'We're fed up': Paris students rise up in a movement that shows no sign of slowing
France 24 · LC · trust 52/100
Hundreds of thousands of students and their supporters took part in nationwide protests across France on Tuesday after weeks of student barricades protesting school conditions.
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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.
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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.
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. A portable speaker passes from hand to hand – the students are singing, rapping, dancing as one body.
Between songs, they chant well-worn slogans – “ Siamo tutti antifascisti ” (We are all anti-fascists), “ Aux armes! ” (To arms!) and “ La jeunesse emmerde le Front National! ” (a somewhat vulgar attack on the far right – it's probably best if you Google this one).
Unlike at other barricades piling up in front of high schools across France, there’s not a police officer in sight.
Bachir, 17, said the people who organised the barricade had come to an understanding with the authorities.
“The police said that as long as there aren’t any problems with fires, or firework-launchers or anything like that – as long as it’s peaceful – they won’t do anything,” he said.
It seems a shaky truce. At one point, a police van crawls up the main avenue, coming to a halt in front of the chain-link barricade. A few of the apparent organisers hurry down to conduct a quick negotiation through the van’s rolled-down window. The van keeps moving.
The ivy-draped walls of the Marais couldn’t feel further away from the working-class outer suburbs of Paris where the school protests first took root in mid-September.
Like many of the students barricading their schools across the capital, Bachir said he wanted to help draw attention to the widening socio-economic gulf between Paris and its sprawling banlieues .
“Conditions are terrible in the suburbs,” he said. “There aren’t enough resources, there aren’t enough teachers, and the class sizes are too large. Most high school buildings date back to the 1970s, but only 14 percent have been renovated or rebuilt” in the past 10 years, he highlighted.
“We’re talking about young people’s education , about the future – we just can’t leave education in this state,” he added.
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“That they put more money into education rather than funding military operations or Bastille Day parades that no one gives a stuff about,” she said. “It would be a lot more beneficial for the students, and also for the teachers. There’s one teacher for 40 students in some classes, and it’s not okay – especially when it’s 40 degrees (104°F).”
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Like many of the high schoolers and their supporters who poured into the streets of Paris on Tuesday, she was incensed by the severity with which the police had responded to the protests.
“I find it completely unacceptable. One guy lost his hand, another lost an eye, another his teeth – and no one has been [held accountable] for any of it,” she said. “Even if it was the students who insulted them or threw a couple of punches first, they’re still 14, 15, 16-years-old up against trained police officers in their 40s armed with batons. It’s not OK.”
But Bachir said he had not been surprised by the heavy-handedness of the police response.
“The…
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