Police Violence Causes Serious Injuries as French High School Students Protest

Nearly 2,000 French high schools are blockaded or closed today amid massive student-led protests over school funding and inequality. The demonstrations began in September at a single school in the economically deprived suburbs of Paris, where students protested teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms and dilapidated school buildings beset by rats, falling debris and more. But the scope of the protests has widened amid a violent crackdown by French police. French authorities have arrested more than 5,000 people, largely underage students, since the movement began. Violent police tactics have led to serious injuries. One protester lost an eye after being hit by a rubber bullet, while another lost a hand when he picked up a police stun grenade.

We hear from an anonymous protester who describes the violence meted out on students, who “aren’t even adults yet,” and from Claire Vigneau, general secretary of Fédération Syndicale Étudiante, the French student union, who reports from a protest in Rennes, Brittany, “where we are trying to escape from the policemen that are chasing us with tear gas and with water cannon[s].”

“The amount of spending that France has done on education has stagnated, if not declined,” explains French American journalist Cole Stangler. “The critiques that high school students are making are actually very similar to what teachers’ unions have been saying for quite some time.”

“Everyone is deeply, deeply angry. We are completely fed up [with] the living conditions, the school conditions, the work conditions that we have,” says Alys Rowlands, a university student in Lille and also a member of Fédération Syndicale Étudiante. “The true violence is the violence of the state that we are being faced with all day, every day, all year. That’s the true violence: having no money, having difficulty finishing the month, having less and less help from the state, having to choose between eating and putting your heating on during the winter.”

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Nearly 2,000 French high schools are blockaded or closed today as massive student-led protests spread over France over school funding and inequality. The demonstration began in September at a single school outside Paris, where students protested teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms and crumbling school buildings. But the scope of the protests has widened amidst a violent crackdown by French police. French authorities have arrested more than 5,000 people since the movement began, about 85% of them high schoolers.

These are the voices of two students protesting in Paris earlier today.

HUGO VETZEL: [translated] For us, it’s, first of all, in support of the high school students who started blockades a few days ago. I think we all have a role to play in this movement, and the more we are, the more we will be heard. And I think this is not a fight of a few handful of people, but a more global fight for the youth. …

We feel despised, because when the answer is violence, that means, in a way, democracy is no longer working. But we feel especially that there is such a gap between the elites and us, and we feel we are creating unease, because we are disrupting so much that they are using force to shut us up.

MONA FALLACARA: [translated] I am quite happy because, for once, we see a real movement of the youth everywhere, and we hear about it. But then, what I deplore is that the media is showing more of the violence done by the students before their demands, which are vital. And yes, there is a bit of violence, but it’s not everywhere. …

France’s budget will come to a vote soon, so we hope there will be a higher budget for education. And for the presidential election next year, as well, we hope for a bit of change after 10 years of President Macron heading the country.

AMY GOODMAN: France’s official independent national human rights body has expressed deep concern over what it called the state’s disproportionate use of force in response to the protests. On Monday, Democracy Now! reached a French student who described the violent police crackdown. For her safety, she asked not to be identified.

PROTESTER: During the protests, people, students receive tear gas, receive — like, get hit, get attacked, get charged by policemen, by the CRS, which is a police institution. And yes, basically it has been really violent. Many people have been wounded. Many people have been arrested. Someone lost an eye. Someone lost a hand. And this is happening to literal teens, literal children. We even — most of us aren’t even adults yet. And this is terrible, because literal adult people, adult policemen, adult policewomen, with weapons and tear gas and shields and helmets, are attacking literal students with some — some cardboard with messages on it. Like, we’re pacifists, and our movement is nonviolent, and yet we receive so much violence, violence from the government.

AMY GOODMAN: That was a French high school student afraid to be named or shown.

We go now to France. We begin with Claire Vigneau, the general secretary of the French student union, the FSE. She’s at a protest in Rennes, in northwestern France.

Thanks so much for joining us, Claire. If you can start off by talking about how these protests began? When people hear “suburbs,” they think more middle-class, but in France, it’s basically the opposite, where more poverty is concentrated. Talk about the schools, the high school students and how this has grown.

CLAIRE VIGNEAU: Yeah, so, it started like a few days ago, and maybe 10 days ago, something like that. And now it’s getting bigger and bigger every day. Yes, it started in Saint-Denis, which is a suburbs near Paris, but very poor suburbs. And it started because class conditions, like studying conditions, are really getting worse and worse. And, like, there is water in their class. They have rats in their class. The roof is falling out. And yeah, so it’s getting harder and harder to study for these high school students. And so they started to block their high schools.

And now it’s widened out to most of the high schools in France. Actually, today, the state decided to close 500 high schools, because they didn’t want them to be blocked. But even with that precaution, 500 more high schools are blocked. And for now, we are — for now we are — we have also like 90% of the universities, the campuses that are blocked. And we are going to keep on going yet, keep on going to block.

Today, we were on a protest in Rennes, yes. We are trying to escape from the policemen that are chasing us with tear gas and with cannon, water cannon. And so, yes, it was a very big protest in Rennes. There was actually like 16,000 people in Rennes, which is not a big city. And one thing to note is that the minister of the interior told today the head of the biggest trade union in France that Rennes was going to be an example of repression, of violence, and to show all the rest of the movement that we can’t do what we are doing now, which is protest for our living conditions.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Claire, could you talk more about what the demands of the students are, and especially their concerns about so many of these schools having no air conditioning in warm weather, that the heat gets up to 35 degrees Celsius, or 95 degrees Fahrenheit, especially given that France has had so many people die during heat waves this past year?

CLAIRE VIGNEAU: Yeah, yeah, because we have seen a lot of classes, even in classes for like really young child, starting from 6 years old, being in classrooms where there were like 35 students with temperatures attaining 35 degrees and even more — some of them attained 40 degrees. And we are concerned, because you can’t learn, really, in a really good way when you are under this weather. And we are fighting, of course, for the weather conditions, like the stunning conditions, but not only.

And obviously, we are struggling for more budgets in school and less budgets in the Army, because in France the financement for the Army doubled in 10 years, and when they — at the same time, the budgets for education is getting lower and lower every day. And so, that’s like — the air conditioning is, of course, one of the goals, but not only. And before even having air conditioning, we would like to have safe classrooms with no bad products for our health in the buildings. And we would like, if it rains outside, we don’t want rain in our classrooms, etc., etc.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go right now to southern France, where we’re joined by Cole Stangler, a journalist in France covering politics and labor. The significance of this protest call? I mean, we see Claire in the streets of Rennes. There are protests in Lille, a nationwide day of protests, the college unions and other labor unions joining in these protests right now, thousands of people arrested, about 5,000, over 87% of them kids in high school.

COLE STANGLER: Yeah, that’s right. And I think maybe just to complement some of what we’ve been — already been hearing, you know, those issues have been absolutely at the forefront of what I’ve been hearing on the ground here. I was just at a protest in Aix-en-Provence, just in the south of France, just north of Marseille, where students were telling me their own stories of the dilapidated conditions of some of their buildings, which, to be fair, aren’t nearly as bad as when we talk about the suburbs of Paris, where you have, you know, rats in the hallways, but still, people talking about dilapidated buildings, having to install nets around their — around the buildings to make sure there’s not falling debris. That’s an issue I heard about.

And, you know, another issue people talk a lot about here is the staff shortages, the lack of teachers. This has been an issue that’s been bubbling up for years, in fact. And we heard it mentioned, France’s — the amount of spending that France has done on education has stagnated, if not declined. You know, if you go back to the late ’90s, 1997, France was spending over 7% of its GDP on education. That’s declined about nearly a percentage point. So, the government is spending less, and the salaries are quite low, as well. That might be shocking to some viewers in the United States. You know, a starting salary for a public school teacher in France is around 2,000 euros. Even mid-career professionals are making less than the OECD average, less than the European Union average. And so, when you have low salaries, you know, and you have dilapidated buildings, it’s easy to maybe understand why you have these staff shortages. And so, this is an interesting issue where the critiques that high school students are making are actually very similar to what teachers’ unions have been saying for quite some time. So, there’s that issue of the shortages.

And I think another key issue that’s emerged — and again, students were talking about it, both the high school students I talked to earlier today and the university students who joined the protests — was the issue of what in France they call Parcoursup, which is the new platform that was introduced a few years ago, which is basically an application platform for high school students to get into universities, that is not very transparent. There’s a lot of critiques about how this sort of seemingly mysterious system will offer university spots to students. So, students aren’t getting to go to the universities they want to go to that are close to them. They might have to move halfway across the country. That means more money that they’re spending on rent; they can’t live with their parents. And so, that critique of the university application process is something that unites, again, both high school students and university students.

And that’s what’s been interesting when you’re talking to people on the streets here, is to see to what extent the high school student issues actually resonate beyond just high schools. Right? It’s university students. It’s also trade unions. Today, at the protest I was at, you had a lot of trade union support from, you know, the main labor unions in France. And I think the movement is really resonating because it’s really hit a nerve here on a lot of issues that are important to French society.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Cole, I wanted to ask you — the French government has accused the left-wing political party France Unbowed of stoking the violence at the — or, some violence at these protests. Can you talk about the significance of this, especially as France is preparing for next year’s presidential elections?

COLE STANGLER: Yeah. You know, I was talking about this earlier, and I think that this line that we’ve indeed heard from the government — I think it is both a great exaggeration of the mobilizing power of that party, La France Insoumise, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and it’s also, I think, an insult to the collective intelligence of the high school students who are protesting. I mean, I don’t think it’s physically possible for a political party to have this broad of a reach. So, I think that’s sort of an easy excuse. But that’s — you know, that’s indicative of the approach the government has taken so far.

And, you know, this question of police repression and police violence, which we heard about just earlier, has also been something that’s been kind of pushing the movement forward. A lot of French people, I think, have been shocked by the degree of the police violence. You know, we heard there was a 15-year-old who had his hand basically blown off by picking up a stun grenade that the police use here. We had another student who lost the use of his eye because he was hit by a rubber bullet. These are like, you know, low-grade, almost military kind of technologies that the police use in France. And it’s part of a policing strategy that has been in place for several years now. Many of your viewers might remember the yellow vest movement back in late 2018, where we had, you know, decentralized mass protests and a huge amount of violence, where you had protesters having — you know, losing their eyes, losing their hands.

The difference here — and this is what makes it frightening — is we’re not talking about adults. We’re talking about literal high schoolers. We’re talking about 15-, 14-year-olds who are being beaten by police. And, you know, there have been incidents. We should just be clear: There have been incidents of, you know, people attacking police officers, at some points firefighters. But that is the extreme minority. And I think the much bigger story here, we’re talking about a democratic country where the police have been attacking high school students. And I think it’s — again, it’s documented. There’s been hundreds of complaints that have been filed with the French government to this effect. This French policing strategy that was used during the yellow vests is now being directed against high schoolers. And that’s also energizing this movement. A lot of people think it’s unacceptable.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go from Aix-en-Provence, where Cole Stangler is, to Lille, France, from the south to the north of France. Alys Rowlands is a university student and member of the national board of the French student union, also just at a protest. Alys, thanks so much for joining us. As we wrap up, what do you think it’s most important for us to understand about this mass protest that’s taking place in France, and what you’re demanding, and how this might even affect the national elections that are coming up next year in France?

ALYS ROWLANDS: Yeah, absolutely. I think the most important thing here is that it started with the high schoolers. Today, it’s also university students, but we’ve seen also teachers. We’ve seen farmers. We’ve seen the yellow vesters who want to join again. We’ve seen everyone want to join this mobilization, because I think what’s very interesting about this one here is that everyone is deeply, deeply angry. We are completely fed up of the living conditions, the school conditions, the work conditions that we have, and everyone is really, really deeply angry. And that’s what’s really interesting at the moment.

So, the students, like they’ve said, are being faced with really strong repression from the police forces. So, as they said before, there are many kids. This is children who are being shot at with rubber bullets and tear gas and water cannons, who are being chased, who are being, you know, arrested massively. And this is completely unheard of before. It’s only been a week of this mobilization with the different protests and schools being blocked, etc., and it’s already over 5,000 people arrested, and, as you said, mostly children. And so, this is completely different from things that we’ve seen before.

And because France, it’s — quite often there are mobilizations and things, but this is completely a different proportion, because people are really deeply angry about what’s going on and the conditions that we are living in. And I think this will have an impact, because we’re already seeing things changing. But what people want right now, it’s not one reform. It’s not one thing. It’s a deep change in the system and more budgets for the public services in France, which is behind all of this.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Alys, what is your sense of the — excuse me — the response of adults, of the parents of these children, of the general society to the way that the government has reacted to the student protests?

ALYS ROWLANDS: Yeah, that’s an interesting question, because we can see in protests loads of parents. And we’ve seen online, on TikTok and the different apps, that the teachers and parents have been joining the protests, because they understand that the students, the high schoolers especially, are really deeply angry and they are completely fed up of going to school and then there being rats and the ceiling falling down and chemical products in the ceiling that are giving us cancer. Like, it’s completely — it’s completely insane. And so, the parents and teachers, but also, much wider, the general population are completely with the mobilizations.

But the media are only showing violence and this and that. But the true violence is the violence of the police, the violence of the repression. How is it possible that children, 14-year-olds, are having their eyes being blown off, their hands being blown off, their teeth being completely ripped out by these rubber bullets and tear gas? How is it possible that this is happening in France today? Five thousand people arrested, mostly children, how is this possible? The true violence is the violence of the state that we are being faced with all day, every day, all year. That’s the true violence: having no money, having difficulty finishing the month, having less and less help from the state, having to choose between eating and putting your heating on during the winter. It’s that kind of violence that we are faced with all year. And so, you know, the parents and the teachers and, wider, the general population are completely agreeing with the —everything that they want, the students, the high schoolers, the university students, but also much wider. Everyone has things they want to change.

AMY GOODMAN: Alys Rowlands, we want to thank you for being with us from Lille, from the north of France, university student, member of the national board of the FSU, French student union. I also want to thank Cole Stangler, journalist based in France, covering politics and labor issues, joining us from Aix-en-Provence in the south, and Claire Vigneau, general secretary of the French student union, joining us from the streets of Rennes, where the massive protest also is taking place today, as it is across the country. And just to underscore something Juan said about the heat and the lack of air conditioning, this isn’t just a luxury. We’re talking about 8,000 people in France this summer died from heat.

Coming up, we go to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the death toll from Ebola has topped 4,000. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Freedom Is Free” by Chicano Batman.