Closed schools, burning bins: France's student revolt shuts up to 500 lycées

France will shut the doors of up to 500 high schools on Monday — not because of an epidemic or a storm, but because its own students have risen up and the state has no better answer than to lock them out. Education Minister Edouard Geffray announced on Sunday that lessons would be "totally or partly suspended" in 400 to 500 lycées because security conditions "have not been fulfilled". The figure matches Friday's closures, when about 400 schools were shuttered amid blockades and clashes with riot police. More than a third of the 468 schools in the wider Ile-de-France region around Paris will be closed, regional president Valérie Pécresse told broadcaster Franceinfo. The movement began on September 17 at a Paris high school and spread across the country last week. The students' grievances are mundane and damning in equal measure: teacher absences with no substitutes, school days that run far too long, and buildings falling apart. In Paris, pupils describe classes of 35 to 40 with not enough chairs; in Strasbourg, students say their schools are so old they are crumbling; during this summer's heat wave, classrooms lacked adequate cooling and ventilation. In the Paris suburbs, with large immigrant populations, decrepit facilities compound with gaps in social services — a reminder that neglect has an address. The unrest has grown increasingly violent. Geffray said 24 schools had been "burned or ransacked" since the movement began, including the main building of a high school in Nantes destroyed by fire. About 5,000 people, most of them teenagers, have been arrested nationwide since Monday; on Friday alone, around 900 demonstrations took place and 1,747 students were detained. More than 600 police officers have been injured — and, by the minister's own account, 78 education staff wounded, "something we have never seen before". Rather than address the conditions, the government has reached for the familiar script. Geffray blamed "far-left activists" for infiltrating the movement and pushing it toward extreme violence, claiming they had "hijacked it from the students themselves". Student representatives, meanwhile, say they are still waiting for a response to their actual demands. Protest organisers have called for the movement to resume early this week, with another day of mobilisation planned for Tuesday. The Justice has seen this play before: teenagers name the decay around them, and the state answers with tear gas and padlocks. A government that cannot staff its classrooms or repair its roofs should not be surprised when its students stop asking politely.