March 9 (Bloomberg) -- A former teacher who took 20 students and three adults hostage in a French secondary school surrendered peacefully to police, government officials said. None of the hostages were hurt.

The man, who had been carrying a handgun, took the students hostage at about 3 p.m. today when he walked into the school, the Lycee Colbert de Torcy in Sable-sur-Sarthe, a town about 210 kilometers (130 miles) west of Paris. The hostage-taker surrendered to a special elite police force, according to Dominique Dezecot, a spokeswoman for the prefect, or top government official in the department.

``He was a very calm man, but a man under medication and under the influence of alcohol,'' Stephane Bouillon, the prefect for the department and who negotiated with the hostage-taker, told France2 television. ``We knew he didn't want to hurt the kids and the instincts of a teacher took over.''

The man, 33, is unemployed after working for two years at the school and said during the hostage-taking that he wanted to alert the media to his situation, the prefect spokeswoman said. He hasn't been publicly identified. The children held at the school were aged between 16 and 18, she said.

`Very Depressed'

``He's very depressed, he just wants a job,'' Bernadette Mercier, a receptionist at the school, told LCI television before the man surrendered.

The unemployment rate reached 8.2 percent in 2004 in the department of the Sarthe, according to the INSEE national statistics institute. France's unemployment rate for the month of January reached 9.6 percent.

Since the early 1990s, there were about half a dozen incidents of hostage-taking in European schools.

In France in 1993, a gunman surnamed ``the Human Bomb'' by the French public held children hostage for 46 hours in a kindergarten in Neuilly, a suburban town attached to Paris. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, then the mayor, talked a dynamite-belted, ransom-demanding gunman into releasing a child, with television footage showing him leaving the classroom with the youngster in his arms. After talks, the hostage taker was killed by police sharpshooters and the seven remaining hostages were freed unharmed.

In September 2004, a Chechen extremist group held hundreds of people in a school in Beslan, in the Russian Caucasus. Russian security forces rushed into the premises after four days and killed the 31 rebels. The forces were later blamed for the deaths of 331 people, among which 186 were children.

To contact the reporter on this story: Gabriele Parussini in Paris at gparussini@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: March 9, 2006 14:33 EST