High school students have again blockaded schools and marched through cities across France, promising to continue their campaign despite government pledges to address the grievances underlying 10 days of protests that have left hundreds injured. Large crowds took to the streets on Thursday for mainly peaceful demonstrations in cities including Lille, Rennes, Nantes, Lyon, Toulon and Marseille, while in Paris a large procession marched through the city centre to the Place de la Bastille. Tens of thousands of students thronged the square in the east of the capital, with some climbing the monument at its centre, which commemorates France’s 1830 July revolution, while waving the tricolour flag and singing the Marseillaise.
As the evening drew in, riot police fired teargas and crowd-dispersal rounds and carried out repeated baton charges to clear the protesters, some of whom hurled bottles, paving stones and other projectiles at the heavily armoured squads. Eliane, 16, a pupil on the Paris march earlier in the day, said she had come to “defend and encourage high schools in an even worse state than mine”, calling the march “magnificent”. She said she planned to continue protesting until concrete progress was achieved.
The education minister, Édouard Geffray, said after meeting students and teachers on Thursday at a school in the eastern city of Reims that he was “implementing an emergency plan to ensure absent teachers can be replaced on a long-term basis”. Heavy timetables were also under review, Geffray said, as were changes to the widely criticised university application system. The prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, has promised a “concrete, rapid and fully funded” response by the end of the month.
Students said the government’s reaction was not sufficient. Ryad Rani, the president of one high school students’ union, said the protesters had heard “no concrete measures whatsoever, no response to our demands”. The movement “will continue”, he said.
Sabrine Kharbach, from another students’ association, said the protest would last “for as long as €10bn hasn’t been put on the table”, the amount students and some leftwing politicians have said needs to be urgently invested in France’s schools. According to an Elabe poll for BFM TV, 72% of French people think the students’ demands are legitimate but 55% of them think the protests should stop. Unions called for another national day of action in support of the students next Tuesday.
The education ministry said fewer high schools had been forced to close than in recent days, with 224 shut on Thursday morning and 157 by lunchtime, meaning that about 95% of the county’s high schools were at least partly open. But several marches drew up to 5,000 protesters, and the demonstrations, backed by many teachers, parents and unions, involved further clashes with police around some school barricades in Paris. In Rennes riot officers used water cannon to disperse protesters.
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