Geffray said dozens of headteachers and deputies had been injured, many deliberately so, and alleged the movement had been “very quickly infiltrated by ultra-violent groups”.
“We have never seen anything like this,” he said of the disorder which officials report has harmed more than 200 students and 700 police officers, and prompted more than 6,600 arrests.
Nuñez later said he found it “excessive to speak of police repression of the movement”, insisting that officers were only acting in response to violence and damage.
The national coordinator of the radical-left France Unbowed (LFI) party said that it had taken “several children being maimed for life for Nuñez to give up using grenades against high school students”.
The prime minister has accused LFI of trying to “sow chaos” during the protests ahead of elections to select President Emmanuel Macron’s successor in April.
Its leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon is currently second in the opinion polls behind Marine Le Pen of the hard-right National Rally – who on Wednesday said Macron was “always on the side of attacking the police”.
The president held an emergency meeting late on Tuesday with Prime Minister Lecornu and other key ministers to find a way out of the crisis after almost a quarter of all lycées were disrupted by the day’s protests – with government figures putting the number of protesters at more than 250,000.
Lecornu announced that schools should set aside half the day for students to voice their concerns, and noted on social media that an online consultation seeking their opinions had drawn 30,000 responses within a day.
But students’ unions – who put the number of protesters at 450,000 – maintain a fourth round of demonstrations is planned for Thursday in Paris and other cities, and told reporters they had requested a meeting with Lecornu due to a lack of “concrete measures” outlined so far.
The union representing school leaders told FranceInfo that a solution would require “something more than simple consultation periods”, while the head of the USL high school union, Ryad Rani, told French radio on Wednesday: “We are telling M. Nuñez, calm your police officers down and call for restraint.”
