TENS of thousands of high school students, teachers, parents and trade unionists marched in more than 30 French cities yesterday in the biggest day of action yet against overcrowded, understaffed and crumbling schools.
The interior ministry put turnout at about 86,000 outside the Paris region, but authorities expected up to 40,000 more.
The Union Syndicale Lycéenne said 2,000 high schools were shut; the education ministry counted 891 with classes partly or fully suspended.
University students and the CGT, France’s largest union, joined what the movement called ‘Act Three’.
‘We peacefully demonstrated for our rights and to demand better working conditions, because we are in classes of 35 students, which is completely overcrowded,’ said Phoebe Nilor, 17, in Noisy-le-Grand.
‘To this day, we still feel like we are not being heard.’
Joanna, a former pupil in the Paris suburbs where the movement began, recalled a roof falling on pupils, floods and rats, and classmates who went without food because meals were too expensive.
‘We want more money for the national educational system so that high schools are renovated,’ said Roberta, a recent graduate, outside the Henri IV school in Paris.
The interior ministry says 6,100 people have been arrested since the protests began, the overwhelming majority of them minors, and the justice ministry says 1,483 minors are being prosecuted.
At least 215 teenagers have been injured. A 15-year-old lost his hand and part of his forearm to a police sting-ball grenade in Lens on Monday, and a boy lost an eye to a rubber-projectile launcher in Tours last week.
France’s National Consultative Commission on Human Rights expressed ‘serious concern’ over the ‘disproportionate use of force and procedural abuses’, and Amnesty International demanded an end to the ‘disproportionate police response seen in recent days’.
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez says 10 internal investigations into brutality complaints have been opened.
Presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose France Unbowed party the government and Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally accuse of stoking the protests, called the charge ‘absurd’, blaming police for brutally dispersing demonstrations and urged supporters to join.
‘Our country is witnessing the most powerful movement of high school and college students it has seen since May 1968,’ he said.
‘In the field of education, as in all other public services, policies of penny-pinching and budget cuts have led to the near-collapse of the system.’
