🇫🇷 - France’s school unrest is no longer a classroom dispute. It has turned into urban violence, and the official refusal to say who is in the streets is part of the problem. Blockades that began over overcrowded classes, missing teachers and decaying buildings have spread nationwide since last week. Fires hit schools in Nantes and Rouen. In Marseille, staff at Victor Hugo were splashed with petrol, and a crowd forced firefighters to abandon a truck outside Lycée Saint-Exupéry before it was set alight. The Interior Ministry counted 1,949 arrests on Thursday alone, mostly for violence, unlawful gatherings and attacks on people in authority, and 305 police, gendarmes and firefighters injured that day. Education Minister Édouard Geffray said 170 pupils and 65 staff, including about 40 headteachers, have been hurt since the movement began, and more than 100 secondary schools have suffered serious damage. About 400 of France’s 3,700 lycées were closed Friday. On Thursday, 1,027 were affected and 222 blockaded. Lecornu called a crisis meeting; Nuñez ordered the blockades cleared. The government now calls it “urban violence,” not a student protest. Reported by AP, BBC, Reuters and RFI. Viral claims that “hundreds of schools burned” or that “2,000 were arrested in a day” overstate what is on the record. Thursday’s 1,949 figure is an arrest count, not a conviction count, and many of those held are minors. France also does not publish ethnic or origin statistics, so no official dataset can prove or disprove the “migrant youths” claim. That gap is not neutrality. It is a policy choice that lets ministers blame “outside agitators” and La France Insoumise while refusing the question voters are already asking. The stated grievances are real. They are also downstream of a system France has not been willing to measure. Rapid immigration, family reunification and high birth rates in poorly integrated banlieues have filled classrooms the state cannot staff, in districts where French is often not the language of the home and where school segregation is an open fact. Intelligence services told Lecornu’s crisis meeting the movement was initiated by LFI and its proxies; LFI denies it. Marine Le Pen’s line is that this is no longer a lycée protest but riots organized by professionals and overseen by hard-left deputies. Both can be partly true. Political exploitation does not explain why the same pattern — masked youths, fireworks, bins set alight, attacks on police and school staff — keeps recurring in the same neighborhoods after every grievance, from pensions to Nahel to Gaza. One week of unrest does not settle the immigration argument. Years of enforcement failure, parallel societies and youth unemployment in the banlieues already have. The honest correction is narrower than the draft suggested: major outlets are covering the fires and the arrests. What they still will not do is publish who was arrested, where they were born, or whether they are French. Until Paris releases that, “we don’t know” functions as a veto on the obvious question, not as an answer to it. Sources: BBC; Reuters; RFI; AP; Irish Times.