About 400 schools and colleges stayed closed on Friday 2 October. Education Minister Édouard Geffray counted “a little over 400” establishments, including nearly 400 of the country’s 3,700 lycées. A protest that began in a handful of Paris-region lycées now stretches across the country. The interior ministry says police have detained more than 1,900 people since the blockades began, most of them teenagers.
Why the Schools Have Shut
Head teachers are closing schools for two reasons: pupils are blocking the entrances, and the clashes around them have turned dangerous.
Geffray said “ultra-violent fringe groups” had seized the movement. He counts 170 injured pupils and 65 injured staff, including 40 head teachers, and more than 100 lycées with severe damage. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez reported 83 police officers and gendarmes injured on Wednesday alone. Authorities in the Paris region recorded violence, clashes or damage at around 50 schools, and several principals reported assaults and harassment at their own gates. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said the violence endangers staff and pupils. Geffray has told schools to teach online wherever protesters block the premises.
What the Pupils Want
Pupils have blocked school entrances and set bins alight. Their demands are practical rather than ideological: supply teachers, repairs to crumbling buildings and smaller classes. The Union Syndicale Lycéenne, which leads the movement, also cites overcrowded classrooms and punishing timetables. Pupils add that heatwaves turned their classrooms into ovens this term. One said his school had “zero budget, zero resources”. Another described classes of 35 and a canteen she could not afford.
The movement began in mid-September at a few schools and grew fastest in Seine-Saint-Denis, the low-income department north of Paris. The Lycée Paul-Éluard in Saint-Denis became its emblem, and social media carried it nationwide within days. Pupils burned barriers on tram tracks in Strasbourg and set a school entrance alight in Nantes. University students joined on Thursday, blocking about 30 campuses. Pupils had already marched alongside public-sector workers during the national strike on 29 September.
How the Government Has Responded
Lecornu called a crisis meeting on Thursday 1 October and ordered ministers to cancel their travel so prefects could manage the unrest locally. Police have met the blockades with batons and tear gas. Prefects have banned fireworks in affected towns and sent riot units to flashpoint schools, and transport operators suspended trams and buses in several cities. Nuñez condemned what he called unbridled violence, and also opened internal police inquiries into brutality allegations involving three pupils.
Geffray paired the policing with talks, meeting staff unions, parent groups and student associations on Friday. He urged parents to keep their children away from the protests and pointed pupils towards their elected school councils. The government accepts that the grievances are real but rejects what it describes as urban violence.
The Row Over Who Started It
Intelligence services told Thursday’s crisis meeting that hard-left politicians launched the movement, according to a source close to Lecornu. La France Insoumise (LFI) denies this. MP Louis Boyard said his party “has always advocated non-violent demonstrations,” and party coordinator Manuel Bompard accused ministers of conspiracy-mongering. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is standing for president, called the government’s response repressive.
Money has entered the argument too. Valérie Pécresse, who runs the Île-de-France region, puts local damage at nearly €1 million and wants to bill Saint-Denis mayor Bally Bagayoko, of LFI, €100,000 for repairs.
The student unions are not standing down. The Union Syndicale Lycéenne and the Union étudiante have called a national march for Tuesday 6 October. Geffray’s talks will test whether ministers can offer anything concrete, and they have little to spend: the government unveiled a 2027 budget of unpopular cuts on the same day it convened its crisis meeting.
Three questions will shape the next fortnight. Will the talks produce firm hiring pledges? Will the violence push ordinary families away from the blockades? And will teaching unions widen the dispute into a broader strike? The political stakes are high, with a presidential election in roughly seven months and polls currently placing Marine Le Pen in front. A long autumn of shuttered lycées would land squarely inside that campaign.
