French Students Burn Down Schools to Protest School Decay

Student 'blockades' (blocus) ostensibly called to protest budgetary insufficiencies and the dilapidated condition of French high schools have degenerated into an orgy of urban violence in which those same schools have been attacked and destroyed. The violence has also included destruction of other property, pillaging of stores and attacks on school personnel, police and simple bystanders.

Students are clearly involved. There are even videos circulating presently of angry parents coming to drag their children home. But numerous French reports citing school sources attribute some of the most serious violence to outsiders.

Thus, a teacher at the Lycée Chevrollier in Angers was attacked with an iron bar and badly injured on Thursday after several people broke into the school. Sources interviewed by the local news outlet Angers-Info said that assailants were not students at the school. Likewise on Thursday, the Headmaster of the Lycée Ambroise-Brugière in Clermont-Ferrand was hit in the head by fireworks fired from the crowd of 'protesters' assembled in front of the school. According to a school official cited in the local media, however, the perpetrators were a group of outsiders who had joined the protest and were “wearing surgical masks and ski masks”.

A picture accompanying the report from the local affiliate of France3 public television shows a Palestinian flag, for some reason, in the midst of the crowd assembled outside the high school in Clermont-Ferrand. (See below.) Palestinian flags as well as Antifa flags are also visible in other imagery from the '