France has temporarily banned police use of stun grenades at student-led protests after a cascade of injuries to minors forced the government into reactive crisis management. Interior Minister Laurent Nunez announced the suspension Wednesday morning, one day after hundreds of thousands marched nationwide demanding more education funding. The trigger was undeniable: a 15-year-old lost a hand in Lens after a stun grenade detonation, and a 14-year-old in Paris lost several teeth when hit in the face by a tear gas grenade at close range. A police officer has been charged over the Paris incident. The numbers tell a story of escalation that outpaced any political strategy. Since protests began in late September over dilapidated school facilities and teacher shortages, 6,100 people have been arrested — the overwhelming majority minors. More than 1,800 are being prosecuted, including 1,483 children. At least 715 police officers and 215 teenagers have been injured. These are not the statistics of a managed response to civil unrest; they are the statistics of a state apparatus that treated a school funding dispute as a security threat. The government's framing reveals the core tension. Officials insist the protest movement has been "hijacked by outsiders" and morphed into urban violence, a familiar rhetorical move that reframes legitimate grievance as criminal disorder. Prime Minister Lecornu condemned violence and rejected accusations of ordered "police repression" — while simultaneously presiding over a system that deployed stun grenades against teenagers. The 18 internal investigations into police misconduct opened so far suggest the government knows its own framing is unstable. President Macron convened an emergency meeting with Lecornu and key ministers to defuse the crisis, and Lecornu is expected to address both the school protests and France's broader fiscal situation Wednesday. The dual agenda is telling: France's education funding complaints exist within a context of austerity pressures, and the government faces the politically toxic task of explaining why it cannot fund schools while it can fund riot police. The protest movement itself began with a narrow, concrete demand — better facilities, more teachers, more money for education — and drew support from parents, teachers, and unions. The violence has been sporadic and largely reactive, breaking out at the edges of otherwise peaceful demonstrations. Rights groups, student organizations, and parents' associations have accused authorities of disproportionate force against children, a charge that the injury toll makes difficult to dismiss. The stun grenade suspension is a tactical retreat, not a strategic resolution. The underlying demands remain unaddressed, the prosecutions of 1,483 minors continue, and the political question of whether France's education system is adequately funded has been buried beneath a policing crisis. Lecornu's Wednesday address will determine whether the government pivots toward substantive engagement or continues treating a funding dispute as a public order problem. France has been here before — the gilets jaunes, the pension protests — but the age of the protesters changes the political calculus entirely. Deploying crowd-control weapons against 15-year-olds demanding school funding is a different proposition than deploying them against adult demonstrators, and the images of maimed children have shifted the legitimacy equation in ways the government has not yet absorbed.
