As police officers tried to disperse students amid unrest outside a school in a Parisian suburb last month, they approached a 14-year-old boy who was lingering near the school entrance.
Their initial interaction is unclear, but soon the teenager was in a heated argument with the police. As it escalated, a male police officer shoved him with a tear gas launcher, according to video footage verified by The New York Times. Then a female officer hit him with her baton, according to prosecutors, the footage and a teacher who witnessed the altercation.
The boy kicked at the female officer, according to the footage, the prosecutors and the teacher, Mathieu Moreau.
The male police officer, standing roughly two yards from the boy, fired a tear gas grenade at his face, breaking his jaw and destroying many of his teeth.
The boy, whose family has identified only as Eden, was unavailable for an interview because he has not been able to speak since a surgery the day after the incident, according to his lawyer, Elsa Marcel. The male officer, who has not been named, said he fired a tear gas grenade because he believed the female officer was at risk, according to prosecutors who interviewed him. He has been suspended and placed under investigation. The interior ministry declined to comment on the incident.
The officers’ actions stirred a national outcry. They were seen and cited by some protesters and others as an incident that helped to explain the anger and intensity of the student demonstrations that began in late September and then evolved into a nationwide protest movement that on Saturday led to some of France’s worst riots in years.
The student demonstrations were initially focused on improving conditions in high schools, including by improving crumbling facilities and hiring more teachers. Those protests often turned violent as participants set fire to or ransacked at least 24 schools, according to the government, leading the police to respond with force. Officers arrested roughly 8,000 people at the high school demonstrations and often used contentious crowd control methods, such as stun grenades, that spurred accusations of police brutality.
Instead of dampening the unrest, the police’s actions against teenagers like Eden helped to galvanize both students and adult citizens across the country, giving them another reason to protest.
That culminated in huge demonstrations across France on Saturday, with people of all ages protesting a range of social grievances, including police violence against students.
Those demonstrations came hand in hand with yet more street unrest as rioters seized the moment to loot shops and set fire to government buildings.
Now, the police stand accused of being too weak to prevent the violence on Saturday — and too heavy handed in its handling of the protests that led to the riots.
Addressing that contradiction, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said on Monday: “For the past three weeks, we’ve been hearing that the police are killing or injuring people. And then, for the past two days, we’ve been asked, ‘What is the police doing?’ A very French kind of schizophrenia.”
‘Walking a Fine Line’
The government has defended how the police handled the student protests in the buildup to the weekend chaos, noting that officers were often forced to contend with violent unrest.
“We’re walking a fine line here because this is a difficult situation to handle,” Laurent Nuñez, the interior minister, said at a recent hearing in Parliament. “When demonstrations take place peacefully, there are no police arrests.”
Critics of the police counter that even against that backdrop, officers have been extraordinarily harsh in their approach to a movement led by teenagers. Prosecutors and France’s police watchdog are investigating at least 34 accusations of police misconduct during the weeks of protests.
Cases include a 15-year-old boy whose left hand was blown off, the interior ministry said, most likely by the explosion of a police stun grenade; a 16-year-old boy hospitalized, prosecutors said, after an eye injury “consistent with being struck” by a kind of rubber bullet; and a 17-year-old boy whose hand was destroyed by a grenade, according to prosecutors.
Concerns about police conduct at protests have repeatedly surfaced in recent years, especially between 2018 and 2020 during the “yellow vest” movement when several demonstrators, protesting high gas prices and other issues, lost eyes after being shot by officers with rubber projectiles.
Experts say the number of incidents is the result of the police increasing their use of heavy-duty weaponry that is inappropriate for crowd control.
“We’re talking about numbers that should prompt the government to re-evaluate the use of these weapons,” said Sébastian Roché, a professor at the National Center for Scientific Research who researches the police and has documented injuries caused by police weapons since the 2000s. “What’s happening is the transposition for a teenage population of a law enforcement approach that has evolved over the past 10 years.”
Mr. Nuñez said at the parliamentary hearing that it was “excessive” to describe the police response as “repression,” but has suspended the police’s use of a certain kind of stun grenade at student protests.
‘Completely Unable to Speak’
Eden’s face was maimed just weeks after he enrolled at Lycée Château d’Épluches, a vocational high school in St.-Ouen-l’Aumône, just north of Paris. The school trains students — almost all of them boys from underprivileged backgrounds — to be car mechanics and truck drivers.
Less than a month after Eden began studying there, unrest broke out at schools across the country as students demonstrated against dilapidated buildings, overloaded schedules and absent teachers. The protests soon reached Château d’Épluches, where the number of students has risen to 630 from 480 in 2014, without a comparable increase in resources to accommodate the increased enrollment, according to teachers, including Mr. Moreau.
Like at many schools affected by the protests, the students gathered outside the school’s entrance, set fires in the street outside and refused to attend class.
The police often responded with tear gas, according to residents, teachers and students.
One resident, Massira Tazi, said, “They’re protesting for what they need, but they shouldn’t be breaking things or setting fires.”
Another, Nisrine Bensmaine, said the police had still been too harsh. “They’re minors, after all,” she said.
Prosecutors investigating the police officers said that Eden was among the demonstrators. According to Mr. Moreau, Ms. Marcel and texts reviewed by The Times that Eden sent his mother, the boy was not involved in the protests.
“There are blockades, I’m heading home,” he wrote to his mother after arriving at the school on Sept. 25.
“OK but please, take care of yourself,” she replied.
“Yes mom,” he wrote.
On the day of his injury, Sept. 28, confrontations between the police and students began after boys lit fireworks in a nearby park, according to Mr. Moreau. That prompted officers to spray tear gas, he said.
Mr. Moreau was trying to usher the students into the school, he said, when a bottle was thrown at the police. The teacher approached the police and pleaded with them not to retaliate, he said. The officers sprayed more tear gas, he said, dispersing most students.
While prosecutors said Eden was “one of” the demonstrators, without giving further detail, a video that Eden sent his mother during the clashes shows the teenager was watching from next to a parking bay, roughly 50 yards from the unrest. The prosecutors and the police have not accused him of lighting fireworks or throwing the bottle.
Eden did not immediately leave the area when the police fired the gas, according to Mr. Moreau, who spotted Eden from a distance.
Mr. Moreau said the police then approached Eden and forced him to stand up — leading to a scuffle that was captured on camera by several bystanders and also later described by prosecutors.
The prosecutors did not say how the scuffle started but described a standoff in which the officers repeatedly tried to push Eden back as he kept moving toward them.
After the female officer struck him with her baton, Eden kicked at her thigh — at which point the male police officer, “carrying a tear gas launcher known as a ‘Cougar,’ fired horizontally at the young man, who was standing facing him,” the prosecutors wrote in a statement.
The officer believed he had “only a fraction of a second to protect her and his team,” the statement added.
Eden will take at least six weeks to recover, according to a medical record reviewed by The Times that shows the boy is at risk of long-term chronic pain and restricted movement in his jaw.
Eden’s mother, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fears of retribution, said that Eden often wrote messages to her asking if he would ever get his old face back.
Her lawyer, Ms. Marcel, has asked prosecutors to consider charging the police officer with attempted murder.
“He’s going to have to undergo extremely invasive surgeries. He’s completely unable to speak or eat normally. His jaw will be completely immobilized for several weeks,” Ms. Marcel said in an interview. “Obviously, this is compounded by intense psychological trauma — he could have died.”
The interior ministry said it could not comment on the case while the police watchdog’s investigation was ongoing.
Mr. Moreau, the teacher who witnessed the scene, said he and his colleagues were left asking what could have justified the police response to Eden.
“Why? I mean, why?” Mr. Moreau said. “What danger did he pose at that moment?”
Reporting was contributed by John Ismay from Washington, Monika Cvorak from London, and Jonathan Baran from New York.
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