Gavin Mortimer

This is not going to be an easy week for the French police. More than 200,000 people are expected on the streets today in ‘Act 5’ of the high school protest, and on Saturday the Gilets Jaunes will join a demonstration about the cost of living crisis. The extreme-left and their anarchist allies are set on disorder There will be violence. There was on Monday, which was supposed to be a relatively quiet day in preparation for today. It was anything but. In a school in Aubagne, in the south of the country, a 14-year-old boy opened fire with a hunting rifle, wounding two teachers and terrifying his classmates. Police are still working to establish a motive. Elsewhere in France, eight teachers were assaulted by protestors.

On 21 September, pupils 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. Pupils 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 pupils described seeing rats in classrooms, others of enduring leaking ceilings and mouldy 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 protestors 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’.

So the ‘one in, one out’ deal is dead. Quelle surprise – as the French might say. Since the initiative was launched on 2 August last year, approximately 1,500 people have been returned to France and a similar number sent in the other direction. In the same period, more than 40,000 migrants have crossed the Channel illegally in boats of varying size. According to reports, Britain was keen to continue the arrangement whereby the Home Office returns one illegal immigrant in exchange for accepting a legitimate asylum seeker. France was not and the deal officially expires today. Paris wants what is described as an ‘EU-wide returns scheme’ rather than one arranged with Britain.

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.

The fight for France is underway. The 2027 presidential campaign began last night as the leading candidates clashed in a live debate on the centre court of Roland Garros. Yesterday's confrontation came on the same day a poll confirmed that Marine Le Pen is streets ahead of her rivals in the court of public opinion. The leader of the National Rally boasts an approval rating of 33 per cent, more than twice that of the left’s Jean-Luc Melenchon. He is on 16 per cent with the centrist former prime minister Edouard Philippe 2 per cent behind. Fourth, on 11 per cent, is Raphael Glucksmann, the leader of the centre-left Place Publique.

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?

European Union interior ministers will hold an emergency video conference on Tuesday to discuss last week’s events in Spain's North African enclave of Ceuta. More than 60,000 Moroccans surged across the border, and although the majority have returned the invasion has traumatised many member states. Who authorised him to speak on behalf of the West? And what hypocrisy to now criticise Italy and Denmark Italy and Denmark initiated the meeting and soon had the support of twenty other EU countries.

Europe is burning. From France to Spain, from Portugal to Greece, and even in Britain, the continent has been engulfed by flames this summer. In France, more than 117,000 hectares have been lost to a succession of wildfires and nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated. It’s already been dubbed ‘the worst season of fire in history’. In Madrid, Paris and in other European capitals, politicians argue about the fires – or rather the response to them. The lack of fire-fighting aircraft in France, for example, has been seized on by opponents of Emmanuel Macron’s government. Some of the media have focused on the human aspect: the fact that the majority of the fires have been started by people, either inadvertently or deliberately.