What to Know About France's High School Protests

There are no signs of slowing in weekslong student protests against poor school conditions and teacher shortages in France.

Demonstrators marched on Tuesday in dozens of cities and towns, from Caen in the north to Marseille in the south, drawing roughly around 250,000 people, according to the Interior Ministry. Union activists, who have rallied in solidarity with high school students, have put the number or demonstrators at around double that.

Officials say nearly 900 schools were closed on Tuesday, while a student union has claimed 1,800.

Hundreds of people have been injured since the protests began last month amid escalating clashes with riot police. Thousands have been arrested, most of them minors, law enforcement officials said.

The protests erupted in a heated climate, as the government tries to pass a belt-tightening budget and as France approaches presidential elections next year. The French government has called some of the students' demands legitimate but has condemned "urban violence" and accused far-left party France Unbowed of stoking the demonstrations. The party has rejected the accusation.

Sébastien Lecornu, the prime minister, said regular classes would be "completely suspended" on Thursday and Friday so that principals could host sessions with students.

"We cannot condemn the violence outside the high schools if we do not have a political moment, in the noble sense of the term, inside each high school," he said.

Here's what to know:

Why are the students demonstrating?

Students are frustrated by crumbling infrastructure, overcrowded classrooms, overloaded schedules, a shortage of teachers and staff, and underfunded schools, according to the student union that is one of the movement's main organizers.

Some are also calling for the abolition of state-run admissions platforms for higher education and universities that they call unfairly selective.

"We're not poorly educated, we're just not listened to," read one banner this week in front of a school in Seine-St.-Denis, a working-class suburb of Paris that is a center of the protest movement.

"Classrooms are not ventilated, and we can barely open the windows," Issam Makhloufi, 15, a student at Rosa Parks High School in St.-Denis, told The New York Times.

Unions and left-wing parties have seized on the protests as part of a wider expression of discontent as French President Emmanuel Macron, who is term-limited, nears the end of his office term.

"The public education system is in a catastrophic state after 10 years of Emmanuel Macron," Sophie Vénétitay, the leader of a teachers' union that has joined the students' protests, said on the sidelines of a recent march. "It is lacking everything."

Have the protests become violent?

Many of the demonstrations began peacefully but escalated as protesters fired mortar-style fireworks and attacked schools and other infrastructure, resulting in millions of dollars' worth of damage, officials said.

Nearly 900 schools in France were partially or fully closed on Tuesday, a spokeswoman for the education ministry said in a statement. Each school could decide on a time between Wednesday and Friday to host opportunities for dialogue, so long as schools meet "essential security conditions," the spokeswoman added.

Contradicting the official count, a French high school union said more than 1,800 high schools -- nearly half of the nation's 3,700 -- were closed on Tuesday.

At least 24 schools had been ransacked or set on fire, Édouard Geffray, the education minister, told France 2 on Sunday. More than 5,000 people have been arrested amid the protests, most of them minors, the Ministry of Justice said in a statement on Monday.

Rights groups, including Amnesty International, criticized the use of tear gas and stun grenades to disperse minors.

At least 215 students and 85 school staff have been injured since the protests began more than two weeks ago, Mr. Lecornu said in the National Assembly on Tuesday. He blamed the chaos on "violent individuals who mingle with the nonviolent high school students and attack them, or attack the National Education staff." Hundreds of officers and gendarmes have been hurt in the protests, officials have said.

France has a long history of youth protests that sometimes have turned violent, including student-led protests in 1968 that nearly toppled the government and helped transform French society.

How have the authorities responded?

The French government has strongly condemned the violence and responded forcefully. Gérald Darmanin, France's justice minister, said on Friday that he had directed prosecutors to pursue criminal charges where possible and to hold parents liable for damage.

But the government has also acknowledged some of the students' grievances.

On Thursday, in an apparent attempt to placate the rapidly spreading protests, Mr. Geffray, the education minister, said the government would scrap plans to increase some higher education registration fees announced hours earlier as part of the 2027 budget.

After meeting on Friday with student union representatives, Mr. Geffray announced plans to reform school democracy to better include students. He also said that his office would draw up plans to address teacher shortages.

On Tuesday, the education ministry announced an anonymous national online survey for high schoolers to voice their concerns.

Student leaders dismissed the proposals, with a spokesperson for one student union calling it a "smoke screen."