A police crackdown on nationwide protests by French high school students has left several teenagers with serious injuries and thousands in detention, intensifying scrutiny of law-enforcement tactics and raising concerns about the long-term impact on a generation of young people.
Among the most serious cases is that of a 14-year-old boy whose jaw was shattered and whose teeth were badly damaged after a police tear-gas grenade struck him.
The officer who fired the grenade was taken into custody a week later and charged with violent mutilation, an offence punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
The boy has undergone surgery and is unable to speak, while his mother says he can eat only with a straw.
The teenager is not the only student to suffer life-changing injuries during demonstrations demanding increased funding for deteriorating schools. In Lens, a former mining town, a 15-year-old lost a hand in an incident involving a police stun grenade. In Tours, in the Loire wine region, prosecutors say a police riot-control projectile is suspected of causing partial blindness to a 16-year-old.
The injuries have added to mounting criticism of the authorities’ response to the protests. Government critics and human rights campaigners accuse police of using unnecessarily aggressive tactics, while lawyers and policing researchers warn that mass arrests and confrontational policing could leave lasting scars on young demonstrators.
For many of the students, the protests have become an early lesson in the power of the state and the limits of their rights as citizens. Alexis Baudelin, a Paris lawyer representing more than a dozen young people detained during the demonstrations, said the experience had rapidly politicized them.
“It politicizes you at an incredible speed,” he said.
“For many of them — for all of them — this was one of the first times that they’d taken part in a demonstration, coming together in a public space to voice demands they considered legitimate.”
According to the Interior Ministry, police have arrested more than 6,500 people since the protests began gathering momentum last week, most of them young people. A further 488 people were detained during nationwide demonstrations Tuesday.
The movement began at a high school in the Paris region in mid-September before spreading across the country. Students are demanding more funding for schools and additional replacement teachers.
The heavy police response has prompted concerns that young protesters could emerge from the confrontation deeply distrustful of the French Republic and its traditional ideals of “ Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. ” Lawyers and researchers who study policing say the authorities have appeared less tolerant toward teenage demonstrators than they have been toward other powerful protest groups.
Farmers, for example, have previously dumped manure on government buildings, blocked roads and set fires during protests while exerting considerable political pressure.
Baudelin said his teenage clients had experienced what he described as a crash course in “unrestrained violence from the police.”
“Being locked up for hours and hours with nothing, in cells that are for the most part extremely unsanitary, in police stations that smell terrible, where you can’t sleep, with police officers telling you that if you don’t talk, if you don’t tell the truth, threatening you, telling you that your life is going to be ruined,” he said.
“It’s an experience that can be deeply traumatic and is completely out of proportion.”
Facing growing public criticism, Interior Minister Laurent Nunez announced Wednesday that the model of stun grenade suspected in the Lens teenager’s injury would no longer be used against high school students.
Nunez said there was a “strong possibility” that the weapon had been responsible for ripping off the pupil’s hand.
“We need to understand exactly what happened,” Nunez said.
The minister nevertheless defended the broader police response, saying officers had acted proportionately in “almost all cases.” He argued that police were required to intervene when demonstrations escalated into rioting, vandalism and other violence.
Nunez also acknowledged that dealing with high school students required a different approach from handling adult protesters.
“You don’t handle a high schoolers’ movement in the same way as one by adults,” he said in an interview with broadcaster RTL.
In the case of the 14-year-old boy, the police officer who fired the grenade launcher during a demonstration in Saint-Ouen l’Aumone, northwest of Paris, told investigators that he had acted in “a fraction of a second.”
According to the prosecutor’s office investigating the incident, the officer said he was attempting to protect a female colleague who had exchanged blows with the teenager.
Prosecutors subsequently determined that the officer’s actions appeared disproportionate. He was given a preliminary charge of violence by a public official causing mutilation or permanent disability.
The officer has been suspended from duty and prohibited from carrying a gun. He is the first police officer to face potential prosecution among 18 investigations opened into suspected police misconduct during the protests.
The injured teenager, identified by his mother as Eden, had sent her a video from outside his school shortly before he was hit. The footage showed police officers and some protesters, she said.
She spoke to The Associated Press and other media on condition that her identity not be disclosed to protect her son.
When she called him after seeing the video, one of his classmates answered instead. The classmate was screaming that Eden had been struck in the face and was lying on the ground bleeding, with his jaw and upper teeth broken and his lower teeth “completely ripped out,” his mother said.
“It’s shameful, it’s appalling, it’s violent, it’s disgusting, it’s despicable — I could give you a whole list of words,” she said. “They are dealing with children. And children demanding what? Simply better conditions in which to study.”
The protests have also exposed tensions over the treatment of minority teenagers.
During Tuesday’s demonstration in Paris, the Associated Press spoke with three teenagers from the Paris region who said they had been arrested, handcuffed, searched and detained before being released without criminal charges the previous week.
Two of them, 17-year-olds Samy and Warkya, said they had been detained alongside another friend. They believe police targeted them because of their race. Warkya and the other teenager are Black, while Samy described himself as Arab.
French officials have repeatedly denied that racism is a problem within the police force. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu told parliament this week that accusations of racism were “lies.”
Samy said officers stopped the teenagers and told them, “’You, you and you, you’re coming with us.'”
He said they had done nothing to warrant the detention.
“we weren’t wearing hoodies, we had nothing on us, our faces were visible,” he said.
The experience, Samy said, reinforced his belief that authorities were failing to listen to young people.
“Here in France, they don’t listen to us. They would rather send in the police than listen to us and put measures in place to improve our daily lives,” he said.
For Warkya, her first experience in police custody strengthened her determination to continue protesting. At the same time, she said the encounter taught her to flee whenever police officers appear.
“The police are more powerful than us,” she said. “There’s nothing we can do.”
