France has also become what experts describe as a “rebound” destination. Applicants who had been rejected for asylum in another European country are trying again in France.

Gérard Sadik, an asylum expert at La Cimade, a migrants rights group, said that Europe’s lack of a “supranational asylum process” encouraged applicants to waste years before finding a country that will accept them, or before they are finally sent back home.

France has increased available housing for asylum-seekers in recent years. But in early November it announced get-tough measures, including restricting asylum-seekers’ access to non-urgent health care and the use of a daily stipend of about $8.20 for those not provided with lodging.

President Emmanuel Macron — a centrist who has tacked right in a move to wrest the volatile issue of immigration from his main political rival, the far-right National Rally — recently told a right-wing magazine that his “goal is to throw out everybody who has no reason to be here.”

In Lyon, the metropolitan government, which has been trying to expel the squatters from the school building, is appealing a recent court ruling allowing them to stay until next September.

Today, some 450 young, single men sleep jammed inside the school’s classrooms and manage the premises — ensuring security, cleaning and making dinner with supplies provided by the city. Most are from France’s former colonies in West Africa, though there is a growing minority from the region’s former British colonies.

If the squatters rediscovered the natural solidarity often found across Africa, they also faced a lack of unity, corruption, suspicions and tensions — between different ethnic groups, as well as between Anglophones and Francophones, some of whom resorted to communicating in the broken Italian they had picked up on their long journeys to Lyon.