Twenty years ago, the story that a bunch of teenaged French pupils had protested they were “shocked” by their teacher showing them a 1603 painting of five nude women would have caused hilarity across the country, not fear. “What are they complaining about?” would have been the universal guffaw. But the teachers at the Jacques Cartier secondary school in Issou, west of Paris, have known otherwise for years. The scenario that unfolded in a French literature classroom last week has happened many, many times across the country in the same kind of state sink schools, and has in the last three years led to two of their profession being murdered by pupils or friends of their pupils, abetted by many parents supposedly roused to outrage by some sort of infringement to strict religious “morals”.
The scene that unfolded was as follows, we are told: one girl stood up during class to object to the use of the picture (the original is in the Louvre). A gaggle of pupils supported her loudly, insulting the teacher. The class ended in loud discord. The following hour, several pupils ran the class head ragged, calling the literature teacher “racist”; the following day a mother threatened the head with a lawsuit.
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As the story made local then national TV news, Gabriel Attal, France’s new activist Education Minister visited the school to talk tough on infringements to French secularism and school disruption, and promised that the offenders would be disciplined. The teaching staff reminded him that this was the 16th such registered incident in the previous two months. In October, the Arras fatal stabbing of another teacher, Dominique Bernard, by a Chechen former pupil, caused outrage: it reawakened French anger at what is increasingly obvious: failures of integration by pockets of communities in a country that until recently had a centuries-old tradition of happy assimilation.
Continue here: The Telegraph
