PARIS — On one side, legions of determined teenagers are fighting for their future, blockading schools and joining marches that have occasionally erupted into violence.
On the other stands one of Europe’s largest internal security forces, mobilized by the government of an unpopular president preparing to leave office.
This dynamic unfolds almost daily outside high schools and across French streets, producing a nationwide storm of unrest. Recent weeks have brought mass arrests and hundreds of injuries, triggering widespread outrage in a nation with a deep-rooted tradition of protest. Some police officers have even publicly criticized the government’s management of the demonstrations.
For President Emmanuel Macron, who departs office in May, this is far from the ideal conclusion to a decade in power. He has contended with a series of protest movements that eroded his popularity and drew broad criticism over how his ministers deploy police against demonstrators.
The backlash has been especially intense regarding high school students. Much of the anger stems from the fact that the vast majority of the roughly 8,000 people arrested in recent weeks are minors under 18, and police riot-control weapons have been blamed for life-altering injuries suffered by several young teens.
The students’ demands for better-funded schools—especially in impoverished Paris suburbs and other cities—have found a sympathetic audience as France grapples with record poverty and record public debt.
Police, however, say they are confronting violent agitators who have hijacked the protests and used the crowds as cover to assault officers with rocks, fireworks, and other projectiles, while causing destruction through fires and vandalism. According to the government, more than 900 officers and nearly 150 teachers and school staff members have been injured.
Walid Hrar, a police officer and union representative in Paris’s northern suburbs, says French history partly explains why demonstrations are escalating into clashes between riot police and some demonstrators who arrive prepared to fight, wearing masks and black clothing.
“This is the country of the French Revolution,” he said. “Everyone boasts about that. Some political parties do not hesitate to say we must disobey the law. That is what Robespierre and other revolutionaries taught us in 1789.”
“France tends to react rather than anticipate,” he added. “In other words, we always go to extremes.”
Police have come under intense scrutiny for their crowd-control tactics, which include so-called non-lethal weapons such as grenades and other projectiles, tear gas, water cannons, and riot shields fitted with powerful strobe lights.
“We are sending poorly equipped and undertrained public security officers into violent demonstrations, where anger and fear can quickly agitate them,” said Jean-Marie Godard, an author specializing in French policing.
Hrar said some of his colleagues “are not specialized in crowd control and are not equipped for it. We deploy them because we need the manpower, so officers wear uniforms that are not flame-resistant. If a firework mortar strikes and the uniform is not flame-resistant, an officer can catch fire. We also have officers with worn-out helmets and shields that are not suitable for the task.”
He added that officers without authorization to use riot-control projectiles and grenades sometimes struggle to keep attackers at a safe distance.
“So unfortunately, we make do,” he said. “Inevitably, this leads to direct physical confrontation. When that happens, injuries occur on both sides.”
His Alliance police union announced this week that it is filing a legal complaint against the state, accusing it of endangering officers’ lives. The union alleged that officers receive vague and contradictory orders, leaving them feeling “isolated, betrayed, abandoned, and exposed to violence.”
French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said this week that security forces have deployed crowd-control weapons at least 18,000 times during the protests—mostly smoke and tear gas, but also projectiles and grenades.
These include a deafening launcher-fired grenade that Nunez said was used “about 40 times” before he suspended its use against high school students, after a 15-year-old lost a hand.
“All this equipment, all these forces, and all these intermediate weapons are used whenever necessary, with proportionality, to signal an escalation, keep people at a distance, or sometimes incapacitate them,” he said.
The minister said the rules governing the use of riot-control projectiles are “very clear and very strict.”
“We avoid targeting anything above the neck,” he said.
Still, this week an officer suspected of firing a round that partially blinded a 16-year-old was charged with aggravated violence.
That case is among a growing number of investigations—36 as of Tuesday—into alleged police misconduct.
Four involve “mutilating injuries,” six involve “significant injuries,” and others cover “blows, insults, and suspected sexual assaults,” including a case in which an officer is accused of attempting to drown a protester, Nunez said.
France employs more than 250,000 police officers and gendarmes.
Sebastian Roché, a policing specialist at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, said their deployment often depends on the political needs of the government that commands them. Officers have been less lenient with teenagers than they were previously with farmers, a powerful lobby in France who doused government buildings with manure, blocked roads, and set fires.
“It is the political definition of the movement that defines the police response,” Roché said.
Public perceptions of the police also shift based on what people see on social media, Hrar noted, adding that officers were applauded for their bravery during the 2015 terror attacks.
“When you bombard people every day with images of police intervening with batons, shields, and tear gas, you inevitably create a negative impression,” he said.
McNeil reported from Brussels.
