Compatible: 23 Lost Eyes, Zero Convictions in France

Twenty-three eyes, no convictions, and a sixteen-year-old in Tours

On Wednesday a sixteen-year-old was hit in the face outside a school blockade in Tours. The prosecutor said his injury was compatible with the impact of a police launcher. By Friday he had lost the use of his right eye. It is the fourth case of an injured minor handed to France's police inspectorate in a single week. I do not know how his case will end. This piece is about how the last twenty-three ended.

By A. Kade

His name is Maël. He is sixteen, in his penultimate year at the Lycée Gustave-Eiffel in Tours.

On Wednesday 30 September he was outside the Lycée Balzac, where pupils had blockaded the entrance, and at some point in what followed he was hit in the face. A few minutes later he was filmed sitting in a street near the school with blood on his face. A pupil who was standing beside him when it happened told the Bondy Blog that it has stayed with her.

Nobody has said publicly what he was doing in the seconds before, and I am not going to guess. That is what an investigation is for.

That evening the Tours prosecutor, Catherine Sorita-Minard, posted on X that the forensic examination had found lesions to his eye "compatible with the impact of a defence ball of LBD type." She had referred the case to the IGPN, the police's own inspectorate.

On Friday she told AFP that he had lost the use of his right eye. He was still in hospital. The inspectors had interviewed him that day.

Compatible.

It is a good word. It is accurate, careful, and exactly what a magistrate should say a few hours after a forensic examination of something she did not witness. I have no quarrel with it.

My quarrel is with what comes after it. France has had that word said about eyes before, many times, and I went back to see how those stories ended.

•••

The week

Maël is not an isolated accident. He is the fourth.

The Interior Ministry first announced three inquiries by the IGPN into injuries to minors at school protests, then added a fourth. Tours is one of them.

Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône, Monday 28 September. A fourteen-year-old was hit in the face by a tear-gas grenade fired on a flat trajectory by an officer, according to France 24. One outlet reports a broken jaw. There are, it says, two accounts of that single second.

Sevran, Tuesday. Mounted police charged. Teachers, pupils and staff were injured. Witnesses told France 24 that parents were dragged along the ground.

Argenteuil. The fourth file, and the one described least. An eye was injured. I could not establish more.

And outside the IGPN's list, Alençon, Tuesday. A fourteen-year-old boarding pupil came out of the school to meet her friends and was arrested in front of the Lycée Leclerc-Navarre. Video of it is circulating. She has given her own account to France 3. By her telling, she tripped and fell with both hands on the officer's chest, and that pushed him. "That's when I got strangled. I was begging him to let go because I couldn't breathe." A colleague of his told her she could get up. The officer, she says, disagreed and pinned her down again. She spent from about ten in the morning until half past five in the evening in custody.

I have not seen the police account of any of these. That is a gap in what I can tell you, and I would close it if I could.

Why were they there at all?

Because of the buildings, mostly. Fadila, seventeen, told Reuters: "There are cockroaches and rats everywhere in the school." Victoire, sixteen, in Lille, told AFP: "We, the children of the suburbs, are abandoned and neglected." What they were asking for was substitute teachers, smaller classes and a classroom they could sit in without flinching. Protests began last week around Paris and spread. The education ministry says about four hundred of France's 3,700 lycées have been affected.

In one lycée in the Paris suburbs, AFP reported, the teachers formed a line around their own pupils to keep the police off them.

On Tuesday alone, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez says, 440 people were detained across the country. Most were minors. The Education Minister, Édouard Geffray, puts the injuries since the movement began at 76, among students and staff.

(All translations from the French in this piece are mine.)

•••

What the other side says

This is not a one-sided story and I am not going to write it as one.

Some of the protests did turn violent. In Tours, bins were set on fire and phone shops were looted in the city centre. In the département as a whole, regional press reported five police officers hurt and ten fires on a single day. Officials put injuries to police across the country at 48. Masked youths fired mortars at officers. A regional live blog reported that some of them were reportedly pupils at Maël's own school.

A mortar is not a toy. An officer in a helmet in a street where one is going off is in real danger, and the weapon in his hand is there so that he does not have to choose between a baton at arm's length and something worse.

The government calls it a "tipping point" from school blockades into urban violence. Nuñez called it "unbridled violence." Geffray said: "No demand can justify such acts." On Wednesday Nuñez called for a "strictly proportionate" use of force, and in the same sentence said it must "never inhibit" action to restore order.

Some of the students agree, in part. A pupil in Alençon told France 3 that it was people from outside the school who came to exploit the protests, and that the police response was disproportionate. "It's just going to feed the hatred," said another.

And the Education Minister himself has said that pupils calling for substitute teachers are pointing at "a genuine issue that needs to be addressed."

It is also possible that the IGPN will find the shot that hit Maël was justified. If it does, I will say so. If he was among those firing mortars at officers, that matters, and it will be part of any honest account.

What it cannot do is give him back the eye. And it cannot change what the record says about the weapon, and about what happens next.

•••

Eight years ago

The LBD is the launcher French police use to fire 40-millimetre "defence balls." The law allows it only in cases of "absolute necessity," used in a "strictly proportionate" way. Its rules say it must never be aimed at the head.

In the winter of 2018–19, during the Yellow Vest protests, it was fired again and again at crowds. Journalists' and rights groups' counts put the number of injured at more than two thousand, with twenty-three people losing an eye and five losing a hand. Twenty-three is the figure AFP's fact-checking desk uses.

The warnings had come first. France's rights ombudsman, the Défenseur des droits, had flagged the dangers of the weapon in a report to the National Assembly in January 2018, ten months before the protests began. In 2019 its holder, Jacques Toubon, asked for it to be suspended for policing crowds. So did the Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights, in a memorandum made public in February 2019. The United Nations Committee against Torture had made recommendations on police weapons in 2016. France's highest administrative court was asked to restrict the LBD and declined.

In 2019 Laurent Nuñez was a junior interior minister. Asked about the injuries, he said: "We have no regrets about the way we conducted public order and public security."

He is the Interior Minister now.

•••

What happened to the twenty-three

AFP's fact-checking desk went back five years later and asked a simple question. Of the twenty-three people who lost an eye, how many had seen the person who injured them convicted?

None.

Not one. Of the twenty-three, a single case ever reached a trial, and the person in the dock was the victim. Jean-Philippe was a sixteen-year-old lycéen in Béziers. He was hit by an LBD round on 6 December 2018, by what he says was a stray shot. He had been filmed throwing a stone at the police. The juvenile judge gave him a "warning." The IGPN investigation into the shot that hit him was closed without action.

In another case, in Charleville-Mézières, the prosecutor told AFP the complaint had been closed on 11 March 2020 "for absence of an offence." Eleven other inquiries, ten of them led by judges, were still open, with nobody charged.

The wider numbers tell the same story. In the first year of the movement, nearly 11,000 people were taken into custody and almost 3,200 protesters were convicted. In the same period the IGPN opened 313 inquiries into police violence. In Paris, a third of the completed ones had already been closed without action, mostly for an "insufficiently established offence," and some for "failure to identify the person accused."

By early 2021 the IGPN's own director was telling a parliamentary commission what the Yellow Vest inquiries had produced: four convictions, six prosecutions, four people placed under formal investigation.

These figures are not like for like. They cover different periods and count different things. But the shape is not subtle.

•••

What the word does

Here is how a file like this works, as far as I can reconstruct it from the cases that have already been through it.

Compatible opens the inquiry. It says that the injury is consistent with a police weapon. It does not say which officer, from what distance, on whose order, at what moment. Those are exactly the things the inquiry has to establish, in a street full of people in helmets, with a crowd moving, in a few seconds, on whatever video exists.

When an inquiry cannot establish them, the file closes: for an offence that is insufficiently established, or because nobody was identified.

So the word that opens the file is also, very often, the word it closes under. The injury is compatible with a shot. Nobody can say whose. Case closed.

Nobody has to lie for this to happen. The prosecutor is accurate. The inspectors are working. The officer, if he is ever found, may sincerely believe he was defending himself. Everyone in the chain does what they are supposed to do. And at the end of it, a boy in Béziers who was sixteen has been warned by a judge for throwing a stone, and no one has ever had to answer for his eye.

•••

The arithmetic

A pupil in Tours told the Bondy Blog this week: "We are easy targets."

In Alençon, the fourteen-year-old who says she was strangled was asked how she felt. She said she felt a bit traumatised, and that it was strange to see all the videos of herself being held down going round. Then she said this:

"I'm a bit angry because part of me thinks the policeman is going to get away with it, because it's always the police who are right."

She is fourteen. She has just spent a day in custody, and she has already done the arithmetic.

I do not know whether she has seen the AFP count. She did not need to.

Maël is sixteen and has one working eye. The prosecutor's word was accurate, and the lesion is compatible. What France has failed to answer for eight years is the question that comes after that word.

Compatible with whom?

•••

A. Kade writes The Kade Frequency, an investigative publication on institutional power, financial capture, and the long project of making democracy something real.

No sponsors. No filters. No propaganda.

•••

Sources and references

Maël, Tours. The injury to a sixteen-year-old pupil of the Lycée Gustave-Eiffel outside the Lycée Balzac blockade in Tours on 30 September 2026, the Tours prosecutor Catherine Sorita-Minard's post on X that evening that the lesions to his eye were "compatible with the impact of a defence ball of LBD type" and that she had referred the matter to the IGPN, and her confirmation to AFP on Friday 2 October that he had lost the use of his right eye, remained in hospital, and had been interviewed by the IGPN that day, are from AFP as carried by franceinfo, from actu17 and from the Bondy Blog. The description of Maël having been filmed minutes after the injury, sitting in a street near the Lycée Balzac with a bloodied face, is from Bsean Media TV and from the Bondy Blog; "according to several witnesses" an LBD was responsible is from franceinfo. Regional press reported that some masked youths firing mortars in Tours the following day were reportedly pupils at the Lycée Eiffel (live coverage, Centre-Val de Loire). I could not open La Nouvelle République's original report, which was blocked to me; I relied on AFP's account of it.

The other cases. That the Interior Ministry first announced three IGPN inquiries (Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône, Sevran, Tours) and then added Argenteuil is from L'Appel and franceinfo; that Tours is one of four IGPN files for injured minors is from franceinfo. The fourteen-year-old struck in the face by a flat-trajectory tear-gas grenade at Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône on Monday 28 September, and the mounted-police charge at Sevran in which teachers, pupils and staff were hurt and witnesses described parents dragged along the ground, are from France 24 (2 October 2026). The report of a broken jaw and of two accounts of the Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône incident is from L'Appel. The Alençon testimony, the fourteen-year-old boarding pupil at the Lycée Leclerc-Navarre, her account of falling onto the officer's chest, of being strangled, of being pinned down a second time after a colleague of his gave permission to get up, her custody from about 10:00 to 17:30, and her remark that "it's always the police who are right", is from France 3 Normandie, published 1–2 October 2026. The video of her arrest is described in France 3's Caen reporting. I have not seen an account from the police of any of these incidents.

The movement and the government's position. The 440 detentions on Tuesday, most of them minors, are from Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez on BFMTV, reported by AP and France 24. The 76 injuries since the movement began are from Education Minister Édouard Geffray on RTL. About 400 of France's 3,700 lycées affected is from the education ministry via Al Jazeera. The students' remarks, Fadila's to Reuters, Victoire's to AFP, are as reported by AP and France 24 respectively. Teachers forming a line around pupils is from France 24 (AFP). The government's "tipping point," Nuñez's "unbridled violence," Geffray's "No demand can justify such acts," Nuñez's call for "strictly proportionate" force that "must never inhibit" restoring order, and Geffray's remark that students calling for substitute teachers identify a genuine issue, are from France 24 and from reporting of 30 September–2 October 2026. Five police injured and ten fires in Indre-et-Loire, and phone shops looted in Tours, are from ici (France Bleu); 48 police injured is attributed to officials by the India News Network and should be treated with care.

The record, 2018–19. The counts of more than 2,400 injured, 23 people losing an eye and five a hand are from Reporterre's report of the 2 June 2019 march of the mutilated, which also quotes Laurent Nuñez, then a junior interior minister, saying "We have no regrets about the way we conducted public order and public security." The figure of 23 is the one AFP's fact-check uses. The Défenseur des droits' report to the National Assembly of 10 January 2018 and its 2015 decision on LBDs, Jacques Toubon's 2019 request for suspension, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights' memorandum made public on 26 February 2019, the UN Committee against Torture's recommendations to France in 2016, and the Conseil d'État's rejection of requests to restrict the LBD, are documented in written parliamentary questions to the Government (National Assembly, 15th legislature) and in contemporary reporting; those texts were written by deputies and are used here only for those institutional facts. The statement that the LBD may be used only in "absolute necessity" and in a "strictly proportionate" manner appears in the same parliamentary record; the rule that it must not be aimed at the head is part of its published instructions of use and should be checked against them before publication.

What happened to the cases. The findings that of 23 people who lost an eye in the Yellow Vest crisis none had obtained the conviction of the person who injured them five years on, that one case reached trial and the defendant was the injured lycéen in Béziers (hit on 6 December 2018, filmed throwing a stone, given a "warning" by the juvenile judge, IGPN inquiry closed without action), that the Charleville-Mézières complaint was closed on 11 March 2020 "for absence of an offence," and that eleven other inquiries, ten led by judges, remained open with nobody charged, are from AFP's fact-checking desk, "Cinq ans après la crise des 'gilets jaunes', sur 23 éborgnés, zéro condamnation," also published by Factuel. The first-year figures, almost 11,000 custody placements, almost 3,200 convictions of protesters and 313 IGPN inquiries, with a third of completed inquiries in Paris closed without action for an "insufficiently established offence" or "failure to identify the person accused", are from ici (France Bleu), November 2019, covering 17 November 2018 to the end of June 2019. The outcomes reported by the IGPN's director to the National Assembly's commission of inquiry on policing, four convictions, six prosecutions and four people placed under formal investigation, are from that commission's record (January 2021), where the text is partial; treat as indicative. The two sets of figures cover different periods and count different things, as the text says.

This piece does not claim to know how Maël was injured, who fired, or whether the force used was justified. The prosecutor's word is "compatible," and the IGPN's inquiry is open.