A boy's lost hand, 6,500 arrests: France halts stun grenades as school protests turn bloody

France suspended the use of police stun grenades at student demonstrations on Wednesday, two days after a 15-year-old boy lost a hand during clashes in the northern town of Lens. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez announced the order on Wednesday morning, hours before Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu was due to address the nation on a protest movement that has closed schools across the country and tested the government in the opening phase of a presidential election campaign.

The movement began on September 17 in under-resourced high schools in deprived suburbs, where pupils demanded more teachers, repairs to crumbling buildings and a fairer university admissions system. Classes were boycotted, school gates blockaded, and elite lycées in affluent districts later joined in solidarity. More than a quarter of a million people marched nationwide on Tuesday, and over 500 schools remained closed or severely disrupted on Wednesday.

It is the policing, above all, that has inflamed opinion. Around 6,500 people, most of them minors, have been arrested since the protests began, and more than 200 teenagers have been injured; another student lost the sight of one eye after being struck by a projectile. The government says 715 police officers have also been hurt. Questioned in parliament, Lecornu rejected the charge of police brutality but conceded: “Can accidents happen? The answer is yes.”

In Lens, the boy’s mother, who asked not to be named, disputes the police account that her son picked up the grenade before it exploded; she says it struck him directly. The local prosecutor, Etienne Thieffry, has referred the case to the police inspectorate, and it remains unclear exactly how the device reached the teenager. For his family, the sequence is simpler: the weapon was withdrawn only after a child was maimed.

President Emmanuel Macron held emergency talks with Lecornu and the education and interior ministers on Tuesday night. The government has promised discussions on increased school funding and possible changes to admissions, the movement’s two central demands. Opposition lawmakers have called the level of force against teenagers unbearable. Whether a suspended grenade and a promised budget conversation can answer three weeks of anger from France’s classrooms is now the question Lecornu must face in public.