Teacher Shortages and Rising Prices Drive Protests in France

Students demanding more teachers joined union members calling for higher pay and lower prices in marches across France on Oct. 17. Clashes with police, fires and looting broke out in Paris, Marseille, Lyon and other cities, while many marches remained peaceful.

The Interior Ministry put nationwide turnout at about 550,000; the CGT union estimated 800,000. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said that evening that about 1,200 people had been detained and 150 police officers injured.

At Saint-Exupéry high school in Créteil, southeast of Paris, several teaching posts were vacant. According to the local SNES-FSU teachers’ union, students blockaded the school the day after teachers went on strike over inadequate resources. Their demands included more teachers and nurses, and better school buildings. Protests by high-school students grew in mid-September, with university students later joining them.

The high-school student union USL called in an Oct. 6 statement for a €10 billion emergency programme for school buildings, a major recruitment drive, 150,000 additional places in higher education and the abolition of Parcoursup, France’s university admissions platform.

The Education Ministry announced on Oct. 8 that it would promptly send more than 3,000 substitute teachers to the high schools most in need. It also pledged to authorise several hundred additional hires and fund more overtime to cover short-term teacher absences. The plan included greater student representation on education councils.

At Saint-Vincent high school in Rennes on Oct. 13, masked people blocked entrances with rubbish bins. A parent told local outlet Rennes Infos Autrement that pupils could not get inside for lessons. Classes had gone ahead as normal the previous day.

Some school staff travelled for up to two hours only to find their workplaces blocked. Administrators and school leaders took on extra duties when education support staff could not get in, according to an Oct. 2 account by the SNASUB-FSU staff union in Créteil. The union said school leaders and the authorities would jointly decide whether to move lessons online when pupils and staff could not safely enter.

Students held another nationwide day of protest on Oct. 13. That day, the CGT backed the Oct. 17 demonstrations, calling for higher wages and pensions, lower prices and better public services. The CGT’s federation of cultural workers later urged public- and private-sector employees, the self-employed and retirees to take part.

Annual inflation rose to 3.1% in September from 2.4% in August, according to final figures released on Oct. 15 by France’s statistics agency, INSEE. Energy prices were 21.3% higher than a year earlier and food prices were up 1.4%. On a monthly basis, energy prices rose 3.9%, their third consecutive increase.

Overall consumer prices fell 0.3% from August, largely because accommodation and transport services became cheaper after the summer holiday season.

On Sept. 28, teachers and education support staff at Paul-Éluard high school in Saint-Denis formed a human chain to shield pupils from police, according to SNES-FSU. The union called for a ban on the use of projectile launchers and police grenades against minors or near schools, as well as independent investigations into alleged police violence.

A 15-year-old high-school student lost a hand when a police stun grenade exploded during a protest in Lens on Oct. 5. Investigators had yet to determine whether he had picked up the grenade or it had landed on him, and whether police had followed the rules for its use. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez told a Senate hearing on Oct. 13 that the national police inspectorate was investigating 36 cases of alleged police violence during the student protests, including four in which people were maimed.

Nuñez denied that the government was suppressing peaceful student protest, saying police intervened to stop assaults, damage to property and looting. He said the suspension of one type of launcher-fired stun grenade did not extend to other crowd-control weapons.

Hundreds of people clashed with police and vehicles were set alight at Place de la République before the main Paris march began on Oct. 17. EFE reported from the scene that the authorised march followed its planned route to Place de Clichy while other groups took different streets. Police deployed a unit specialising in urban violence.

AFP reporters in Paris saw small groups wearing masks and gloves disable shop security cameras before breaking windows and looting. Their report did not establish a link between those groups and the demonstration organisers.

The Education Ministry is seeking high-school students’ views on conditions in their schools and possible improvements until Oct. 23. The CGT said in its Oct. 13 statement that it was preparing strikes and demonstrations involving workers from several sectors on Nov. 5 to oppose austerity measures in the government’s draft budgets.