French police maimed schoolchildren who asked for teachers. The media led on the looting, and Trump called it Islam.

The reality of the protests in France: they began on 21 September at one school, the Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, south-east of Paris, where pupils, parents and teachers stood at the gates over teaching posts nobody had filled.

Four weeks later, on 17 October, 550,000 people marched across France by the interior ministry's own count: school students, teachers, unions and the Yellow Vests, angry about the schools and the cost of living. In Paris, police said the march of 110,000 people passed without major incident.

Unfortunately, that is not the story most of the media told. The coverage led on looted shops and burning buildings. It pushed what police had done to children for a month down to a line, or left it out. And a group of right-wing outlets in America and Britain repeated Donald Trump's claim that the whole thing was about Islam.

That is dangerous, because a movement reported as a riot is easier to police as a riot. The French government already calls it "urban violence". Most of the coverage told it the government's way.

So we read the coverage: 734 English-language reports from 164 outlets in Britain, the United States and around the world, published between 28 September and 18 October 2026.

What we found:

• On the national day, the violence led. Of the 132 reports from 17 and 18 October we could read in full, 96 (73%) were mostly about the violence in their headline and first two paragraphs. Six were mostly about the march.
• The peaceful march was buried, or never mentioned. 56 of those 132 reports (42%) never said the marches were peaceful. Only 12 said so in the headline or the first paragraph.
• Eight words on violence for every one on the peaceful marches. On 17 and 18 October, 42 of every 100 words were in sentences about violence and damage. Five were about people marching peacefully.
• Injured police were counted. Injured protesters were not. 59 reports gave a number for injured police officers and none for protesters. Only two of the 132 gave any number for injured protesters at all.
• The police were left out of their own violence. Across the three weeks, one report of the violence in four (151 of 609) never said police used any force. 62 outlets published at least one.
• The maimed children got a line, at most. Only 67 of the 132 national-day reports mentioned any of the children police had maimed since late September. Only 21 said the interior minister had allowed stun grenades again for that day, ten days after suspending them over the injury to a 15-year-old who lost his hand.
• The Islam lie found its echo. Fox News, Breitbart, the Washington Times, the Washington Examiner, The Federalist and GB News all pushed the claim, in their own words, that the protests were about immigration, Islam or the children of immigrants.

Where the words went

We also counted the words. Every sentence in the 634 reports we could read in full was sorted by what it was about: the violence and damage, why people were protesting, police using force, the peaceful marches, and the children police had maimed.

What the counts show:

• Nearly eight words on violence for every one on the peaceful marches. Across the three weeks, 132,301 words were in sentences about violence and damage. 17,164 were about people marching peacefully.
• On the national day, violence took 42 of every 100 words. In the five days before, it was 16. The peaceful marches got 5.
• Police force got a third of the space violence did. For every 100 words on violence and damage, the reports spent 33 on tear gas, batons, grenades, rubber bullets, charges and police violence. On the national day it fell to 23.
• The maimed children got 12 words for every 100 on violence. In the week Evan lost his hand it was 21. On the national day, when a 17-year-old lost his hand in Saint-Étienne, it was 8.

What the pupils asked for

The demands were about schools. Amnesty France listed them: posts with no teacher, absent teachers never replaced, overcrowded classes and timetables, too few nurses and social workers, and buildings with collapsed walls, rats and mould.

In Seine-Saint-Denis, north-east of Paris, two-thirds of schools have teaching posts nobody has filled, according to a union survey reported by Reuters. Louise Paternoster of the CGT's education union there told Reuters: "Some schools don't have drinking water." She blamed the government's cut of 3,256 teaching posts across France this year.

Most of the French public agreed with the pupils. An Elabe poll for BFMTV found 72% of French people thought the students' demands were legitimate, though 55% wanted the street protests to end.

The government's answer was to call it a plot. After a crisis meeting on 1 October, a person close to Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu told Reuters the intelligence services' shared assessment was that the movement was "an operation organised by LFI (France Unbowed) and its proxies on the far left". LFI denied it. On 15 October Lecornu said it no longer looked like a pupils' movement: "un mouvement de violences urbaines", a movement of urban violence.

Most reports said why people were protesting near the top. Some outlets kept pushing it down. Of the 634 reports we could read in full, 142 said why people were protesting only in paragraph 5 or later, or never said it at all.

What police did to the children

Before 17 October, police had already spent three weeks shooting, maiming and arresting school students. These are the children we know by name.

• Eden, 14, Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône, 28 September. A video authenticated by Le Monde, as Amnesty France describes it, shows police hitting him with batons. He kicks out, and an officer fires a grenade launcher at his face at point-blank range. His jaw was broken in two places. His lawyer, Elsa Marcel, told the Guardian the shot was fired from 1.5 metres: "This is the equivalent of war weaponry." The officer has been suspended and is under investigation.
• Maël, 16, Tours, 30 September. He lost the sight of his right eye. The prosecutor said the wound was "compatible" with a round from a police rubber-bullet launcher. An officer has been charged with aggravated battery.
• Evan, 15, Lens, 5 October. A police grenade took his left hand and fingers from his right outside his school. His lawyer, Bertrand Wattez, says Evan had come to attend class and took no part in any violence: "His injuries resemble war injuries."
• A 17-year-old, Saint-Étienne, 17 October. A grenade tore off his hand. The interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, said he had been told it was a gendarmerie grenade and could not confirm it. The police inspectorate is investigating.

Then there are the arrests. Since mid-September, the justice ministry says, 6,773 children have been held in police custody. For more than 1,000 of them, no charges were brought.

Amnesty International warned on 5 October:

On 7 October Nuñez suspended stun grenades "for the high-school students' movement until light has been shed on what happened in this case", Evan's case. For 17 October, he allowed them again.

Some protesters did attack people and property in these weeks, and the record shows it. On 2 October a group beat a plain-clothes police commander near a school in Belfort, and prosecutors opened an attempted-murder inquiry. Amnesty France, which condemned the police, also said violence by some protesters was unacceptable. None of it explains firing a grenade launcher at a 14-year-old's face from 1.5 metres.

The coverage did not keep up. From 6 October, the day after Evan lost his hand, 184 of the 415 reports we could read in full never mentioned any of the children police had maimed.

What happened on 17 October

The French reports of the day show two different things happening at once.

The marches were peaceful almost everywhere. Every French source we read says so, from the Paris police to the local papers. And in the morning, police used tear gas on blockades and marches where the French reports record no violence before the gas:

• Marseille, shortly after 9am. Several hundred school students gathered at the Prado roundabout and blocked it with bins and scooters. Police cleared it with tear gas.
• Strasbourg, 11am. About fifty people blocked a tram. The group was dispersed with tear gas.
• Lyon, 11am. An unannounced march was driven back with tear gas at Saxe-Gambetta.

In Toulouse, the CGT union says police attacked the union bloc at the head of the march, and four women union leaders were hurt by police dispersal grenades.

Separately, masked groups attacked buildings, shops and police. In Paris about 100 hooded people attacked the headquarters of the TV channel CNews at 7am, before any march began. In Marseille the town hall door was rammed in before the afternoon march set off. In Limoges, hooded people broke into the town hall and set it on fire. AFP reporters in Paris watched organised groups of half a dozen young men disable security cameras before smashing their way into shops. The French reports call these groups looters and wreckers, and treat them as separate from the marchers.

Both things happened on 17 October. Most of the English-language coverage reported one crowd. Only 13 of the 132 national-day reports mentioned police using force on anyone acting peacefully. None of the 31 British reports did.

Outlet by outlet, this is where reports on the national day first said the marches were peaceful.

The New York Post made the whole crowd the arsonists:

The Daily Mail had done it from the start. On 7 October it wrote of riot police "clashing with hundreds of thousands of rioters in towns and cities across the country". Of the 185 times a British outlet called people rioters, thugs, looters or a mob in its own words, 106 were in the Mail.

How the police dropped out of their own violence

Across the three weeks, 609 reports we could read in full described violence or damage. 151 of them, one in four, never said police used any force: no tear gas, no batons, no grenades. 62 outlets published at least one.

Where police force was in the story, it got far less space than the violence. For every 100 words on violence and damage, Breitbart spent 7 on police force. GB News spent 16. Le Monde spent 70.

How the headlines changed through the day

A rolling story changes its headline as the news moves. Look at which way these moved. The earlier version is the headline NewsCord stored when it first collected the page, or the wording the page's own web address still carries.

One went the other way. Le Monde's English report on Evan is filed at an address saying he lost his hand "picking up" a police grenade. Its headline says he lost it "due to police grenade".

How a police grenade became a boy's fault

When Evan lost his hand on 5 October, the police account was that he had picked the grenade up. Eight headlines from AFP's copy that day led on it. France 24's read:

His mother told BFMTV, as the Sun reported: "A lot of lies are circulating; my son didn’t pick up the grenade from the ground." Schoolgirls who saw it told France 3 the grenade landed in his hand and went off. The prosecutor said he could not yet say whether Evan picked it up or it was thrown at him.

The Daily Mail went further. It wrote, as fact, that the boy lost his hand "after trying to throw a stun grenade back at police". It repeated the claim on 15 October, in the same article that reported Evan denies the police account.

On 17 October the Australian Herald Sun summed up the day: "Hundreds of thousands marched against inflation in France", then "masked gangs torched town halls, looted luxury boutiques and blew off a teenager’s hand". The hand injury reported that day, in Saint-Étienne, came from a grenade the interior minister had been told was the gendarmerie's.

The lie that it is about Islam

On 6 October Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social:

Notice what he did. He took the real cause away: "This isn’t about schools."

Elon Musk answered Tommy Robinson's "Trump gets it." with "It’s an invasion in slow motion, but an invasion nonetheless." On 17 October, as Limoges town hall burned, Vice President JD Vance wrote on X:

Vance did not name Islam. He blamed immigration, as Trump had done in the post that named it.

In Britain, Tommy Robinson took videos from the French outlet Frontières and rewrote what they showed:

Nigel Farage blamed the "hard-left". GB News went further, in its own news report:

These outlets pushed the same claim in their own words:

Notice the words they used to wave the real demands away. The pupils were "said to be protesting" (GB News). They were "supposedly protesting", in "so-called student actions" (Breitbart). They protested "ostensibly" (Ynetnews).

The facts are the other way, and the outlets that checked said so:

• Reuters: "The students' demands do not concern religion or immigration, but focus instead on understaffing and lack of funding."
• The New York Times: "Neither immigration nor religion have figured in the demands of students, who are calling for more teachers and better school facilities."
• Politico: "Neither migration nor religion are part of the movement, which began over frustrations with school conditions".

Fact-checkers found the videos used to push the claim were old, or from somewhere else. NewsGuard traced a clip of men in the Gare du Nord, shared as African men joining the protests, to a December 2017 protest. France 24 traced a burning bus to a school bus fire in Nîmes in 2022, and the "France has fallen" smoke over the Eiffel Tower to Paris Saint-Germain fans celebrating in May.

There is a real fact under the lie. The movement started in the suburbs of Paris, in Créteil and Seine-Saint-Denis. As the European Digital Media Observatory pointed out, the areas with the most hardship, where schools are more run-down and teachers are in short supply, are also home to the children and grandchildren of immigrant families. That is why those pupils walked out first, and it is what they walked out about.

Calling a school protest for teachers an Islamic takeover only benefits the people who want French Muslims treated as a threat, by turning children's demands for teachers into proof of an invasion.

Protesters in Tehran, rioters in Paris

Iran had its own cost-of-living protests at the turn of the year. CNN reported on 29 December 2025: "Iran's largest protests in three years erupted Monday after the country's currency plummeted to a record low against the US dollar". On 2 January Trump warned Iran:

Iranians angry about prices were peaceful protesters. French children asking for teachers were Islam taking over. One standard for Tehran. Another for Paris.

Some of the papers split the same way. We compared 31 reports on Iran's protests with 28 on France's, from 18 outlets, most of them British and American, on the peak days of each.

• In the 31 reports on Iran, no outlet called the people in the streets rioters, looters, thugs or a mob in its own words, even when it reported them burning buildings and fighting police.
• In the 28 reports on France, those words appeared 27 times: 20 in the Daily Mail, the rest in the Telegraph, the New York Times and the Guardian.
• When buildings burned in Iran, the Independent wrote that "Buildings were set on fire in Tehran", with nobody doing it. When the Limoges clock tower fell, the Telegraph wrote that it "collapsed on Saturday night after rioters set it ablaze".

The scale is not comparable, and we are not comparing it. Iran's security forces killed thousands of protesters in January: the rights group HRANA has verified 6,872 deaths, mostly of protesters, and a UN fact-finding mission found crimes against humanity. We found no protester killed by French police. The comparison is about the words outlets chose for the same acts, by people angry about the same thing. The BBC, AP, CNN and Sky called people protesters in both countries.

The pupils of Créteil asked for teachers. Four weeks later, most English-language coverage led on the looting, a group of outlets repeated a lie about Islam, and the children police had maimed got a line, at most.

How we counted

Outlet by outlet

Every outlet with at least two reports we could read in full, on every measure in this piece. Pick a measure, filter by where the outlet is based, and tap an outlet to see all its numbers.