France seems to have taken a first step back in its clashes with protesting teenagers. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez told RTL radio on Wednesday, October 7, that he had ordered police to stop using stun grenades “in the context of the high school students’ movement,” after a 15-year-old boy lost a hand during a protest in the northern city of Lens on Monday. Nuñez said the pause would last “until we know exactly what happened in this case,” the Guardian reports, and he told RTL he meant it “only for the high school student protests” and for “just long enough to understand what happened,” according to DW.
The weapon in question goes by several names. The BBC calls it an anti-encirclement grenade, a dispersal device that bursts and throws out small rubber pellets. DW and AFP describe a sting ball grenade, also called a blast ball. French authorities class these weapons as non-lethal, the BBC notes.
What happened in Lens remains disputed. The grenade went off near the Auguste Béhal high school, the BBC reports. Authorities say the boy picked it up and it exploded in his hand, and an AFP police union source gave the same account on Monday, DW reports. Students allege that an officer fired and the grenade hit him directly. His mother told BFMTV on Wednesday that surgeons had amputated her son’s hand and that he had not tried to pick up the grenade, the Guardian reports. The local prefect says police faced more than 200 students throwing stones and fireworks when the riot squad moved in. The desk found no official finding that settles which account holds up.
Nuñez did not concede the larger charge. Speaking to the National Assembly later on Wednesday, he called accusations of “police repression” of the movement “excessive” and said officers intervene only when protesters turn violent or damage property. He did single out Lens, saying that police action there “raises questions for all of us within the Ministry of the Interior,” the BBC reports. He told lawmakers that the police watchdog, the IGPN, has opened 18 internal investigations into whether officers acted in proportion, including one over a young protester who lost several teeth and another over a student who lost the use of an eye.
His numbers show the scale of the clashes. Since the protests began, 215 high school students, 89 school staff, and 761 police officers and gendarmes have suffered injuries, Nuñez said, and police have arrested 6,629 people, almost all of them minors. The justice ministry says prosecutors have charged more than 1,800 people, nearly 1,500 of them under 18, the Guardian reports. Education Minister Édouard Geffray told lawmakers that 24 schools, “set alight or vandalised,” will stay shut for several weeks, keeping 30,000 pupils out of class. Both ministers told the National Assembly the protests turned violent at unprecedented speed, and Geffray said ultra-violent groups had infiltrated the movement “very quickly.” “We have never seen anything like this,” he said.
Other cases keep the anger alive. A police officer now faces charges over a 14-year-old hit in the face with a tear gas grenade last week at Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône, northwest of Paris; the boy’s lawyer says he lost several teeth and suffered a broken jaw, the BBC reports. In Belfort, prosecutors opened an attempted-murder inquiry after a 17-year-old said an officer held his head underwater during an arrest near a river; French reports say prosecutors charged the boy himself with aggravated assault on the officer. On Wednesday a 16-year-old in Strasbourg badly hurt a hand, reportedly while handling a firework mortar. And on Sunday police detained a 16-year-old after a 59-year-old teacher took a blow and a dousing of gasoline beside a protest in La Ciotat, DW reports; Libération reports that three 16-year-olds will face the Marseille juvenile court over that attack in February 2027.
The police side pushed back. Jean-Paul Nascimento, national secretary of the UNSA police union, told FranceInfo the decision rested “on emotion,” the BBC reports. He warned that officers who lose a tool for pushing crowds back may end up fighting at close quarters, where he expects even more injuries. Anne Savinel-Barras, who heads Amnesty International France, welcomed the pause as “an important first step,” the Guardian reports, but said France should ban the devices permanently from the policing of all protests, warning that some can cause permanent hearing loss and life-changing wounds from blast and shrapnel.
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu went on television Wednesday evening, Paris time, about 10:20 a.m. PT. He denied that security forces had “orders to confront” the young people, the BBC reports, and he said France could not stay “indifferent” to what students want, because the “anger of young people does not come from nowhere.” He said too many past promises went unkept because nobody could deliver them, and that he wants concrete, quick, fully funded answers, according to DW and the Guardian’s live blog. Lecornu named the areas the government plans to tackle, including replacing absent teachers, fixing school buildings, reorganizing the school day, and reworking Parcoursup, the national university admissions portal. He promised the first decisions “at the end of October” and said the listening sessions that began in high schools on Wednesday will continue through next week. In the same speech he said France will release 10 million barrels of diesel from strategic stocks, which he said “will automatically lower prices at the pump” by 0.12 to 0.18 euros a liter.
The movement shows no sign of stopping. Students began protesting at one Paris school on September 17 over chronic teacher absences, crowded classes, crumbling buildings, long school days, and classrooms that bake in summer heat, DW reports. On Tuesday the interior ministry counted nearly 256,000 marchers nationwide, while student unions claimed 450,000, the BBC reports. Classes stopped fully or partly at 429 of the country’s roughly 3,700 lycées on Wednesday, according to the education ministry figures the Guardian cites, while the BBC counts more than 500 schools shut in full or in part. Unions say students blockaded about 80 university campuses, including Sciences Po in Paris, where police fired tear gas on Wednesday. Student unions plan a fourth national day of marches on Thursday and have asked to meet Lecornu, citing a lack of “concrete measures.” Ryad Rani, who leads the USL high school union, told French radio his message to Nuñez: “calm your police officers down and call for restraint.” An Elabe poll for BFMTV found 55 percent of French people back the protests, 35 percent oppose them, and 10 percent hold no clear view, the Guardian reports.
The fight has spread beyond the schools. A Toulouse administrative court suspended a ban on gatherings around 45 schools in Haute-Garonne, calling it “a serious and manifestly illegal infringement of the freedom of demonstration and the freedom of assembly,” BFMTV reported, according to the Guardian. Paris police chief Patrice Faure rejected an AI-generated TikTok video that claimed to show him threatening “indiscriminate” use of tear gas grenades and “even more amputations,” and warned its makers they could face prosecution, DW reports. France also summoned Iran’s ambassador on Wednesday over what the foreign ministry called a “disinformation campaign conducted by the Iranian authorities” and called the content “absolutely unacceptable,” a day after Tehran summoned France’s envoy to complain of “violent treatment” of protesters.
The politics run hot because an election looms. President Emmanuel Macron cannot run again in April, and the protests have become a test for the candidates who want his job. Lecornu has accused the radical-left France Unbowed (LFI) of trying to “sow chaos,” the BBC reports, and the government accuses LFI of encouraging and even orchestrating the movement after many LFI lawmakers turned up at school blockades, the Guardian reports. LFI’s national coordinator said it took children maimed for life to make Nuñez give up the grenades. Party leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, second in the polls, backs the protests while urging nonviolence. Marine Le Pen of the National Rally, who leads the polls, said Macron stays “always on the side of attacking the police” and that “impunity must end,” according to the BBC and the Guardian. Behind all of it sits France’s strained budget: the government wants to cut a large deficit just as students demand more money for schools, which limits what Lecornu can promise by the end of the month.
