday, were another manifestation of public discontent in a country where support for both far-right and far-left forces is growing ahead of the presidential election in the spring.
France’s government is under pressure to reduce the national debt amid weak economic growth; in addition, it is struggling to address basic tasks such as passing a budget, ever since allies of President Emmanuel Macron lost their majority in the 2024 parliamentary elections.
Lecornu told lawmakers that at least 215 teenagers and 85 school employees had been injured in the clashes — the "heaviest losses suffered by the school system in decades." His ministry also said that more than 700 police officers had been injured.
BFM TV reported that Macron summoned Lecornu and other senior government officials to an emergency meeting on Tuesday.
In Marseille and Nantes, protesters held signs reading: "The state has killed national education." In Toulouse, parents marched at the front of the city procession, holding hands.
In Strasbourg, Lyon, Rennes and Paris, demonstrations sometimes escalated into violence: police used tear gas, while protesters lit fires in the streets and threw various objects at law enforcement officers.
Paris police said that clashes in the city began when about 300 people attempted to confront law enforcement officers, adding that protests elsewhere were generally peaceful.
By evening, law enforcement officers said they were still holding back a small group of protesters. Storefronts at three shops were damaged.
The protests began in September in the poor suburbs of Paris and later spread across the country.
"There is an enormous gulf between the elites and us," said Hugo Wetzel, who recently graduated from a high school in Strasbourg.
The high school students’ union said that more than half of France’s high schools had been blocked or closed for the day. Some local education authorities attempted to switch classes to an online format.
Human rights organizations, students and parent associations accused the authorities of using disproportionate force against minors. The government claims that the protest movement was hijacked by outsiders and escalated into street violence in some places.
France’s Interior Ministry said that 6,100 people had been detained since the protests began, the vast majority of them minors. According to the Justice Ministry, more than 1,800 people, including 1,483 minors, are facing charges for various offenses.
On Monday in northern France, a teenager’s hand was blown off during clashes between high school students and special police units. The regional newspaper La Voix du Nord reported that the 15-year-old boy lost his hand and part of his forearm after picking up a police grenade considered a non-lethal device.
"They want to divide young people into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ protesters," said Omar Slaouti, a high school teacher in Argenteuil, a northwestern suburb of Paris. "If the trash bins had not been set on fire, the government would not have made concessions or paid attention to the issues on the agenda."
Six months before the election to choose Macron’s successor, the government and the party of far-right leader Marine Le Pen, National Rally, accused lawmakers and mayors from the radical-left party La France Insoumise (LFI) of inciting the riots. LFI rejects these accusations.
"All the young people have taken to the streets. Where there is no police, everything is happening peacefully," said Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the presidential candidate for LFI.
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Lecornu instructed ministers to work on addressing the students’ main demands. These include ensuring that absent teachers are replaced, reviewing the length of the school day (from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.), and considering extending lunch breaks.
The government will also consider repairing outdated school buildings, Lecornu said, demanding that ministers submit their initial proposals by the end of October. Émilie Lomm, one of the students’ parents, said during a protest outside the Hélène Boucher school in Paris that the government’s words alone were not enough: "It is all well and good, of course, but it will not change our children’s daily lives," she said.
Finding additional funds to implement the education reforms will not be easy.
The government is under pressure to rein in the rapid growth of the budget deficit, as investors’ concerns about France’s rising public debt, weak economic growth and the authorities’ unwillingness to curb spending are driving up borrowing costs. Last week, the yield on France’s 10-year bonds briefly reached a 24-year high, exceeding 5%.
The increase in France’s borrowing costs has begun to affect the situation across the eurozone, while the fall in the euro’s exchange rate has become another warning signal for policymakers. Finance Minister Roland Lescure said on Tuesday that intervention by the European Central Bank was not currently necessary.
Marine Le Pen — a far-right populist and Eurosceptic who is leading the presidential race ahead of next spring’s election — unveiled plans for sharp cuts in public spending if elected. In this way, she seeks to demonstrate her financial competence against the backdrop of the deepening crisis in the bond market.
Data from the PISA 2025 study indicate that the growth rate of education spending in France is lagging behind inflation, while French students’ performance is lower than that of their peers in other OECD countries.