Mayor as human shield: Saint-Denis mayor tear-gassed as he stood between students and police

The mayor of Saint-Denis was tear-gassed on Tuesday after placing himself between riot police and student protesters in the northern Paris suburb, in an episode that has become a symbol of France's widening school crisis. Bally Bagayoko was filmed standing with his entourage as smoke and tear gas filled the air, and was later seen applying eye drops to reddened eyes. After the gathering had been dispersed, he accused officers of totally disproportionate force against young people who, in his words, were simply asking to be heard.

Bagayoko, who leads the left-wing municipal government of one of France's most diverse communes, told mobilised youth that their demands were just and urged them to continue organising and making their voices heard while staying united and non-violent. The intervention matters because Saint-Denis is not an abstract backdrop. It is a working-class suburb whose schools carry the same funding and staffing pressures that pushed pupils and teachers into protest in the first place.

The student movement began last month when pupils at a high school joined striking teachers demanding more resources and funding. Coordinated on social media, it drew 250,000 students into nationwide demonstrations on Tuesday, according to figures attributed to the French Interior Ministry. As the protests grew, some turned violent, with fires set, property looted and police and emergency workers assaulted, according to contemporaneous reporting. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu was reported as saying that more than 6,000 people had been arrested in connection with the protests and more than 700 police officers injured. The Justice has covered the school revolt since its first week, when about 500 of France's 3,700 lycées were reported closed or partly closed.

The politics of the image are unavoidable. A mayor elected to run a city found the state's batons and gas on one side and the city's own children on the other, and chose to stand in the middle. Bagayoko has previously faced criticism in French public life, including for his visibility at scenes of urban unrest, and his defenders and critics will read Tuesday's footage through opposed lenses. What the footage establishes without argument is narrower and more damaging to the government: order in Saint-Denis now requires an elected official to shield protesters from the police sent to manage them.

France's education protests have already redrawn the country's budget argument. Every week they continue, the question shifts further from whether schools need more to why a republic that funds order so readily funds classrooms so reluctantly. Saint-Denis answered that question on Tuesday with tear gas.