The mass student protests rocking France have spurred violent clashes with police and thousands of arrests — and is the most explosive uprising the nation has seen in nearly 60 years.

The demonstrations over classroom conditions, which have carried on for weeks and disrupted lessons at hundreds of schools, have swelled with shocking video showing protestors flashing flamethrowers and burning people as they face off with riot police.

A 15-year-old student lost a hand Monday after picking up a police grenade during the protests, AFP reported.

The issues inside France’s schools have been brewing since at least 2010, when the country saw a notable fertility spike, with women having on average two to three children that are now high school-aged, records show.

The country was ill-equipped to handle the influx as thousands of job cuts hit middle schools and high schools due to budget-saving policies enacted by President Emmanuel Macron.

To date, secondary schools have fewer teachers than they did in 2008 while also needing to meet the demand of 250,000 more students in the school system.

The French Ministry of Education has also been hit with a recruitment crisis in recent years, with classrooms forced to merge to larger and larger sizes.

In public schools, 70% of classrooms have more than 30 pupils per class, and 20% have more than 35.

Along with the lack of staffing and resources, students are also fed up with the country’s dilapidated school facilities, which were highlighted during this year’s record heatwave.

French high schools are on average 61 years old, and only 15% of all school buildings in the nation have been built or renovated since 2015.

Tensions eventually boiled over at the Saint-Exupéry high school, outside Paris, on Sept. 21, where students and teachers held the first protests to demand an increase in staffing.

The demonstration ended without incident and the demands were met by the district, but it ended up as a flashpoint that triggered hundreds of other schools to call for similar changes.  

“After 10 years of Emmanuel Macron’s education policies, it was to be expected that high school students would be angry,” Elisabeth Allain-Moreno, general secretary of the teachers’ union SE-UNSA, told French outlet Le Monde.

“One could even wonder how they did not express it sooner,” she added.

President Trump weighed in on the demonstrations Tuesday and blamed the unrest on mass immigration.

“What’s happening in France is nothing less than out of control mass migration,” the president wrote on X Tuesday. “This isn’t about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country!”

France’s Muslim population equals 66% of the country’s total immigrant population and has grown from around 0.5% in 1985 to more than 6 million people this year.

At least 6,100 people have been arrested since the protests began last month, a majority of them minors, according to France’s Interior Ministry.  

About 715 police officers and 215 teenagers have also ​been injured in the clashes, according to Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu’s office.

The protests are the largest since the historic May 1968 student revolt that triggered nationwide protests, with nearly two-thirds of France’s labor force bringing the country to a screeching halt.

With Post Wires