Why Are Students Protesting Across France? Hundreds Of Thousands Took To The Streets In Demonstrations

 Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets around France on Tuesday, marking the biggest day of protests yet in the escalating unrest over conditions in the country’s school system that has spread and erupted into violence in recent days. The student demonstrations, which began two weeks ago in the suburbs of Paris, have forced high schools across France to close and resulted in thousands of arrests and hundreds of injuries.

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Why Are Students Protesting?          

The protests have been driven by anger over a variety of issues impacting French high schools. A main complaint among demonstrators is the shortage of teachers and support staff in the country’s schools. The education ministry found that during the 2024-2025 school year, nearly 10% of teaching hours went untaught in public secondary schools. About 7.5% of those lost hours were due to a failure to find substitutes.

"Today our school is paralyzed due to a lack of resources, teachers, and not enough desks,” one student told the French outlet Agence France-Presse (AFP). “We don't have nurses or supervisors, and all they do for us is take away our phones.” Complaints about insufficient resources and funding and poor infrastructure in schools have also been raised in the student protests. "We are 35 per ‌class; we don’t have enough chairs in classrooms. With 35 degrees Celsius [95 degrees Fahrenheit] in summer, it’s unbearable. There aren’t enough toilets, and there are water leaks in some rooms,” a 17-year-old said while speaking to AFP at a protest in Strasbourg in the northeast of France. “The building is falling apart; the cafeteria is too small. There’s zero budget, zero resources, not enough supervisors.”

“We’re also protesting about the conditions in the heatwave,” the 19-year-old said. “Young people just want to study and learn in decent conditions. The French state seems surprised about worsening school results, but they’re doing nothing to remedy that.” A series of deadly heatwaves hit Europe over the summer, with Western Europe experiencing its hottest summer ever. In France, nearly 8,000 people died over the course of the summer as a result of the high temperatures.  

Student protesters have also expressed grievances with the country’s online university application system, Parcoursup, which they have described as a source of stress and mistrust in the education system. The particular complaints being raised by demonstrators have varied somewhat across different parts of the country, however. The education Minister, Édouard Geffray, characterized this as a complicating factor in addressing the roots of the unrest. "One of the difficulties of this movement is that there are no national demands. It all started with local demands,” the Education Minister said Friday morning.

Over 250,000 demonstrators gathered in more than a dozen French cities on Tuesday, including around 56,000 in Paris alone, according to the Interior Ministry. Student unions, parents, teachers, and university students joined in the protests. Most of the demonstrations were peaceful, but some broke into conflagrations and clashes between protesters and law enforcement. In Strasbourg, Lyon, Rennes, and Paris, demonstrators set fires and hurled projectiles, and police officers deployed tear gas into crowds. Firefighters were deployed in some locations to extinguish blazes started amid the unrest.

The national day of protests comes a day after a 15-year-old’s hand was blown off during a clash between high school students and riot police in Northern France on Monday morning, according to François-Xavier Lauch, the prefect of Pas-de-Calais. The regional newspaper La Voix du Nord reported that the boy lost his hand and part of his lower arm after picking up a stun grenade thrown by police amid a demonstration in the town of Lens. Lauch told news outlets that roughly 200 protesters had been hurling objects at police, but declined to comment on the specific circumstances of the boy’s injury.

In total, 215 students and 85 school staff members have been injured amid the demonstrations since they started in late September, according to French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu. A spokesperson for the national police told RTL radio on Saturday that more than 600 police officers have also suffered injuries. Over 6,000 people have been arrested since the protests began roughly two weeks ago, France’s Justice Ministry said.

 Of those who have been detained, the ministry reported on Monday that 87% have been minors and more than 1,800 are being prosecuted. Nearly 2,000 protesters were detained on Thursday alone, the French interior ministry announced last week. French officials have met with students and school administrators over the past few days and announced that they will take steps aimed at hearing and addressing students’ concerns. But the protests show no signs of abating.