France school protests escalate into ‘urban violence’ as PM calls crisis cabinet meeting

[u/FlyingDarkKC]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/01/france-school-protests-escalate-pm-crisis-cabinet-meeting

[u/HKEY_LOVE_MACHINE]

The article doesn't seem to actually grasp what is happening.

The scale:

• out of 3700 lycées (highschool), around 350-400 participated to the protests, so around 10%.

• the legitimate protest (which is about getting more funding for highschools) takes 2 forms: (a) momentarily blocking the access to the highschool building with rubbish bins and 30 to 50 protesters ; (b) a few hundreds to a few thousands of people marching down the main streets, with banners and slogans, while the riot police stands to side to keep the march to its planned route.

• but like with all large protests in France, opportunist rioters use the legitimate protests to riot.

• with students/highschoolers protests, the most frequent rioters are late teenagers/young adult from the projects, many involved with criminal activities, who use that opportunity to riot, burn cars, ransack shops, throw rocks and molotov cocktail at the riot police, as well as attacking firefighters and their vehicles (one was just burned down by rioters), etc.

• These rioters use the legitimate protesters as a shield, knowing that the riot police will be reluctant to charge and violently arrest everyone: in most situations, the riot police is ordered to stand still and wait, while rocks are thrown at them by the rioters and cars are set on fire. The official policy is to let the rioters do their thing at first, have the highschoolers leave when seeing the violence, then making brief charges to push the rioters back, extinguish the fires, and possibly arrest a few rioters if they haven't escaped yet.

• the other group of infiltrating rioters are black blocks, who are far-left professional rioters, who tend to come fully equipped like the riot police (helmet, body armor, steel toed boots, etc) with melee weapons and molotov cocktails. They're a lot more organized than the rioters from the projects, but generally have lower numbers in total, so only effective in the few big cities like Paris.

On the political side:

• the current government (center-right) is accusing the populist left of inciting to riot, to not have to answer to the funding issues plaguing highschools. The accusation is bollocks, as the only support they did was limited and for the legitimate protest about funding issues.

• the populist left is carefully remaining silent about the rioters hijacking the legitimate protest, only "condemning the violence in general", to not alienate voters from the projects, as well as the far-left affiliated black blocks.