“The man wants to talk to the press about his job problems,” said Dominique Dezecot, an official at the prefecture, the headquarters of the town authorities.

“We are hopeful (it will end well) but we are worried,” Bernadette Mercier, a school employee, told LCI television.

Officials initially put the number of hostages at 18 pupils and two adults, but later raised the number.

“All the day pupils have gone home,” Marie, a boarder at the school, told France Info radio shortly after the hostages were seized on Thursday afternoon.

“They took all the boarders out via the toilets by a door where they couldn’t see us. We went around the buildings to get to a door behind the gym and now everyone is in the gym. At the moment they are doing a roll call to see who is there and who isn’t there.”

The drama comes at a sensitive time for conservative Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who is under pressure over an unpopular youth job creation plan.

Aides said Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy was monitoring the situation during a visit to the French Antilles Islands but he announced no plans to cut short his trip.

Sarkozy was mayor of the Paris suburb of Neuilly when a man took children hostage at a local school in May 1993.

Sarkozy helped negotiate with the hostage-taker before crack police broke into a classroom, killed the man and freed the remaining hostages. The other hostages had been gradually released as a result of the negotiations.