France's school revolt enters its second week: 500 schools shut as student anger boils over

France's student uprising entered its second week on Monday, with between 400 and 500 high schools closed or partially shut as the movement over crumbling school infrastructure, teacher shortages and overcrowded classrooms refused to die down. Education Minister Edouard Geffray announced that lessons would be "totally or partly suspended" because security conditions could not be guaranteed, a near-repeat of Friday, when about 400 of the country's 3,700 lycées were closed amid blockades and clashes. The movement began in late September at a high school in a Paris suburb, where pupils blockaded the gates over teacher shortages. Within days it spread nationwide. Students are demanding urgent investment to repair dilapidated buildings, hire more teachers and shrink class sizes that have ballooned past safe limits. On Thursday, university students joined the demonstrations, partly in solidarity and partly over inadequate university funding, while public sector workers, including firefighters, staged parallel strikes that widened the unrest into a general social confrontation. The protests have not stayed peaceful everywhere. Geffray said 24 schools had been burned or ransacked since the movement began and that 78 employees of the national education system had been injured. Around 5,000 people, most of them teenagers, have been arrested nationwide since the previous Monday. Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin has asked prosecutors to hold parents responsible for damage caused by their children and demanded families pay for repairs. Paris police chief Patrice Faure, in an open letter on Saturday, said those who launched the protests no longer controlled them and urged students to abandon blockades in favour of peaceful protest. Monday's closures come ahead of a nationwide day of demonstrations called for Tuesday by a major student union, raising fears of further disorder. BFMTV broadcast images of police-student skirmishes in Lille, and at the Lycée Nicolas-Louis-Vauquelin in Paris's 13th arrondissement, masked youths who were not pupils of the school piled furniture and rubbish against the entrance and started fires before firefighters extinguished them. The unrest underlines a fraught social atmosphere as the government tries to pass a deficit-narrowing 2027 budget. France's 10-year bond yield briefly topped 5 percent last week, its highest since 2002, as the protests compounded investor concerns over the country's fiscal outlook. Government spokeswoman Maud Bregeon insisted "our priority is to restore order," while the government has admitted the students' concerns but condemned the violence. For a generation raised in overcrowded classrooms with absent teachers, the barricades at the school gates have become the only argument the state seems to hear.