Laurent Nuñez halts stun grenades to mask brutal policing

By Maya Ellison · Reporting from Detroit · October 7, 2026

When police maimed a teenager during school protests, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez offered a temporary munitions pause that shields a violent state apparatus rather than delivering justice for broken classrooms.

The blood price of a broken public school

When a state turns its police force loose on children demanding a roof that does not leak and a teacher in every classroom, it reveals the exact moral bankruptcy at the top. More than 250,000 people poured into the streets across France, marching against understaffed schools, overcrowded classrooms, and dilapidated academic buildings, as reported by the BBC and PBS. They were met not with funding, but with tear gas, water cannons, and militarized munitions. In Lens, near the Auguste Béhal high school, a 15-year-old boy had his hand blown off by an anti-encirclement stun grenade. Authorities claim the boy picked up the explosive, while students insist he was hit directly by an officer who fired it, according to the BBC.

This is the grim ledger of Emmanuel Macron’s republic, where austerity starves the classroom and rubber-pellet grenades punish the kids who notice. We are talking about human beings whose bodies are collateral damage for neoliberal budgets. A 14-year-old boy in Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône lost several teeth and suffered a fractured jaw after a tear gas grenade hit him in the face last week, according to BBC and Euronews reporting. In Belfort, a 17-year-old student protester complained an officer held his head underwater during an arrest, leading prosecutors to open an attempted murder investigation, as documented by the BBC and The Punch. The interior ministry reports more than 6,500 people stopped or arrested, notes the BBC.

The establishment apologists rush to defend the enforcers of this order. Jean-Paul Nascimento, national secretary of the policing union UNSA, told FranceInfo that the decision to halt stun grenades was based "on emotion," warning that police "are dealing with increasingly violent people" and that "there's where there will perhaps be even more injuries," as cited by the BBC. This is the oldest playbook in the book: blame the victims of state violence for bleeding on the pavement. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu accused the left-wing France Unbowed party of trying to "sow chaos," while Marine Le Pen claimed Macron was "always on the side of attacking the police," per BBC dispatches. Meanwhile, parents chanting outside schools remind the armed guards of reality: "There is no danger. You are the ones creating it," as PBS reported. The parallel to the George Floyd protests is exact and inescapable: a massive scale of public outrage meeting judicial-led and delayed accountability for specific instances of police-inflicted and maiming and physical violence against vulnerable populations. Just as in Minneapolis in 2020, where video captured an officer kneeling on a man's neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds while peers looked on, the French state relies on a shield of internal inquiries—like the 18 investigations opened by the IGPN watchdog—to run out the clock on public fury.

The architects of austerity and their PR pauses

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez announced a suspension of stun grenades for high school student protests only until the facts of the Lens incident are "clarified," telling RTL radio, "There is a police action that raises questions for all of us within the Ministry of the Interior," according to Euronews and the BBC. This is not reform; it is damage control by a career security bureaucrat. Nuñez’s resume is steeped in the machinery of state control, having served as director-general of the DGSI intelligence agency and Paris police prefect before ascending to lead the interior ministry under Lecornu, as detailed in the dossier. When Manuel Bompard, national coordinator of France Unbowed, remarked that it took "several children being maimed for life for Nuñez to give up using grenades against high school students," he named the brutal math of this administration.

Lecornu himself shares a political DNA rooted in cutting public goods and defending opaque state power. As president of the Eure departmental council, his flagship policy was hunting welfare recipients and closing priority education colleges due to low occupancy rates, while as armed forces minister he defended secretive arms exports and refused scrutiny, as noted in the dossier. Now, as prime minister under Macron—dubbed "president of the rich" by his people—Lecornu sheds tears over school disruptions while commanding the same apparatus that arrests thousands of minors. The 500-plus schools fully or partially shut down on Wednesday and the 24 schools set alight or vandalized, affecting 30,000 pupils, are the direct harvest of starving public infrastructure for a decade. Prisca Ancion of the Collective for Judicial Action told AFP that every arrested high schooler reported experiencing "an insult, a slap, having their head held down on the ground, chokeholds," as reported by Euronews.

The strongest opposing case for the state's actions is that the government faces a genuine breakdown of public order, with hundreds of "hostile individuals" hurling fireworks and stones at police lines, and that law enforcement officers are under physical strain. As Prime Minister Lecornu argued, "Extreme violence has knocked on the doors of these high schools, and this extreme violence must be condemned unconditionally," per PBS. But this argument collapses under the weight of historical and material facts. The violence did not begin with students throwing stones; it began with a state that systematically defunds working-class education, packs classrooms, and deploys military-grade stun grenades against high schoolers. You cannot crush children with munitions and then cry foul when they pick up stones to defend their schools. The state holds the monopoly on legitimate force and the entire leverage of the treasury; when it uses that leverage to maim teenagers protesting for books and heat, it has forfeited its moral authority to lecture anyone on order.

Justice requires a complete and permanent ban on kinetic impact and explosive munitions in all civilian policing, the immediate prosecution of every officer who maims a child, and full public funding for the schools these students are fighting to save.

Laurent Nuñez halts stun grenades to mask brutal policing

The blood price of a broken public school

The architects of austerity and their PR pauses

Sources