A teaching assistant has died after being stabbed by a student outside a school in Nogent, north-east France, officials say.
The 31-year-old teaching assistant was stabbed on Tuesday morning outside Françoise Dolto middle school as pupils’ bags were being checked by police, the Haute-Marne prefecture said.
French media reported a suspect had been taken into custody, with Prime Minister François Bayrou saying the student was 14 years old.
French President Emmanuel Macron said the teaching assistant was a “victim of a senseless wave of violence” and declared that “the nation is in mourning”.
Politicians across parties condemned the attack and called for more action against knife crime.
The suspect was not formerly known to police and the motive for the attack remains unconfirmed, local media reported.
Bayrou and French Education Minister Elisabeth Borne said the teaching assistant was stabbed by a student.
Borne said she would travel to Nogent to visit the school, adding “I commend the composure and dedication of those who acted to restrain the attacker”.
Bayrou wrote on social media that “our thoughts go out” to the victim’s “little boy”, family, loved ones and the entire educational community.
“The threat of bladed weapons among our children has become critical”, Bayrou said, adding it is “up to us to make this widespread scourge a public enemy”.
Opposition politicians pushed back on the government to take more action.
Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally (RN), denounced what she called the “trivialisation of ultraviolence, encouraged by the apathy of the public authorities to put an end to it”.
“Not a week goes by without a tragedy striking a school,” she wrote on social media.
Jordan Bardella, president of the RN, criticised Macron for what Bardella said was a “denial” of “savagery”, seizing upon comments Macron made over the weekend.
Speaking on Saturday ahead of the UN Conference on Oceans, Macron had said he did “not want either the government or Parliament to give in to the conveniences of the moment”, criticising those “who want to make people forget the fight for the climate” and “prefer, in the meantime, to brainwash people about the invasion of the country and the latest news”.
There have been other recent knife attacks in schools. Last October, a teacher was killed during an attack at a school in the northern city of Arras.
Following a stabbing at a high school in Nantes in April, Bayrou called for “an intensification of controls put in place around and within schools”.
At the end of April, the Ministry of National Education reported that 94 bladed weapons had been seized since March in 958 random bag checks at schools.
Jean-Remi Girard, president of the National Union of Secondary Schools, said: “It’s impossible to be more vigilant 24 hours a day. We can’t say that every student is a danger or a threat, otherwise we’d never get out of bed in the morning.”
