France shuts its schools: 250,000 protesters on the streets, a 15-year-old boy lost his hand

France is closing its schools - because secondary school students have taken to the streets and the state no longer knows how to get them back behind their desks. The French government decided to suspend classes from 7 October until Friday, after a day in which, according to the Interior Ministry, around 250,000 people protested across the country. The organisers claim there were 450,000.

The figure that overshadowed all the statistics is a single hand. In Lens, in northern France, a 15-year-old protester from the Auguste Béhal secondary school lost his hand after picking up a stun grenade from the ground and it exploded in his grip. Parents and pupils at the school are, according to reports, in shock.

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu gave MPs the toll: since the protests began, 215 pupils, 85 education staff and 715 gendarmes and police officers have been injured. Education Minister Édouard Geffray added that the number of injured school staff is the highest in several decades. Lecornu condemned the "extreme violence" which, he said, "is knocking on the door of secondary schools", and explained the suspension of classes by the need to give every head teacher time for an "internal democratic dialogue".

The other side of the ledger is just as heavy. 6,059 people have been arrested and 5,060 ended up in custody. The national police's General Inspectorate said ten criminal investigations have been opened. Videos of police interventions against young protesters are circulating on social media, among them one from Poitiers in which an officer grabs a young man by the neck. The left - Socialists, Communists, Greens and La France Insoumise - called for the resignation of Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez and announced initiatives to restrict rubber bullets and stun grenades, as well as a parliamentary inquiry into police violence.

There was violence on the other side of the barricades too. In Lyon and Besançon, protesters threw stones and objects at police, who responded with tear gas, and in Rennes with water cannon as well. A 16-year-old pupil from La Ciotat was brought before a court in Marseille, suspected of dousing a teacher with petrol outside the school during a protest. Even the prestigious Paris lycées Henri-IV and Louis-le-Grand were blockaded.

So what are they actually protesting about? The pupils say - underfunding of schools. Donald Trump, on the other side of the Atlantic, has his own diagnosis. On Truth Social he wrote that this "is not a school issue, it is an issue of Islam wanting to take over the once great country", and blamed it all on "uncontrolled mass migration". A 15-year-old without a hand and 215 injured pupils, and one of the most powerful men in the world sees in all of it just another argument for his favourite topic.

The French authorities are promising measures to improve conditions in education, but the protests show no sign of dying down for now. At least they admitted the problem lies in the schools, not just on the street. How many Balkan governments, when young people turn up outside their buildings, would choose dialogue - and how many would simply send more police?