It started in schools, spread across the whole country: the French are protesting

France took to the streets again on Saturday. From Paris to Marseille, from Lyon to Rennes, students, union members and yellow-vest activists marched to protest against rising living costs, social inequality and the deteriorating state of public education. By evening, authorities had already detained nearly three hundred people, a tourist information office was on fire in Lyon, and protesters vandalized the city hall in Marseille.

The protest began on a small scale a month ago, in high schools in the poor suburbs north of Paris. Students took to the streets because they had had no teacher for months and were studying in crumbling buildings. Their demands quickly found an echo across the country, and today the protests are no longer just about schools but also about increasingly expensive fuel, falling living standards, and the question of who is paying for the state's austerity measures. A nineteen-year-old Parisian girl, Lola, summed up why she was on the street: life has become too expensive, and high schoolers get beaten when they demand more teachers and decent conditions.

Most of the day passed peacefully, but violent clashes broke out in several cities alongside the marches. According to the Interior Ministry, masked groups attempted looting, set street furniture on fire, clashed with police, and attacked state institutions and newsrooms, mainly in Paris, Marseille, Rennes, Toulouse and Angers. The government blames the far left for the unrest. Tear gas was used to disperse crowds in Paris and Marseille. Marseille's mayor said the government would send more police officers to the city, where, according to a Reuters correspondent, a group of about a hundred marched toward the starting point of the protest chanting anti-police slogans. In central Paris, police cordons sealed off the area around the Champs-Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe, while protesters wearing high-visibility vests blocked several streets — a scene deliberately evoking the 2018 yellow-vest movement, which grew from a protest against a diesel tax into a nationwide revolt.

Tensions have also been fueled by the police's handling of the protests so far. Several young people have been seriously injured at demonstrations in recent weeks — one teenager, for instance, lost his hand after picking up a stun grenade — and the police's internal oversight body is now investigating more than twenty complaints of police violence. The government therefore banned the use of stun grenades at student protests, but Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez authorized their use again for Saturday. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu noted that more than nine hundred police officers had also been injured in earlier protests.

President Emmanuel Macron had already called for calm on Friday, asking protesters to respect people and public property. Saturday's events, however, show that the president, nearing the end of his second term, is governing with ever less room to maneuver. Parliament is fragmented, efforts to reduce the national debt have failed to convince investors, and as a result France's borrowing costs are the highest they have been in more than twenty years. Every new austerity measure further fuels discontent, and the street protests are adding further strain to an already stretched budget.

Ugar