A boy lost his hand, then France halted the grenades: student protests force a reckoning
France suspended stun grenades at student protests after a 15-year-old lost his hand in Lens. With 500 schools shut and 18 police investigations open, the injury has become a referendum on how the state polices children.
It took a child's hand. On Monday, outside the Auguste Behal high school in Lens, northern France, a 15-year-old lost his hand in an incident involving a police anti-encirclement grenade. By Wednesday, Interior Minister Laurent Nunez had suspended the use of stun grenades against the high-school protest movement until the facts are clarified, conceding there was a strong possibility the grenade caused the injury.
The accounts still conflict: officials say the teenager picked the device up, students say it was fired at him, and the prefecture says officers faced more than 200 students throwing stones and fireworks. What is not in dispute is the wider ledger. A 14-year-old near Paris lost teeth and suffered a fractured jaw after being hit in the face the previous week; an officer has been charged. The police watchdog IGPN has 18 investigations open. Ministers told parliament that more than 200 students and 700 officers had been harmed in the unrest, with more than 6,500 arrests, most of them minors.
The protests themselves are about the condition of French schooling: dilapidated buildings, teacher shortages, overloaded schedules, and reading and maths scores that have fallen faster than the OECD average since 2015. On Tuesday between 250,000 people by the government's count and 450,000 by the unions' marched; on Wednesday more than 500 schools were fully or partly shut. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu, who called the students' demands legitimate, promised schools time to hear pupils out. The left accused the government of only acting after children were maimed; a police union warned the suspension was driven by emotion.
Chennai, on a humid October day with its own school and college crowds, should read Lens carefully. A grenade described as non-lethal that can take a hand is not a crowd-control tool; it is a weapon whose name is a euphemism. France has paused it. The investigations will decide who fired what. The students, who plan a fourth day of marches on Thursday, have already decided the larger verdict: a republic that cannot fix its classrooms should not be maiming the children who point that out.