France Detains 440 as Student Blockades Spread and Join Public-Sector Strike
French authorities detained 440 people, mostly minors, on Tuesday, September 29, as high-school protests over classroom conditions spread to at least 400 schools and converged with a national public-sector strike.
Interior Minister Laurent Nunez told BFMTV that two-thirds of those detained were placed in garde à vue, the French term for formal police custody for questioning BBC. The education ministry put the number of schools affected at 400 or more. The numbers rose fast. About 40 lycées, the French word for high schools, were under full blockade on Tuesday, compared with 180 schools touched by actions on Monday, September 28, in a system of roughly 3,700 high schools nationwide Le Monde.
The movement began last week in Ile-de-France, the region around Paris, before extending across France on Monday. Students cite overcrowded classes and teacher shortages. Morning blockades of school entrances have been the central tactic, with rubbish bins burned and fireworks set off at several sites on Tuesday The Times.
Officials said clashes on Tuesday left at least 10 teachers and 48 law enforcement officials injured. French media reported protesters hurling projectiles at police, who responded with batons and tear gas. A day earlier, Nunez had reported 12 officers injured during Monday's blockades.
Education Minister Edouard Geffray said students retain the right to protest but described reports of violence as indefensible. Nunez defended the police response as carried out in an extremely proportionate manner. Ryad Rani, president of the Union Syndicale Lycéenne, a high-school student union, accused the government of repression and police of using excessive force. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu had warned on Monday that any escalation would be irresponsible, after 164 detentions that day.
Tuesday's student actions coincided with nationwide walkouts by unions representing teachers, hospital staff and civil servants over low wages and working conditions. At least 200,000 people joined those demonstrations, which Nunez said mostly went without incident.
The geography remains uneven. In Paris, the rectorat, the local education authority, counted fewer than ten high schools affected by blockades on September 29, including the Lycée Lamartine, where students joined the national public-sector strike and protest day. Elsewhere, local detentions mounted through the week. Three youths aged 15 to 17 were detained and placed in custody on Monday after an attempted blockade of Lycée Mounier in Isère, with ten other young people detained in Alpes-Maritimes after attempted blockades. On Friday, September 25, 21 people had been detained after student-organized blockades in Ile-de-France.
The broader context here is familiar in France: a student mobilization rooted in specific school-level complaints meeting a planned union day of action in the public sector. Neither pattern is new on its own. The weight in this sequence comes from the overlap, the spread from Ile-de-France to national scale in under a week, and the large number of minors held in custody. That mix raises the political cost of policing choices and makes it harder for the government to treat classroom conditions and wage disputes as separate files. For Lecornu, the near-term test is whether talks with student organizations and education unions can separate the two before another protest day produces similar detention and injury counts.
