If the French government was hoping to drive its protesting high schoolers back into their classrooms with a whiff of tear gas, it hasn’t worked. Hundreds of thousands of students and their supporters took part in nationwide demonstrations, barricading school entrances and marching through France's major cities. The interior ministry estimated that a quarter of a million people took part on Tuesday; organisers maintain it was almost twice that.
High schoolers have been blocking access to hundreds of schools across the country since mid-September, protesting what they say is a lack of teaching staff, harsh timetables and run-down buildings ill-equipped to deal with the worsening heatwaves that now stifle the country each summer. To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement. One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading.
To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. Cover image: French high school and university students attend a demonstration as part of a nationwide day of protests and blockades, voicing anger over overcrowded classrooms, teacher shortages, and dilapidated school buildings, which they blame on years of underinvestment, in Nantes, France, October 6, 2026. © - Stephane Mahe Accusing the movement of descending into "urban violence" as some demonstrators set fire to school buildings and allegedly assaulted staff, the government told the police last week not to hold back from using all the "intermediary" (non-lethal) weapons at their disposal to re-open the schools. The ensuing crackdown has been severe.
Widely circulated footage has shown a 14-year-old boy set upon by three police officers, with one of whom firing a tear gas grenade point-blank into his face, knocking most of his teeth out and fracturing his jaw. A 15-year-old boy in the northern town of Lens had his hand blown off up to the elbow by a sting-ball grenade; while a 16-year-old in Tours lost the use of his right eye to what the local prosecutor said was likely a projectile fired by riot police. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said Tuesday that 215 students and 85 teaching staff had been wounded in the protests, as well as 715 police officers.
More than 5,000 people have been arrested since the movement began– the overwhelming majority of them minors. Read moreFrench student protests fuel political clash ahead of 2027 presidential vote A number of France's trade unions have called for members to throw their support behind the protesting students Tuesday to shield them from possible police violence. True to their word, members of the left-wing Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) formed a human chain between riot police and high schoolers barricading the Lycée Hélène Boucher on the eastern edge of Paris.
It was one of dozens of occupations that students had planned for the day– marking "Act III" of a movement that shows no signs of slowing. At the Lycée Sophie Germain in Paris’s winding Marais district, students choked off one end of the narrow street with a blockade of upturned bins, steel railings and chain-link fences. Students crowded the front doors of the high school, cardboard signs held high.
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