France

On September 21, students at the Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, south-east of Paris, staged a protest. They had a list of grievances. Classes were overcrowded and there was a shortage of teachers. They were also dismayed at the decaying state of some of the school buildings and the automated university admissions platform they feel deprives them of autonomy. Students filmed the protest and uploaded the footage onto social media. It went viral. Across France, children in other secondary schools joined the protest. They aired the same complaints as their peers in Créteil – and more. Some students described seeing rats in classrooms, others of enduring leaking ceilings and moldy walls. For many, memories of the summer heatwave were still painfully fresh.

The government of France held a crisis meeting yesterday afternoon as a school protest movement intensified in violence. On Wednesday, 625 people were arrested and 83 gendarmes and police officers were injured as youths protested outside hundreds of schools nationwide. Yesterday, a school in Nantes was severely damaged after being firebombed and a fire engine was destroyed in Marseille. In the city of Reims there were fierce clashes between protesters and police, and only the use of tear gas dispersed the demonstrators. In some cities, such as Rennes, it was reported that university students were protesting alongside the high school pupils. The government claimed yesterday that the movement has been hijacked “by LFI and its far-left proxies.

Marine Le Pen has promised to ban women wearing Muslim headscarves if she becomes president next year. The leader of the National Rally declared on X: “I will submit to the French people, by referendum, a bill to combat Islamist ideologies with numerous powerful measures, including the banning of the Islamist headscarf in public spaces.” Le Pen may be out of step with the rest of the political class but she is speaking for a majority of the people France has led the way among European countries on the issue of conservative Islamic dress. In 2004, for example, a law was passed prohibiting the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in schools. It applied to Christians, Jews and Muslims, but France was accused of using the bill to persecute Islam.

It has been a punishing summer in France. Heatwaves, drought and forest fires have driven away tourists and made life hell for firefighters. The nation’s winemakers have also had an anxious time of it, but there is now cautious optimism that the exceptional weather may work in their favor. Since late May, France has been swept by a succession of heatwaves as well as a series of destructive wildfires. The worst of these was in the Gironde, west of Bordeaux, which lost 42,000 hectares to flames. Swathes of Provence have also been ravaged by fires in recent weeks. As a result of the fires and the heat, France’s Ministry of Agriculture decided to postpone its annual grape harvest forecast from early August to early September. The announcement was welcomed by the industry.

France’s under-15s can carry on using social media after a parliamentary ban was struck down by the Republic’s constitutional council on Friday. The ruling is a humiliating blow for Emmanuel Macron, who had championed the legislation from the beginning. It had won the backing of both parliament and the Senate last month but the Council had other ideas. In rejecting the Bill, France’s highest constitutional authority judged that it “places a disproportionate restriction on freedom of expression and communication.” Macron heard the news as he enjoyed the surf at his seaside retreat on the Riveria, a break that has already provoked the ire of many. Should the President be gallivanting on a jet-ski when so much of the country is ravaged by destructive wildfires?