Like most French primaries on Wednesdays, Marcel Pagnol school, in the eastern suburbs of Lyon, was shut on 19 June 2024. But at 6.30pm that evening, two boys turned up late for school – by two years. Former pupils there, the 13-year-olds struggled to break through the crispy lattice of the front-door window with a garden fork and a broom.
Using a window-breaker, they finally created an opening large enough to force their way in without hurting themselves. What happened next is captured in a video the pair subsequently posted on Snapchat. Once inside they prowl the classrooms, corridors and canteen, slinging around scooters and smashing up computer equipment, setting off fire extinguishers and upending furniture.
They help themselves to pouches of Capri‑Sun from the fridge: “I don’t give a fuck – I’m taking the lot.” The boy not filming sets small fires as they move through the building, squirting each one with a little jet of lighter fuel. With a thick black canopy of smoke creeping along the ceiling of the main corridor, they realise it’s time to go: “Come on, come on, there’s smoke everywhere. Fuck, I can’t see a thing!” They’re soon scarpering into the surrounding streets in broad daylight, the cameraman sipping his Capri-Sun as a column of smoke rises from the school, and police cars converge on the site.
The Marcel Pagnol arson was perhaps the most serious incident of a phenomenon that has swept the whole of France in recent years: comprehensive trashings of school premises that go well beyond isolated acts of vandalism. There were at least 15 cases in 2025; a similar number in 2024. The damage inflicted on at least 24 high schools across the country during this month’s student protests seem to some extent to fit this pattern – though these actions are fuelled by particular shared grievances, including dilapidated facilities and endemic staff shortages.
Perhaps attacks on schools like Marcel Pagnol should have served as canaries in the coalmine for rising tension, resentment and nihilistic feeling among students towards the institutions supposedly there to guarantee their future. Such events crop up in other countries, but here they seem to fit a pattern of carnivalesque destruction – like the mass burning of cars during urban riots – that seems distinctively French. In a sense, trashings are the country’s equivalent of school shootings in America – though obviously far less deadly and generally perpetrated by groups, not loners.
To highlight a few: smashed computers and broken windows at Rabelais secondary school in Vitry-sur-Seine in March 2024, the fourth break-in in six months; graffiti of a swastika, an anarchist symbol and anti‑Rassemblement National (RN) slogans left behind by ideologically confused hooligans at André Malraux secondary school in Baignes-Sainte-Radegonde, near Bordeaux; “Foke les profs” (Fuck the teachers) scrawled amid the devastation at Jean Moulin primary school in Montgeron, on Paris’s southern edge; one primary school and two nursery schools laid waste to in 2025 in working-class neighbourhoods of the Provençal city of Arles. In a strikingly large number of cases, it is primary schools that are attacked. When the perpetrators are caught, they are often children of early secondary-school age returning to wreak havoc.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
