France has closed hundreds of secondary schools amid violent student protests, as ministers urged parents to keep children away from blockades and warned families could be billed for damage.
Issued on: 02/10/2026 - 12:33
Around 400 of France’s 3,700 secondary schools were closed on Friday on the orders of police prefects, with many schools switching to online lessons.
Education Minister Edouard Geffray urged parents to intervene, warning that young people were putting themselves at risk.
“Children are in danger on the streets,” he told BFMTV. “Parents must, quite clearly, take action and tell their children not to go [to the blockades]."
The protests began over staffing, funding and school conditions and have spread rapidly across the country.
The Interior Ministry said 1,027 secondary schools were affected on Thursday, including 222 that were blockaded. Around 30 university campuses were also blocked.
It said 1,949 people were arrested on Thursday alone, mainly in connection with violence, unlawful gatherings and attacks on people in positions of authority.
A total of 305 police officers, gendarmes and firefighters were injured during Thursday’s unrest, while Geffray said 170 pupils and 65 education staff had been hurt since the movement began.
More than 100 secondary schools had also suffered serious damage, he said.
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Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin said he had asked prosecutors to seek civil liability against parents whose children were responsible for vandalism, potentially leaving families to pay for repairs.
“When schools are vandalised, when bus shelters are attacked, when public transport is targeted, we will now hold parents civilly liable,” he told radio network RTL.
“It’s not the minor who pays, it’s the parents,” Darmanin said, arguing that the approach could prove “far more useful than detention”.
He said around 90 percent of those detained were minors, while roughly a third of those arrested had been held in connection with violence against other people.
Darmanin described those responsible as an “active and violent minority” and questioned whether all of them were secondary school students.
He said the unrest had moved beyond a conventional student protest to become a matter of “public order”, with the authorities concerned about further violence over the weekend and during a national day of action scheduled for Tuesday.
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The government has accused the hard-left France Unbowed party (LFI) of contributing to the radicalisation of the movement and seeking to exploit the unrest.
The prime minister’s office has described the protests as a “manoeuvre organised by LFI and its proxies on the far left”.
LFI coordinator Manuel Bompard rejected the accusation and urged the government “not to descend into conspiracy theories”.
The government’s claims that LFI has orchestrated the unrest have not been independently established.
At the same time, the government has made its first concrete concession to the movement.
On Thursday night, Geffray announced that a proposal in the 2027 budget to introduce registration fees for non-scholarship students in BTS vocational higher education courses and those in preparatory classes for entrance exams for France's elite universities would be dropped.
The planned charges – €178 for BTS students and €270 for those in preparatory classes – had drawn criticism from student groups, trade unions and parties on the left.
Geffray was due to meet secondary school organisations, parents’ associations, education unions and representatives of the national student council on Friday.
“One of the difficulties with this movement is that there is no single national demand,” he said. “It all stemmed from a fairly diverse range of local demands.”
Student organisations are nevertheless calling for protests to continue, with the movement now looking towards Tuesday’s national day of action.
(with newswires)
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