School blockades: nearly 2,000 arrests in one day, a 16-year-old student wounded in the eye in Argenteuil
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On Thursday 1 October, the blockade movement against underfunding affected more than 1,000 high schools, according to the Ministry of the Interior, and spread to some thirty universities. Nearly 2,000 people were arrested in a single day. In Argenteuil, a 16-year-old student was seriously wounded in the eye by an LBD shot, according to several sources.
Video posted on Instagram. High-school blockade in Orléans, Thursday 1 October 2026.
On Thursday 1 October, the Ministry of the Interior counted more than 1,000 high schools affected by the mobilisation, 222 of them blockaded. Launched on 21 September at a high school in Créteil, the movement has also spread to higher education: according to the Union étudiante, 29 universities were partially blockaded by the morning, including campuses of Sorbonne Université, Université Gustave-Eiffel and Paris-Nanterre.
The same day, 1,949 people were arrested, mostly for offences against persons holding public authority, violence and unlawful assembly according to the ministry, roughly three times as many as the day before. On Monday and Tuesday, more than 600 arrests had already been recorded, most of them minors; for Thursday, the ministry did not specify their share. The Minister of National Education, Édouard Geffray, mentioned 170 students injured since Monday, without distinguishing the causes. The Minister of the Interior, Laurent Nuñez, now describes a situation with “all the characteristics of urban violence”; fires have targeted several schools, notably in Bordeaux, Montpellier and Nantes.
After several days of police operations to clear the blockades, the authorities themselves closed around 400 high schools on Friday 2 October, as a preventive measure according to the Ministry of National Education. Classes there are meant to be held remotely, and prefects have banned all demonstrations around the schools.
In Argenteuil (Val-d’Oise), on Thursday in late morning, a 16-year-old student was wounded in the eye on the Dalle, on the sidelines of a student demonstration. He says he was hit by an LBD shot, as his relatives also report; treated on the spot, he was transferred to a Paris hospital, according to ICI. According to the Pontoise prosecutor’s office, quoted by BFMTV, fireworks mortars were fired before the “response” of two police officers equipped with LBDs, and the wounded student’s description “seemed to match” that of one of the two people targeted. An investigation for violence with a weapon by a person holding public authority has been entrusted to the IGPN. Some sources report that the victim lost his eye. At this stage, no medical or official source has confirmed the seriousness of the injury.
In Tours, the public prosecutor, Catherine Sorita-Minard, said on Wednesday evening, on the basis of forensic examinations, that the eye injuries of the young man wounded near the Balzac high school were “consistent with the impact of a LBD-type defence ball”. The condition of his eye has not been made public.
In Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône (Val-d’Oise), the 14-year-old student hit in the face on Monday by a grenade fired from a Cougar launcher has, according to his lawyer, Elsa Marcel, a double fracture of the jaw, with all his upper teeth and some of his lower teeth broken; hospitalised, he is due to undergo major surgery. The Défenseur des droits has taken up the case on its own initiative.
On Friday, the Minister of National Education is meeting student organisations, staff unions and parents’ associations. The Union syndicale lycéenne and the Union étudiante maintain their call for a national demonstration on Tuesday 6 October.