On Thursday 8 October 2026, the lycée pupils’ demonstration in Bordeaux, which brought together several thousand people, takes place calmly according to Rue89 Bordeaux. Around 4 p.m., a group of individuals with masked and hooded faces targets the police station in the Capucins district.
According to the Bordeaux public prosecutor, cited by France 3, the group piles rubbish bins outside the front door and deliberately sets them on fire; the fire quickly spreads to a whole part of the facade. Three national police officers were inside and were able to escape through an emergency exit at the rear. The articles do not say whether the station remained usable or what became of the damage inside.
The public prosecutor’s office immediately opens an investigation, entrusted to the territorial crime division of the Gironde DIPN, for “destruction of property by a means dangerous to persons, committed because of the status of the owner or user as a person vested with public authority” (translated) and “participation in a group formed with a view to preparing violence against persons or destruction or damage of property, during a demonstration on the public highway” (translated); the perpetrators face twenty years’ criminal imprisonment (France 3, Rue89 Bordeaux). Rue89 Bordeaux adds that the public prosecutor’s office describes a group of several dozen individuals and that a tag was sprayed on the facade, referring to the lycée pupil seriously injured in the face by a grenade launcher shot in Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône. According to France 3, this station had already been targeted during the 2023 mobilisations against the pension reform.
No arrest for this fire is reported in the sources read. The perpetrators are not identified: the entry does not say whether they are lycée pupils.
Follow-up
On 9 October, according to actu Bordeaux, the Bordeaux public prosecutor indicates that, according to the first elements of the flagrante delicto investigation, the protesters knew that police officers were inside and that the perpetrators wanted to damage the place but also “tried to make a deliberate attempt on the lives of the police officers present in the building” (translated). He details what the hearings of the three police officers made it possible to establish: one, in uniform outside, tried to move a vehicle and was “set upon and pursued by a group of individuals” (translated); the other two were “forced to take refuge inside” (translated) the station “because of the large number of hostile people facing them and the sustained fire of projectiles they were receiving” (translated); individuals then “piled rubbish bins outside the door of the premises in order to block access to it and then deliberately set fire to it, without being able to ignore that several police officers were still inside” (translated). The public prosecutor’s office has reclassified the facts as “aggravated attempted intentional homicide of national police officers in the exercise of their duties” (translated); the perpetrators face criminal imprisonment for life (actu Bordeaux). The fire could be brought under control and the perpetrators fled into alleyways (actu Bordeaux). The prefect of the Gironde and the deputy mayor for security at the Bordeaux town hall condemn these acts; the latter tells actu Bordeaux that “this police station is never empty and even if it were, nothing would justify this violence” (translated). No arrest is reported in the sources read as of 19 October.