A 14-year-old pupil has opened fire with a 12-gauge shotgun inside the Joseph-Lakanal collège, or middle school, in Aubagne, east of Marseille in southern France, on the morning of October 12, wounding the principal and a teacher.
The 53-year-old head and the 37-year-old teacher were hit in the lower body; the former in the hip, the latter in the thigh. Neither suffered life-threatening injuries. Both were taken to hospital by the fire service.
The boy was quickly subdued by staff — a senior school supervisor, according to French broadcaster France 3 — and arrested.
Police and the Marseille prosecutor opened an investigation for attempted murder. Public prosecutor Nicolas Bessone went to the scene.
The teenager reportedly brought the weapon, his father’s hunting shotgun, hidden in a guitar case.
He entered a classroom, fired toward a teacher (missing and striking the blackboard), then moved to the principal’s office and shot again, wounding the headmaster and striking another teacher by ricochet.
At least four shots were fired.
According to police sources cited by French media, the suspect told investigators he felt “harassed by the school” and “unloved”. He had no prior police record. The prefecture said he was in his final year of middle school and was not known for delinquency or radicalisation.
Officials stressed the incident was isolated and unconnected to the lycée blockade movement that has convulsed France for weeks; the collège itself was not subject to blockades.
Education minister Édouard Geffray called the attack “unacceptable” and said it “once again demonstrates the rise of unbridled violence in our society”. Writing on X, he said the education system would stay united and strong.
He travelled to the scene that afternoon with interior minister Laurent Nuñez and junior minister Sabrina Roubache. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu ordered the ministers to the school.
Prefects described the shooting as having “nothing to do with the lycée movement”.
A support cell was set up for pupils and staff. Aubagne mayor Jean-Pierre Squillari said no pupils had been hurt, though some had been affected psychologically.
The shooting landed on a day when the wider student protest movement was still producing disorder, even as the government claimed a “marked slowdown”.
Some 130 establishments were closed nationally that morning, down from 172 on October 9, and the education ministry reported that “at least eight” education personnel were injured in the course of the morning alone, not counting the two wounded in Aubagne, with concentrations of violence around Créteil, Bordeaux and Lyon.
The ministry stressed that 96.5 per cent of establishments were open. Nearly 80 lycées were disrupted in the Île-de-France region and 19 in the Rhône, where the prefecture counted 13 arrests.
In Marseille, a police officer was injured by a mortar firework near the Saint-Exupéry lycée.
In Rennes, officers faced mortar fire and urban violence around blocked schools; in Villeurbanne, tear gas was used against pupils. In Reims, two reception staff at the François-Arago lycée were hurt by mortar fireworks.
Fires and projectiles continued in scattered locations.
These incidents sit atop weeks of blockades, burned entrances, assaults on staff and thousands of arrests, with cumulative injuries running into the hundreds on both sides of the barricades.
President Emmanuel Macron said the mobilisation of young people had to take place calmly, in an orderly way and with respect for both people and property.
The protests began in mid-September over teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, crumbling buildings and the Parcoursup university-access system; the government has announced the emergency deployment of roughly 3,000 substitute teachers to the worst-affected lycées. Teaching union Snes-FSU dismissed the announcement as disconnected from conditions on the ground, and a meeting Geffray had planned with pupil representatives was postponed.
Student organisations have called for a further day of action on October 13. The Union syndicale des lycéens (UNL), which called it, is demanding the abolition of Parcoursup and a €10 billion investment plan for secondary schools, while Lecornu has said he would table amendments to the 2027 budget bill taking up some of the pupils’ demands.
