French student protests returned after a two-week break, but at a sharply reduced scale, with groups of pupils attempting to block a small number of secondary schools in Paris, Marseille and Rennes.
The education ministry said blockades affected just 1% of France’s 3,700 secondary schools, known as lycees, which serve students aged 15 to 18.
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In the weeks before the holiday, hundreds of the country’s more than 3,000 secondary schools had been blockaded.
The movement began in Paris’s suburbs in September before spreading nationwide. Its focus has also widened from education to the rising cost of living, bringing in trade unionists and activists and, at times, leading to violence.
In Marseille, protesters placed several rubbish bins across the entrance to one school.
“We’ve resumed the movement because we were supposedly given answers, but… it’s clearly not enough,” said Meriem, a 16-year-old student.
The unrest forms part of a broader wave of so-called “Gen Z” protests across Europe, including in Germany, Italy, Belgium and Albania. Demonstrators have cited the cost of living, deteriorating schools and allegations of corruption among their grievances.
Police officers securing the entrance to the Emmanuel Mounier secondary school in Grenoble
French demonstrations descended into violent clashes with police and full-scale riots in several cities last month, including incidents in which shops were looted. The unrest has posed a serious challenge to President Emmanuel Macron’s minority government.
Students continued their action after hundreds of thousands of people, including pupils, joined demonstrations across France on Saturday for a third straight weekend.
“In terms of blockades — or rather, attempted blockades — the phenomenon is very marginal. We’re talking about just a handful of units, a few individual schools,” Education Minister Edouard Geffray told radio station France Inter.
He urged students to return to lessons, warning that prolonged absences could jeopardise their exams.
“I have students who are sitting the baccalaureate at the end of the year, and several hundred thousand of them haven’t attended classes for four or five weeks,” he said.
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Mr Geffray said students had the right to protest, but blocking access to schools was unlawful.
Television footage showed police stationed at schools, although officers were not wearing full riot-control equipment.
Last week, Mr Geffray proposed limiting class sizes to 28 students, allocating €4 billion to school renovations, creating 15,000 additional places in higher education and introducing a new admissions system by 2028.
Representatives of secondary school students rejected the measures as insufficient and said the protests would continue.
President Emmanuel Macron has called for lessons to restart peacefully, saying that “young people have been heard”.
As the European Union’s second-largest economy edges towards recession and faces mounting pressure to reduce its debt, the government has little room to placate student protesters with further spending.
