TEHRAN — The French state has chosen its response to crumbling schools and missing teachers. It has deployed violent riot police. Over the past three weeks, a localized dispute in the working-class suburbs of Paris has escalated into a nationwide confrontation over austerity, structural inequality, and the heavy-handed tactics of the Emmanuel Macron government.

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez confirmed the arrest of nearly 5,000 people by early October. Authorities detained 1,949 individuals on Thursday alone, followed by another 1,747 on Friday.

Official figures indicate up to 90 percent of those taken into custody are minors. The government has ordered the preventative closure of more than 400 high schools. Blockades have disrupted 1,200 secondary institutions and 30 university campuses.

Riot police and rubber bullets

The government response relies heavily on specialized anti-riot units. The CRS (Compagnies républicaines de sécurité), France’s riot police, and mobile gendarmes have confronted adolescents with tear gas, batons, flashballs, and Cougar grenade launchers.

Human rights organizations are documenting severe injuries. A 14-year-old boy in Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône suffered a double jaw fracture and lost teeth after being struck at point-blank range by a police projectile.

In Tours, a 16-year-old student permanently lost vision in his right eye from a rubber bullet. Another 14-year-old girl in Alençon was subjected to a police neck hold.

Amnesty International France condemned the use of military-grade crowd control munitions on children.

French officials have instead doubled down. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu and Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin characterized the student assemblies as “urban violence.”

Darmanin instructed prosecutors to force parents to pay for protest damages. This legal maneuver is designed to individualize the fallout of a systemic failure.

Austerity at home, hypocrisy abroad

The crackdown reveals a stark contradiction in French foreign policy. Paris routinely positions itself as a global arbiter of democratic rights.

French diplomats actively lecture independent nations in West Asia and Africa on the right to peaceful assembly and the treatment of civilians.

Iranian officials quickly highlighted the double standard. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baqaei condemned the violent actions of French security forces against young protesters.

In a statement on Friday, he noted that the same government quick to issue statements on human rights abroad is currently firing chemical agents and rubber bullets at its own youth.

French politicians’ lectures on international law hold no credibility while the state relies on police militarization to manage domestic social failures.

France faces a stagnant economy. GDP growth sits at 0.4 percent. The average family has lost 1,200 euros annually in purchasing power since 2024.

As public sector workers launch coordinated strikes against wage freezes, the government finds itself isolated. Macron’s approval rating has plummeted to 18 percent.

Rather than addressing the root causes of the educational and economic decay, Paris has answered its citizens with mass detention.

The collapse of the classroom

The students are demanding basic operational standards. France’s public education system has steadily deteriorated under successive budget cuts.

The 2026 academic year began with 53 percent of secondary schools lacking at least one teacher. This follows the elimination of over 3,250 teaching positions.

Physical conditions inside the schools expose a widening class divide. Working-class and immigrant-heavy suburbs like Seine-Saint-Denis, Aubervilliers, and Créteil bear the brunt of the decay.

Students report classrooms crammed with 35 to 40 pupils. They endure summer temperatures of 35 degrees Celsius in uninsulated buildings without ventilation. Broken sanitation facilities and a lack of clean drinking water are routine.

“The education authority is not investing enough in the suburbs,” a 17-year-old student from Aubervilliers told Reuters. “It’s classist and racist.”

The 2027 draft budget offers a 1.7 percent nominal increase to education spending. This falls well below the cumulative inflation rate of 21.3 percent since 2019. It represents a real-terms contraction.

The government prefers to protect military budgets and corporate subsidies while enforcing a 54-billion-euro austerity package on public services.

A government without answers

The crisis has further exposed the weakness of Macron’s political project. Macron is barred from seeking a third consecutive term, but his centrist coalition remains in office and deeply unpopular.

Prime Minister Lecornu is trying to pass an austerity budget in a divided parliament while facing protests from students, workers and public employees.

The government’s main defense has been to blame the far left. Officials claim La France Insoumise and Jean-Luc Mélenchon organized or exploited the movement.

Education Minister Édouard Geffray said the blockades had been “fueled and co-opted” by LFI.

The accusation is convenient. It allows ministers to portray students as manipulated rather than angry, and to present police repression as the restoration of order.

However, the students’ demands are specific, material and rooted in daily experience.

They want teachers, chairs, clean bathrooms, repaired buildings and shorter school days. Calling these demands a far-left plot does not answer them.

Mélenchon denies directing violence and has called for nonviolent action, while pointing out the government’s brutal crackdown with racist undertones.

The far right is also gaining from the chaos. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally leads polling ahead of the April 2027 presidential election by presenting itself as the party of order.

The same economic anger that brings students into the streets also feeds the RN’s base. France’s political center has failed to resolve the social crisis, and its reliance on repression strengthens the extremes it claims to oppose.