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France Student Protests, Act V: Closures Fall, Demands Stand

France’s lycée students march for a fifth day as closures fall to about 200 schools; 6,877 held in custody, and first government decisions are due.

ByPeter Peters
Paris street march with union flags and large white balloons over a crowd and delivery vans
Archive photo (2010): Clem from Paris, France, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

PARIS, 13 October 2026 – French high school students marched for a fifth national day of action on Tuesday. They are pressing a government that says the movement is losing strength but has not yet met the main demand: a €10 billion plan for the country’s lycées. According to the Education Ministry, about 200 of France’s roughly 3,700 lycées were closed on Tuesday morning and 94.2% were open (RTL).

The movement began on 17 September at Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, outside Paris, over overcrowded classes, unreplaced teachers and run-down buildings. Our France Protest Tracker follows every protest day since then, with both turnout counts, arrests, injuries and a dated timeline. This article covers what changed this week.

Act V: smaller closures, continued anger

Marches set off in Marseille and Nantes in the late morning, each drawing several thousand students, teachers and union members, according to La Croix. In Paris, the main march left Place d’Italie at 2 PM local time for Les Invalides, near the prime minister’s office and the Education Ministry. La France Insoumise presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon walked with it. Swedish activist Greta Thunberg joined pupils at Lycée Paul-Éluard in Saint-Denis, where lawyers in robes formed a human chain to protect students after allegations of police brutality, AFP reported.

Education Minister Édouard Geffray told France Inter that the lower closure figure showed a “décrue”, a receding tide, compared with previous weeks. The ministry put Tuesday’s closures at 214, against 224 on 8 October and 800 on 6 October. It also said 20 staff members were injured on Monday, five of them head teachers, the second-worst day for staff since 1 October. That brings the ministry’s total to 147 injured staff (actu.fr).

Local authorities are tightening rules around schools. The Essonne prefecture banned gatherings next to 13 lycées on Tuesday, citing a “particular risk of disorder”, and reported 141 arrests in the department since the movement began (actu Essonne).

Two counts of the crowds

As in every French protest movement, the government and the organisers publish separate turnout figures. For Act III on 6 October, the Interior Ministry counted 266,000 marchers nationwide, 56,000 of them in Paris. The student and youth organisations (USL, FAGE, Union étudiante, UNEF) counted 450,000, and the CGT union said it endorsed that figure (Le Monde).

The gap widened in relative terms at Act IV on 8 October. The ministry counted 71,500 marchers, 24,500 in Paris, plus 55,000 people at actions outside schools (RFI). The CGT counted more than 130,000. Neither side’s method is independently audited, so the tracker shows both.

What the government has offered

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu spoke from Matignon on 7 October. “The anger of young people does not come from nowhere,” he said, according to TF1 Info. He announced five work streams: covering lessons when a teacher is absent, repairing buildings, reorganising the school timetable, making the Parcoursup university-admissions platform more transparent, and giving students a clearer voice. He said the first decisions would come at the end of October and that the 2027 Education budget would rise by €1.2 billion to €64 billion.

A day later, Geffray announced an emergency plan on TF1. It deploys about 3,000 replacement teachers who had no class assignment, allows regional education authorities to hire several hundred more, and gives head teachers hundreds of thousands of extra paid hours for short-term cover (LCP). The student unions say the measures fall far short of the €10 billion they want, and they also want Parcoursup scrapped. On 12 October, President Emmanuel Macron urged protesters to mobilise “calmly, in order, and with respect for people and property,” La Croix reported.

Policing, custody and the courts

Arrest numbers set this movement apart. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez told the National Assembly on 7 October that police had made 6,629 arrests and that 761 police and gendarmes, 215 students and 89 education staff had been injured (La Libre, citing AFP). The same day he suspended the use of stun grenades at student protests after a 15-year-old protester lost a hand.

The Justice Ministry’s figures, released on 9 October, count people held in custody rather than arrests: 6,877, of whom 5,890 were minors. About a third face prosecution, and 21 people, six of them minors, are in pre-trial detention (ICI). In Paris, prosecutor Laure Beccuau said on 12 October that most of those prosecuted were unknown to police and the courts, and that eight inquiries into police conduct had been sent to the IGPN, the police oversight body (actu Paris). Nationally, AFP counts 24 internal investigations into alleged brutality.

No deaths linked to the protests have been reported by officials or by the outlets reviewed for this article.

What to watch

Analysis: Two dates will shape what happens next. The All Saints’ school holiday begins later this month, and school holidays have often slowed school-based protest movements. The government has also promised its first decisions by the end of October. If the measures come close to the unions’ demands, the government’s “décrue” may hold. If they don’t, the unions have said they will keep calling national days. The figures on custody and police-conduct inquiries are likely to stay in the debate, with the presidential election due in spring 2027.

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*Featured photo: archive image of a 2010 Paris march with student and union balloons, by Clem from Paris, France, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped.*

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