France shuts up to 500 schools as student protests erupt over crumbling classrooms

PARIS: France will shut up to 500 schools on Monday after weeks of student protests descended into some of the worst school violence the country has seen. Education Minister Édouard Geffray announced on Sunday that lessons would be "totally or partly suspended" at between 400 and 500 high schools because security conditions "have not been fulfilled". What began last week as a student revolt over education standards has spread from Paris to Montpellier, Nantes and Marseille — and turned ugly. Twenty-four schools have been burned or ransacked since the unrest began, and 78 education staff have been wounded. "Something we have never seen before," Geffray said, claiming staff "were deliberately targeted because they were employees of the national education system." The students' grievances are concrete: too few teachers, overcrowded classrooms, crumbling buildings. But the demonstrations have been overtaken by barricades, petrol bombs and clashes with riot police. In the southern town of La Ciotat on Friday, a 59-year-old teacher was doused in petrol and struck; police detained a 16-year-old on Sunday in connection with the assault. Elsewhere, a 15-year-old was arrested after a woman suffered horrific facial burns in an attack involving a makeshift flamethrower. French media report that more than 5,000 people have been arrested during the unrest, with around 85 per cent of those detained understood to be minors. Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin said 735 of France's 3,700 schools had been affected "one way or another" by violent protests. Geffray blamed outside agitators, claiming activists "particularly from the far-left" had infiltrated the student movement and "hijacked it from the students themselves" into extreme violence. Student groups dispute that framing, insisting the state's answer to a funding crisis — riot police outside school gates — is what radicalised the streets. The crisis piles fresh pressure on President Emmanuel Macron's government, already struggling with a fractured parliament. Closing schools to protect them is an admission of a kind: that the state can no longer guarantee order in its own classrooms. Monday's mass suspension is billed as a "partial, progressive return to lessons." For hundreds of thousands of students, the lesson being taught is about the fragility of a republic that lets its schools fall apart — and then locks the doors.