By Tilman Blasshofer, Cecile Mantovani and Lucien Libert
STRASBOURG/LYON/PARIS, Oct 6 (Reuters) - Police fired tear gas at protesters blockading French high schools on Tuesday as students, teachers and parents took to the streets on the biggest day of action in a wave of demonstrations against understaffed and dilapidated classrooms.
In Marseille and Nantes, protesters held up signs marked with "The state has killed national education" and other messages, in largely peaceful rallies. In Toulouse, parents
linked arms at the front of a march through the city.
But in Strasbourg, Lyon and Rennes, the demonstrations at times turned violent, with police firing tear gas and protesters lighting fires in the streets and hurling projectiles.
"There is such a gap between the elites and us," said Hugo Vetzel, a recent high-school graduate in Strasbourg.
The protests began in September in the deprived suburbs of Paris, before spreading nationwide, presenting a major challenge to President Emmanuel Macron's cash-strapped government at a time when it faces strong economic headwinds.
The High School Students Union said more than half of France's high schools were blockaded or would close for the day. Some local education authorities have tried to move classes online.
"We want more money for the national educational system so that high schools are renovated," said Roberta, another recent high-school graduate at a protest outside Paris' prestigious Henri IV school.
Schools were facing a list of problems from water leaks to rat infestations, she added.
THOUSANDS OF ARRESTS
The government has responded to the demonstrations with riot police.
Rights groups, students and parent groups have accused authorities of using disproportionate force against minors. The government says the protest movement has been hijacked by outsiders and morphed into urban violence.
France's interior ministry said 6,100 people have been arrested since the protests began, the overwhelming majority of them minors. More than 1,800 people are being prosecuted, including 1,483 minors, the justice ministry said, without specifying the crimes.
At least 715 police officers and 215 teenagers have been injured in clashes, according to Lecornu's office.
A teenager's hand was blown off as high-school protesters clashed with riot police in northern France on Monday. The regional newspaper La Voix du Nord said the 15-year-old lost his hand and part of his lower arm after picking up a police dispersal grenade.
"They want to divide the young people into good and bad protesters," said Omar Slaouti, a high school teacher in Argenteuil, a northwestern suburb of Paris.
"If there were no trash cans on fire, the government would not have stepped back and become aware of the issues at stake," he added.
Six months before an election to replace Macron, his government and Le Pen's National Rally party have accused hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) lawmakers and mayors of stoking the protests. LFI denies the accusation.
PRIME MINISTER PROMISES A RESPONSE
Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu has ordered his ministers to tackle the students' leading demands. Those include ensuring absent teachers are replaced, reviewing the length of the 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. school day and the need for longer lunch breaks.
The government will also look at repairs needed to ageing school buildings, said Lecornu, who demanded ministers send in their first proposals by the end of October.
Parent Emilie Lhomme said at a protest outside the Helene Boucher school in Paris that the government's words were not enough. "That's all fine and dandy, but that's not what's going to change the daily lives of our children," she said.
Finding spare cash to implement educational reforms will be difficult.
The government is under pressure to try to narrow a ballooning budget deficit as investor concerns about France's growing debt pile, weak growth and reluctance to rein in spending push bond yields higher. The yield on France's 10-year bonds briefly hit a 24-year high of over 5% last week.
The surge in French borrowing costs has started to spill into the broader euro area, with the sliding euro currency the latest alarm bell for policy makers. Finance Minister Roland Lescure said on Tuesday there was no need for the European Central Bank to step in.
Marine Le Pen, the far-right euro-sceptic populist leading the presidential race ahead of next spring's election, set out plans to slash public spending if elected, seeking to establish her fiscal credibility as the bond market crisis deepens.
(Reporting by Tilman Blasshofer in Strasbourg, Cecile Mantovani in Lyon, Lucien Libert and Juliette Jabkhiro in Paris, Layli Foroudi in Argenteuil, Inti Landauro and Sudip Kar-Gupta in Brussels; Writing by Richard Lough and Makini Brice; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
