Some 400 French schools stayed shut on Friday, 2 October 2026, after a week of high school protests escalated into what the education ministry is calling "urban violence" - a phrase that has never once been used to describe a quiet, well-mannered demonstration.

The numbers, per the French education ministry: about 100 schools severely damaged, 40 headteachers injured, and nearly 3,000 lycée students aged 15 to 18 detained since the protests began, including 1,949 on Thursday alone, according to the interior ministry. That is a lot of teenagers for one Thursday.

The grievances driving it all are refreshingly specific: overloaded timetables, overcrowded classes, insufficient teachers, and unbearable temperatures during heatwaves earlier this year. Riot police have been deployed to confront the increasingly violent protests.

Justice minister Gérald Darmanin spent Thursday night on a call with local prosecutors urging them to pursue civil liability claims - meaning parents get to foot the bill for damage caused by their children. Education minister Édouard Geffray, meanwhile, appealed to parents directly, warning that "children are in danger on the streets."

There is no sign of things cooling down. First incidents were reported near the Jean-Rostand high school in Strasbourg and the Simone-Veil high school in Marseille. In Strasbourg, protesters were building a barrier and clashing with local police; further incidents were also reported in Paris and Nantes, where at least ten people were arrested during a clash with riot police on Friday morning.

Jacques Witkowski, prefect of Bouches-du-Rhône in southern France, told BFMTV the situation on the ground was "incomparable" to Thursday's riots, with "far fewer demonstrators" joining on Friday. In his region, 11 schools are affected and 55 have switched to e-learning.

The bill is mounting: damages from this week's protests are likely to run into hundreds of millions of euros, with the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region alone reporting 25 million in damages.

Elsewhere in Europe - because this live blog never met a crisis it couldn't stack another crisis on top of - Spain's rightwing parties announced they will vote against new housing measures put to parliament on Friday by the Socialist-led coalition government. The conservative People's party, the far-right Vox, and the hardline Catalan pro-independence party Junts have all lined up against, meaning the measures will likely fail and the country could be pitched into a heated standoff over access to housing.

The long-simmering anger over soaring housing costs burst into public view 10 days ago after 87-year-old Maricarmen, who uses a wheelchair, was evicted from the home she had lived in for 70 years. For many in Spain, it was the last straw: rents have surged 80% within a decade and the cost of homes has climbed by 63%.

As anger snowballed into encampments across the country, the Socialists-led coalition said it had agreed on new measures and would put them to parliament on Friday. Late Thursday, prime minister Pedro Sánchez said the vote would go ahead regardless: "Or you're with the social majority or with speculators," he said, adding that the vote would lay bare the "true colours" of the dissenting parties. The Madrid tenants' union, the driving force behind the protests, responded by calling for people to take to the streets again this weekend.

The protests have breathed new life into Sánchez's beleaguered government by shifting national attention away from recent events in Ceuta and onto housing. On Friday, as a new poll suggested two-thirds of people in Spain support intervening in the housing market to limit prices, sources told news site Eldiario.es that the Socialists were mulling whether to bring forward next year's elections to November.

And in Sweden, parliament speaker Andreas Norlén has asked Social Democratic leader Magdalena Andersson to have another go at forming a government, giving her a week starting Monday to see if she can build one with enough support in the new parliament - after which she must report back or ask for an extension. The move comes just days after Andersson said on Monday she couldn't secure enough backing once a potential coalition partner backed Norlén, a centre-right politician, for the speaker's post. Sweden runs on "negative parliamentarism," meaning a PM needs an absence of an absolute majority against them rather than a majority in favour - which is either elegant breathing space or a constitutional shrug, depending on your mood.