PARIS — A 15-year-old pupil lost his hand to a police stun grenade outside his school. The government’s answer was to suspend one type of grenade. On Tuesday, riot police were back on the streets with water cannon, tear gas and stun grenades, and the interior minister said 11 officers had been hospitalised.
Tuesday’s day of action drew about 161,500 people nationwide by the authorities’ count, 41,500 of them in Paris. Unions said 480,000. The worst clashes came at Place Vauban, beside Les Invalides, where masked individuals threw bottles, fireworks and stones, according to Euronews. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez called it a “particularly gruelling” day for the police.
The students’ grievances are overcrowded classrooms, run-down buildings and absent teachers, and the movement began in mid-September in the suburbs of Paris. What sets it apart is the policing. Justice Ministry figures reported on Oct. 11 put arrests at 6,877, 86 percent of them minors, already more than the 4,596 people held in the first month of the yellow vest protests. The unrest has landed on a minority government struggling to pass its 2027 budget, six months before the April 2027 presidential election.
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu told the country last week, “We cannot play with the safety of France’s youth,” and accused “political leaders who use this anger to conduct their electoral battles,” Euronews reported. Education Minister Édouard Geffray offered 3,000 substitute teachers. Unions called that a short-term fix.
Paolo Stuppia, a sociologist at Sciences Po, called the level of police repression “unprecedented” since May 1968. Anne Savinel-Barras, president of Amnesty International France, said: “Any policing response must be lawful, necessary and proportionate.” The police union Alliance Police Nationale pushed back. “I don’t like using the term ‘repression’ or ‘suppression’ of student protests,” its national secretary, Stanislas Gaudon, said. Twenty-four cases of student injuries are before the police disciplinary body, and the UN has voiced concern, Euronews has reported.
Into this walks the NFL. Its first regular-season game in Paris, the Steelers against the Saints at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis on Oct. 25, is on, the league said. It said preparations “continue as scheduled for NFL events and the game at Stade de France on Oct. 25,” as Fox News reported. Saint-Denis is also where Greta Thunberg joined a protest on Tuesday and said, “Our future is being robbed away from us.”
A separate cost-of-living and fuel-price march is set for Saturday, and some speculate it could revive the yellow vests. Whether students and adults end up in the same streets is open. Olivier Ertzscheid, of the University of Nantes, has said “it is entirely possible that the student movement will fizzle out.”
