More than 250,000 students, teachers, and parents marched across France on Tuesday in the largest single day of a protest movement that began over a fortnight ago in the northern suburbs of Paris and has since spread to every major city. The interior ministry counted 200,000 in regional cities and 56,000 in Paris; organizers claim 450,000. The demands are not radical: replace absent teachers, repair decaying school buildings, reconsider the grueling 8am-to-6pm school day. The state's response has been overwhelmingly coercive. Since mid-September, 6,100 people have been arrested — almost all minors. More than 1,800 are being prosecuted, nearly 1,500 of them under 18. On the injury ledger: 215 teenagers and 85 school staff hurt, plus 715 police officers wounded. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu called it "the heaviest toll in decades paid by the school system." Twenty-four schools have been burned or ransacked, which Lecornu uses to frame the movement as violent — while glossing over the fact that a 15-year-old's hand was blown off by police munitions, a 16-year-old lost the use of his right eye from a "defensive bullet of the blast ball type," and a 14-year-old lost most of his teeth after an officer fired a grenade at him at close range. Amnesty International has called on French authorities to "put an end to the disproportionate police repression." The interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, said police have launched 10 internal investigations since the protests started — a ratio of roughly one investigation per several hundred arrests. Trade unions, the CGT, the Greens, and teachers' unions have mobilized alongside students, with CGT leader Sophie Binet urging members to "protect high school students" and Green leader Marine Tondelier asking parents and officials to wear white and physically shield young demonstrators. The government has tried to reframe the movement as a creature of the radical left, accusing Jean-Luc Mélenchon's La France Insoumise of orchestrating school blockades. Mélenchon has supported the protests publicly while urging non-violence. This framing conveniently sidesteps the structural reality: 900 of France's 3,700 high schools were blockaded or closed on Tuesday by the education ministry's own count, with student groups claiming 1,800. Movements at that scale are not manufactured by one party. The students themselves are articulate about what they want. "Our demands are simple: better study conditions, enough teachers, decent school buildings," said a student named Anna in Paris. Placards read "schools with no money = country with no future" and "under our text books, anger" — a deliberate echo of May 1968's "under the paving stones, the beach." The historical rhyme is not subtle, and neither is the government's discomfort: presidential elections are seven months away, Macron cannot run again, and the administration is simultaneously trying to cut a ballooning budget deficit under investor pressure over France's mountainous debt. Lecornu has ordered ministers to address the core demands. But the ordering reveals priorities: weeks of teargas and blast balls came first, then 6,100 arrests of children, and only then an instruction to actually look at staffing and building conditions. Macron convened key ministers at the Élysée on Tuesday night. The question is whether the political class treats this as a policing problem with a policy afterthought, or a policy failure that produced a policing disaster. The trajectory is clear. France is mass-prosecuting minors for demanding functioning schools while simultaneously failing to provide functioning schools. The protests echo not just 1968 but a deeper pattern: decades of underinvestment in public education infrastructure colliding with a security apparatus that treats civic expression by young people as a threat to be suppressed rather than a signal to be heeded.
