Student Agitators Storm Back For Biggest Day Yet As Far-Left Foments Riots

French teenagers stormed back to the barricades Tuesday for a third round of their increasingly violent school revolt, and this time the grown-ups joined them.

Scuffles erupted between protesters and cops on the streets of Paris, and clashes flared in Lyon and Strasbourg as thousands of high schoolers once again blockaded their schools. Authorities braced for as many as 40,000 marchers to flood the capital.

The students now have reinforcements. A coalition of teachers’ unions, the hard-Left Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) labor federation, the Socialist Party, and French Left-wing politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise joined the students. A radical farmers’ union even urged its members to roll up to the blockades on their tractors.

The movement, which started over complaints about crumbling classrooms, packed schedules, and a shortage of teachers, has spiraled into riots.

Cops have made more than 6,000 arrests since September 28, and over 5,000 people, most of them minors, have been hauled into custody, according to France’s Interior Ministry. More than 700 police officers and nearly 100 school staffers have been hurt.

Protests have disrupted 589 schools and left at least 190 students injured. In the northern town of Lens, a 15-year-old lost his hand after picking up a police grenade.

France’s internal police watchdog has now launched 10 investigations into officers’ conduct since the unrest began.

Calls are mounting for a “black week” of protests, and the government appears to be blinking.

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu told lawmakers Tuesday that regular class schedules will be suspended at high schools later this week. Principals will hold what he called sessions of “internal democracy” with the angry students.

But Lecornu also came out swinging.

“Burning down a high school doesn’t improve the state of high school buildings,” he told the National Assembly. “Lynching a teacher doesn’t improve the teacher replacement rate.”

He warned there could be no tolerance for violence against educators, and insisted that minors are responsible for their actions too.

The prime minister saved his harshest words for the radical Left. He accused La France Insoumise (LFI) of pursuing a “political project to create chaos in the country” ahead of next spring’s presidential election, and of fanning the flames.

He also flatly rejected claims of state-ordered police brutality, calling them “a lie.” Injuries in tense crowd-control operations, he said, were “accidents, not police violence.”

Famed French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy blasted Mélenchon for comparing the student blockades to the uprisings of May 1968, saying the LFI founder was “unworthy” of even invoking that era.

Lévy said the students have every right to be angry, but he called Mélenchon’s hijacking of their cause “disgusting.” He accused LFI of setting fires, dancing around them, and sending teenagers into the flames. He added that the party bears “considerable responsibility” for the movement’s ugly turn.

Lévy isn’t alone. Far-Right leader Marine Le Pen has also blamed Mélenchon and his party for the riots. She said LFI put itself outside the bounds of the republic by urging activists to stand between kids and cops by branding police conduct “savagery” and suggesting violence can be legitimate. That echoes an LFI mayor in Saint-Denis who said violence “can be legitimate.”

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