Nearly 3,000 French high-school students — children aged 15 to 18 — have been detained since protests erupted last week over conditions in the country's lycées, with 1,949 arrested on Thursday alone. The scale is staggering: 900 simultaneous demonstrations and blockades, more than 160 schools shut, 30 university campuses blocked, and a prime minister convening a crisis cabinet. This is not a riot. It is an infrastructure failure that has become a policing event. The grievances are mundane and damning. Thirty-five students per classroom. Insufficient toilets. Water leaks. No air conditioning during heatwaves. Cafeterias too small to feed the students they serve. Teacher shortages so acute that instruction gaps are routine. A 17-year-old in Strasbourg summarized it precisely: "Zero budget, zero resources." These are not radical demands. They are descriptions of physical reality. The government's response has been to deploy riot police against teenagers and then blame the radical left for incitement. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu called crisis talks and announced many schools would switch to online classes — not to fix the buildings, but to clear the streets. Education Minister Édouard Geffray will meet pupil representatives on Friday, but the meeting comes after nearly 3,000 detentions, more than 300 injured police, and dozens of injured firefighters, teachers, and students. An internal police investigation has been opened after accusations of excessive force against three pupils. The violence is real and escalating in both directions. Bins have been set ablaze outside schools across the country. In Nantes, arson damage closed a school for a month. In Marseille, a teacher was splashed with petrol during an attempted fire inside a school. In Lille, a bus stop was destroyed. In Strasbourg, tram services were suspended. The government now calls it "urban violence" — a framing that conveniently shifts the story from institutional neglect to public order. Some teachers are standing with their students, literally forming human barriers between pupils and police. Juliette Estiville, a Spanish teacher in Paris, said she was there "to provide protection, to form a barrier between the police and the students." Others have been physically threatened. The fracture runs through the teaching profession itself: those who see their students as right versus those who have been endangered by the chaos. The political overlay is predictable. The government accuses La France Insoumise of stoking the protests; LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon insists his party backs only non-violent methods and directs attention to police brutality. LFI MPs and mayors have appeared at demonstrations. The structural point both sides avoid: France has systematically underinvested in its educational infrastructure for years, and the bill has arrived in the form of teenagers blocking tram lines and burning rubbish bins. The 20-year question writes itself. If France cannot maintain school buildings, hire enough teachers, or keep classrooms below 35 students, the protests are not an aberration — they are the new baseline. Every year of deferred maintenance compounds. Every detained 16-year-old is a political radicalization event. The government is treating a structural deficit as a law-enforcement problem, and that math does not improve with time.
