French police arrested 984 people on Monday alone as riots driven by teenagers entered a third week, with 65 police officers injured in a single day of unrest spreading across the country.
Since the disturbances began in mid-September, more than 5,000 people have been arrested, 87 percent of them minors, according to Le Figaro. The toll on security forces stands at 715 police officers and gendarmes injured, along with 85 school staff members, including 34 school principals.
The unrest, framed by participants as protests over classroom conditions, has repeatedly turned violent against bystanders. One woman suffered burns after a 15-year-old sprayed a makeshift flamethrower in her face. On Monday, the Paris Prefect reported on X that a high school girl was arrested carrying a Molotov cocktail, a lighter, baking soda, and rubbing alcohol in her schoolbag.
Masked students set fires at their own schools again on Monday, including at the Lycée Vauquelin in Paris, where windows were broken and a fire was set outside a door, forcing an evacuation.
At least 190 students have been injured since the unrest began. Education Minister Édouard Geffray said most of these injuries were “accidental events or injuries caused by troublemakers, particularly mortar fire.”
Some protesters have been seriously hurt in clashes with police. In Lens, a 15-year-old lost his hand on Monday after trying to pick up a stun grenade thrown by officers. Another student is reportedly at risk of losing an eye after being struck last week by a police rubber bullet.
Political reaction
Far-left figures have pointed to those injuries as evidence of police brutality. La France Insoumise presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon described the policing as “increasingly brutal,” saying its objective is “ever more confused, ever less easy to discern, ever more difficult to define.”
Mélenchon noted that arrest numbers have already exceeded those from the May 1968 student protests, where he began his political activism before joining the Trotskyist group Organisation communiste internationaliste. His party has been accused of manipulating the teenagers into the riots.
LFI, the Socialist Party and the French Communist Party are all set to join further demonstrations on Tuesday, billed by organizers as “Act III.” Mélenchon has called on supporters to wear white armbands and helmets to act as a buffer between police and student protesters, a tactic he says he learned during the 1968 unrest.
Centre-right presidential candidate Bruno Retailleau, speaking outside a school named after Nelson Mandela, called for restoring a law scrapped in the 1980s under Socialist President François Mitterrand that fined rioters and their families.
“We have to hit them where it hurts: their wallets. And when they are minors, we have to go after their families, obviously, including social benefits and allowances,” Retailleau said.
Government spokeswoman Maud Bregeon backed the idea of “collective responsibility” for those who stay in violent crowds after police order them to disperse. The government is also backing a “vandals-pay” bill, set for Senate consideration later this month, that would fine the parents of minors who start fires or damage public property.
