By Michel Rose, Charlotte Van Campenhout and Marc Leras
PARIS, Oct 1 (Reuters) – France’s intelligence agencies briefed a government crisis meeting on Thursday that a wave of student protests, sometimes violent, that has swept across the country was initiated by hard-left politicians, a person close to the prime minister said.
The protests against teacher shortages and dilapidated school buildings erupted in the Paris region last month but have turned increasingly violent as they spread nationwide, with dozens injured and with police making hundreds of arrests.
Student protesters started fires in at least two high schools, while teachers were inadvertently splashed with petrol at a third in the southern city of Marseille, officials said. At least one car was torched in Strasbourg in the east and riot police clashed with youths in Toulouse in the southwest.
The protest movement had reached a tipping point and morphed from school blockades into urban violence, according to a readout of the crisis meeting provided by the source close to the prime minister.
“Shared assessment by the intelligence services on the origin of the movement: an operation organised by LFI (France Unbowed) and its proxies on the far left,” the readout stated.
Hard-left lawmakers and local mayors have been accused by political opponents of fanning the protest movement by turning up in front of high schools and defending it.
LFI dismissed the charge that it was behind the protests.
“LFI has always advocated non-violent demonstrations,” LFI lawmaker Louis Boyard told BFM TV after the meeting readout was shared with reporters.
“The government, by turning it into a political battle, has added fuel to the fire by insulting and repressing high school students,” he added.
“This sense of frustration will not be dealt with through batons; it will be dealt with by showing consideration for these young people,” he said.
UNREST SPANS THE COUNTRY
Some of the worst unrest on Thursday was in Marseille.
At the city’s Victor Hugo high school, the two teachers were inadvertently splashed as a student attempted to throw gasoline into a trash bin. Earlier the prosecutor’s office had said the teachers had been assaulted and “doused in petrol”.
Outside Marseille’s Saint-Exupery high school, hundreds of young people forced firefighters to flee their truck and then set it alight. Public transport in the city, France’s second largest, was suspended after staff members were injured in the unrest.
A school was set ablaze in the western city of Nantes, fire crews said, and the facade of another suffered fire damage in Le Havre in the north.
In the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis, crowds of young people massed in front of a line of police. One student held up a sign that read: “Can we explain ourselves without being teargassed?”
French education minister Edouard Geffray said on Thursday evening that he would meet representatives of staff unions, parent associations and student associations on Friday.
SCORES OF INJURIES, HUNDREDS OF ARRESTS
The demonstrations and blockades, which began last week, have become a political flashpoint at a sensitive moment for the government, which announced a series of deeply unpopular spending cuts in its 2027 budget on Thursday.
The demonstrations have left dozens of people injured. Hundreds have also been arrested, most of them teenagers, officials have said.
Students have accused the police of using heavy-handed tactics, including the use of teargas and flash-ball guns. The government has criticised the violence that has broken out during some of the protests, but has said difficulties in high schools should be acknowledged and addressed.
Interior minister Laurent Nunez said that, in some places, troublemakers were moving from school to school to incite violence.
Geffray called for schools to hold classes remotely if protesters were blocking their premises.
“Violence will not keep our students from their fundamental right to an education,” he said in a post on social media platform X.
(Reporting by Lucien Libert, Layli Faroudi and Abdul Saboor in Saint-Denis, Noemie Olive and Christian Levaux in Lille, Marc Leras in Marseille, Makini Brice in Paris and Sudip Kar-Gupta in Brussels; Editing by Andrew Heavens, Alex Richardson and Richard Lough)
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