The École normale supérieure on rue d’Ulm is the school of commitment: from Lucien Herr and Charles Péguy to Simone Weil and Jean Cavaillès, many intellectuals have been trained by the school and have shaped it in return, by combining knowledge and commitment. Raymond Aron is not only the name of a room at 45 rue d’Ulm – a room whose door was covered with “Student Intifada” posters and whose walls were spray-painted with the slogan “Palestine will conquer”: a place abandoned, like the part of fire, to ideological radicalism, where it became impossible to think and work.
The commitment of normaliens to Palestine does not surprise us: young intellectuals have always mobilized for the causes they considered just – and that is fortunate. We note, however, that activists of this cause today claim to impose it on the School, in good faith or not, as a moral position: they are in reality only relaying the ideological discourses and the selective indignations of propaganda extremist. Whatever one thinks of the Israeli government, virtuous illusion is a bad policy advisor. There is no commitment without responsibility and no cause, however charitable and painful, can excuse blindness or legitimize incitement to hatred and violence.
Students are worried about the atmosphere in rue d’Ulm, some are leaving the boarding school where they no longer feel safe, others are witnessing a regular rise in anti-Semitism under the guise of anti-Zionism. They remain silent because they are bullied, they exclude themselves from the community they were proud to join. We assure them that we believe them, that we support them and that they do not have to be “ashamed of being normaliens” because it is not their place to be ashamed. We refuse to see them leave in silence.
The taste of truth
We must learn a lesson from recent events, because what is at stake concerns everyone attached to the school, well beyond political divisions and community affiliations. The management of the ENS would be very wrong to reduce the problem, as certain media do, to “the feelings of a few Jewish students” or to political sensitivity: the liberation of anti-Semitic speech is an objective fact that everyone can observe and that everyone should find it intolerable.
The commitment of the normaliens during the Dreyfus affair was justified by their love of the truth. Where is the taste for truth today when the words “colonization” and “genocide” become dehistoricized slogans? When the situation of Palestine is amalgamated, through speeches, posters and flags, with that of colonial Algeria and New Caledonia today, in a form of confusionist ideological intoxication? No mobilization at the ENS should be able to free itself from the rational consideration of the facts from a critical perspective.
The occupation of the main courtyard at 45, rue d’Ulm was only an episode, visible and publicized, but noisy propaganda had prepared the ground well in advance, and it has continued since then under other forms, notably in the Aron room: the simple evacuation of the camp did not resolve anything. There is a continuum between, on the one hand, “scientific” events, more or less militant, such as the weekly seminar on Palestine hosted and financed by the school, several of whose guests are activists in favor of the boycott of Israel, and, on the other hand, the anti-Zionist exaltation at the time of the occupation.
The calls for hatred and violence of the collective “ENS Ulm in struggle” are based on the authority of intellectuals invited to the ENS, whether it is Judith Butler who greeted the terrorist attack of October 7, 2023 as “an act of resistance”, or Ghassan Hage who gave a conference at the ENS in December and according to whom “German pseudo ‘anti-anti-Semitism’ and French pseudo ‘secularism’ have in common the ennoblement of the different varieties of European anti-Muslim racism.
The school management therefore has its share of responsibility: by showing its openness to discussion with extremist students, it has institutionalized the radically anti-Zionist protest that it believed to contain. These signs of weakness were seen as encouragement by the activists; a spokesperson for the ENS occupation declared on Turkish state television: “we are lucky to have a leadership which can be relatively attentive in certain respects”.
According to the media Permanent revolution, “the occupation allowed students and workers of the university [c’est-à-dire de l’ENS] to make it a political place, by giving voice to different organizations and associations at the forefront in the movement against the State of Israel today, like Samidoun…”. The situation described constitutes a serious attack on the Code of education, according to which the public service of higher education is independent of any political, economic, religious or ideological influence and tends towards the objectivity of knowledge (art. L. 141-6), and freedom of expression of users of this public service must exercise themselves in conditions which do not harm teaching and research activities and which do not disturb public order (art. L. 811-1).
Samidoun’s tracts
In an order of March 7, 2011, the Council of State considered that the ban on public meetings of the “Palestine ENS” collective in the premises of the School was fully justified, and that it was up to the director of the establishment to define and control the conditions under which its premises are used by students. The summary judge of the Council of State deduced from the cited articles of the education code that the ENS, like any higher education establishment, must ensure the exercise of the freedoms of expression and assembly of users of the service public higher education and the maintenance of order on its premises, as well as the intellectual and scientific independence of the establishment, with a view to expressing pluralism of opinions.
Instead of relying on this order to protect the missions of its establishment, the management of the ENS did not take the preventive measures which would have made it possible to avoid the occupation and entry of external activists. Under the windows of the management team, leaflets from Samidoun were displayed in garlands, an organization whose activists were present and active in the main courtyard. On the French version of Samidoun’s website, a page dated October 7, 2023 celebrates the massacres of the “heroic resistance” and calls for them to be committed. The apology for terrorism does not need to hide itself to have a place in Ulm. Samidoun, an organization dissolved for anti-Semitism in Germany, serves as a subsidiary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist organization banned in the European Union. Samidoun calls for defeating Europe, the United States and Israel with “Kalashnikovs, rockets and bullets”, in rhetoric that evokes that of the assassins of Samuel Paty and Dominique Bernard, and encourages an “intensification of character revolutionary of the global student intifada in favor of Palestine […] with a view to a new revolutionary phase of total escalation.” Samidoun supports Hamas with the active help of Iran, and the leadership of the ENS has neither prevented nor condemned the instrumentalization of the School as platform for this vile propaganda is committed by the school. The silence of the management in the face of the intolerable is worse. long press releases recall that she “had expressed on several occasions her understanding of the motivations of the mobilized students”, and that the evacuation “was a very difficult decision to make”!
On May 24, the ENS diploma ceremony, relocated to the Collège de France due to the occupation of the School, was the scene of a particularly serious incident. Seizing the opportunity offered to her to give her testimony about her years of schooling, a student made a hateful speech in favor of the “Palestinian cause”, with a flag in support. The assembly reacted loudly, between favorable cheers and disapproving boos. Visibly overwhelmed by such a speech and by the reactions of part of the audience, the management team neither interrupted the student nor subsequently commented publicly on the episode. She denies having applaudedbut wasn’t its role to protest in order to reestablish the neutrality and solemnity of the event?
End impunity
Despite the occupation of 45, rue d’Ulm, despite the thinly veiled death threats, issued through their blood-stained photographs, against three members of the board of directors of the ENS, the management simply evacuated the places, not believing it necessary to file a complaint either against the occupants, or against the organizations responsible for inciting hatred and violence: perhaps in a spirit of conciliation, no doubt to avoid media turmoil which was not lacking to occur. It is our duty to break the silence of passivity and corporatism in an institution that seeks to defend its image to the detriment of truth and justice, because the accumulation of renunciations suggests a dark future.
Since October 7, the ENS management has been conspicuous by its complacency. When will she decide to adopt a clear course of action? To not allow voices advocating terrorism to be expressed in Rue d’Ulm? To put an end to the impunity of those who propagate a harmful ideology, going so far as to draw up an anti-Zionist proscription list on the networks? The authors of the filthy anti-Semitic images that have circulated must be sanctioned so that the School can regain a climate of serenity conducive to study and research, in a peaceful… and inclusive atmosphere.
The first signatories:
Marianne Bastid-Bruguière, Jacques-Olivier Bégot, Roland Béhar, Bérénice Benayoun, Abraham Bengio, Martine Bismut, Alain Boyer, Piero Caracciolo, Paul Carmignani, Danièle Cohn, Christophe de Voogd, Thibault Dornon, Adèle Duraffour, Magda Ericson, Louis-Olivier Fadda, Laurent Fedi, Éric Guichard, Hubert Heckmann, Emmanuelle Hénin, Brigitte Jaques-Wajeman, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Carlos Lévy, Sandrine Malem, Lucie Marignac, Claudia Moatti, Agathe Novak-Lechevalier, Marie Parmentier, Sabine Prokhoris, François Regnault, François Ratte, Pierre-André Taguieff, Claudine Tiercelin.