High schools across France have closed, thousands of teenagers have been arrested, and hundreds of people have suffered injuries as unrest over conditions in the lycée system has spread and erupted into violence in recent days.

On Monday, a 15-year-old’s hand was blown off during a clash between high school students and riot police in Northern France, according to François-Xavier Lauch, the prefect of Pas-de-Calais. The regional newspaper La Voix du Nord reported that the boy lost his hand and part of his lower arm after picking up a stun grenade thrown by police amid a demonstration in the town of Lens. Lauch told news outlets that roughly 200 protesters had been hurling objects at police, but declined to comment on the specific circumstances of the boy’s injury.

In total, 190 students and 78 school staff members have been injured amid the demonstrations as they have at times escalated into violent clashes, according to education minister Édouard Geffray. A spokesperson for the national police told RTL radio over on Saturday that more than 600 police officers have also suffered injuries.

Over 5,000 people have been arrested since the protests began roughly two weeks ago, France’s Justice Ministry said on Monday. Of those who have been detained, the ministry reported that 87% have been minors and more than 1,800 are being prosecuted. Nearly 2,000 protesters were detained on Thursday alone, the French interior ministry announced last week.

French officials have met with students and school administrators over the past few days and announced that they will take steps aimed at hearing and addressing students’ concerns.

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The protests show no signs of abating as they enter their third week, however. Roughly 500 French schools remained closed as students set fires, blockaded schools, and clashed with riot police around the country on Monday, ahead of a nationwide day of protest on Tuesday

Here’s what you should know about the ongoing demonstrations.

Why are students protesting?

The protests have been driven by anger over a variety of issues impacting French high schools.

A main complaint among demonstrators is the shortage of teachers and support staff in the country’s schools. 

The education ministry found that during the 2024-2025 school year, nearly 10% of teaching hours went untaught in public secondary schools. About 7.5% of those lost hours were due to a failure to find substitutes. 

“Today our school is paralyzed due to a lack of resources, teachers, and not enough desks,” one student told the French outlet Agence France Presse (AFP). “We don’t have nurses or supervisors, and all they do for us is take away our phones.” 

Complaints about insufficient resources and funding and poor infrastructure in schools have also been raised in the student protests. 

“We are 35 per ‌class, ⁠we don’t have enough chairs in classrooms,” a 15-year-old student told Reuters in the Paris suburb of Pantin as demonstrators clashed with police deploying tear gas in an effort to quell the protest.

“There are 35 of us per classroom. With 35 degrees Celsius [95 degrees Fahrenheit] in summer, it’s unbearable. There aren’t enough toilets, and there are water leaks in some rooms,” a 17-year-old said while speaking to AFP at a protest in Strasbourg in the northeast of France. “The building is falling apart, the cafeteria is too small. There’s zero budget, zero resources, not enough supervisors.”

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Another student also raised concerns about a lack of resources to address high summer temperatures when talking to The Guardian. 

“We’re also protesting about the conditions in the heatwave,” the 19-year-old said. “Young people just want to study and learn in decent conditions. The French state seems surprised about worsening school results, but they’re doing nothing to remedy that.”

A series of deadly heatwaves hit Europe over the summer, with Western Europe experiencing its hottest summer ever. In France, nearly 8,000 people died over the course of the summer as a result of the high temperatures. 

Student protesters have also expressed grievances with the country’s online university application system, Parcoursup, which they have described as a source of stress and mistrust in the education system. 

The particular complaints being raised by demonstrators have varied somewhat across different parts of the country, however.

Geffray characterized this as a complicating factor in addressing the roots of the unrest. “One of the difficulties of this movement is that there are no national demands. It all started with local demands,” the Education Minister said Friday morning. 

Where did the protests begin, and how have they expanded?

The protests began with students at Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil outside Paris mobilizing to protest teacher shortages and a lack of adequate resources in late September. 

In the days that followed, protests spread throughout the Île-de-France region, which includes Paris and its surrounding metropolitan areas, as students attempted to set up blockades at dozens of schools.

The demonstrations have escalated still further this week, spreading outside of Paris’ surrounding area and into regions around the country. Tracking from Reuters also showed that protests have sprouted across western France in Rennes, Nantes, Quimper, and Brest; around the southern part of the country in Bordeaux, Toulouse, Toulon, Marseilles and Grenoble; as far east as Strasbourg; and as far north as Lille.

By Monday, 180 schools were disrupted by the expanded demonstrations, according to the interior ministry. That number had risen to over 500 at week’s end.

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Thursday marked the largest escalation of protests. 

Fires were started at at least two French schools that day. Several teachers were accidentally splashed with gasoline at Marseille’s Victor Hugo high school. At Saint-Exupery high school, also in Marseilles, hundreds of students set ablaze a fire truck that had arrived to put out a previous fire from the morning. Firefighters were forced by students to exit their vehicle before it was burned. In protests around the country, confrontations broke out between students and police, who fired projectiles in attempts to control crowds of demonstrators.

The following day, roughly 900 demonstrations took place around France, according to police. 

And in a message last week, two student unions, the Student Union and the High School Trade Union, jointly called for continued protests this week.

“Students and high school students, while the authorities seek to drive us out of our places of study through budget cuts, the closure of places, dilapidated buildings, selection, or repression, let’s not let them: let’s block and retake the universities and high schools!” the unions wrote in a press release.

How French officials are responding 

On Sunday, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu introduced five initiatives to address students’ demands, including “ensuring classes are held, improving facilities in partnership with the regional councils responsible for them, better organizing school days, making Parcoursup more transparent, and giving follow-through to the voices of high school students.” He added that a timeline and a funding plan for the initiatives would be given before the end of the month. 

Days earlier, Geffray met with education unions, student organizations, and parent associations on Friday morning in an attempt to temper the protests through dialogue.  

“High school students must be listened to. Their difficulties call for concrete responses, both in their schools and at the national level,” Geffray wrote on X. “This is the purpose of the dialogue initiated in high schools and academies, which I am continuing today with representatives of staff, parents, and high school students.” 

He announced a platform students can use to submit proposals for education reform, which he said will be evaluated and used for a “national report.”

High school student organizations, however, called for continued demonstrations following their meetings with Geffray, citing a lack of “concrete measures” from the French government to address their complaints. 

Dialogue between students and education administrators remained ongoing on Monday, as Geffray continued to meet with students At Villaroy high school in Guyancourt outside of Paris.

French officials, weighing in the student demonstrations as they have continued to escalate and expand around the country, have also addressed remarks toward protesters’ parents. 

Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin told RTL radio on Thursday that parents whose children have caused damage to property should pay reparations. 

Meanwhile, Geffray cautioned against the dangers he said the increasingly violent protests pose to students.

“Parents clearly need to mobilize and tell their children not to go” to the blockades, Geffray said on Friday. “Now, what matters is ensuring that our children are no longer in the streets because they are in danger.”

As the protests intensified this week, Lecornu called a crisis meeting on Thursday and canceled ministers’ travel plans to work on quelling the demonstrations. 

“I hear and understand the anxieties and anger that our youth may have,” French President Emmanuel Macron said on Wednesday while speaking in Madrid. “However, none of these debates, none of these fears legitimizes violence.”