High-school protests over teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms and run-down buildings closed at least 400 of France’s 3,700 high schools on October 2. About 2,000 people were detained, 90% minors, and the justice minister wants parents to pay for repairs. The counts depend on who counts. On October 2 the Education Ministry said 400 of 3,700 high schools were closed and 560 disrupted; AFP said more than 730 were disrupted; a day earlier the Interior Ministry counted 1,027 affected. The firmest figures are about custody and injury: about 2,000 detained, 90% minors, and 170 students and 65 staff hurt. No figure counts the overcrowded rooms, missing teachers and run-down buildings the students named. A school enters the count when it shuts. The same teenagers get four names in one day. To Geffray they are ‘our children’ in danger, and also a movement ‘held hostage’ by fringe groups. To GB News, ‘rioting youths’. To the Daily Mail, ‘children as young as 14’ burning schools. Each name puts the cause somewhere: outsiders, parents, hate. The government’s charge that LFI took over the movement, which LFI’s Manuel Bompard called a conspiracy theory, moves the cause one step further. No name carries the demand. Two foreign state outlets read the same streets through their own quarrels. Press TV’s headline condemns ‘French police violence’, and the Iranian spokesman it quotes argues about Iran. RT puts ‘high school’ in quotation marks and promises a hidden story. Le Monde’s opinion headline puts the risk of serious injury to minors at the top of the police’s job. No headline quotes a student’s demand; the one student union line in the coverage is a disavowal: ‘We disassociate ourselves from the urban violence,’
