On 11 September 2001, journalist Carine Azzopardi was covering the attacks in New York, where she happened to be. On 13 November 2015, her partner and father of their children, music journalist Guillaume Barreau-Decherf, 43, was murdered at the Bataclan. In her book “Ces petits renoncements qui tuent” (Plon), Carine Azzopardi gives the – anonymous – testimony of a French teacher, confronted on a daily basis with the vindictive Islamism of some of his pupils. He refuses to give up and remains hopeful.
Rejection of secularism, denial of science and conspiracy… Teachers in the national education system find themselves confronted with a challenge not only to the republican model, but also to the Enlightenment, against a backdrop of a general decline in the level of students. Understaffed, teachers do not feel supported by their superiors, who seem to be out of touch with reality.
Two years after the beheading of Samuel Paty, our survey of teachers shows that fear has not changed sides at all. Attacks on secularism are on the rise to such an extent that more than half of the teachers censor themselves to avoid causing “incidents”…
It represents a very small card in the jungle of administrative recommendations issued in France on the occasion of deconfinement, but it is a huge step in the fight against communitarianism. This three-page document issued by the Ministry of National Education, under the title of “Coronavirus and the risk of communitarian withdrawal”, is at once unprecedentedly clear-sighted on the complexity of the “spectrum of radical ideas of communitarianism”, on the “techniques and ways of proceeding” of the various “radical groups” carrying out “anti-democratic and anti-republican” projects and on the “conduct to be adopted” to thwart the “separatist” aims of such groups, whether they are “communitarian, authoritarian or unequal”.
