The barbaric assassination of Samuel Paty marks a turning point. For the defenders of the Republic, but also for its enemies. After Mohammed Merah, after Charlie Hebdo, the Hyper Cacher, the Parisian cafes and the Bataclan, after Father Jacques Hamel, but also Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Beltrame, and so many others – too many others – a professor with his throat cut in the middle of the afternoon a few meters away of his high school was a shock big enough to arm himself – or capitulate. The President of the Republic had then imagined a ceremony at the height of the tragedy, and all those who were hoarse to point out the danger of Islamism have regained hope.
Two years later, it is already time to take stock. And they are scarlet red. This is to say if the umpteenth reversal of Emmanuel Macron’s jacket on secularism is serious. In his last essay, French Youth, School and the Republic, Iannis Roder tells us that students use the expression “I’m going to make you a Samuel Paty” with a lightness that sends shivers down your spine. It is instructive to note that Roder, professor in Seine-Saint-Denis, was one of the contributors to the collective work The Lost Territories of the Republic, published in 2002, when they were already sounding the alarm. Is this all that’s left of a Republic teacher slain for doing his job – instructing his students?
Nothing is going well in the school of the Republic: it is no longer a question of teaching, but of conversations between teachers and students, no longer a question of secularism, but of identity, no longer a question of ministry either. The Minister of Education prefers to speak of sex education – which is certainly essential, but which is not supposed to be a tool to promote “equality between children”, this being particularly acquired in France – rather than to look into the delays accumulated by students, unable to read and understand a text and who, shocked by the effort, prefer to attack the author of a text proposed for the baccalaureate, in this case Sylvie Germain , with a torrent of misspelled insults and without any grammatical meaning. When the Minister of Education is not worried about establishing an equality that already exists, he flies to the United States, where he destroys the French universalist model by being offended that the question of races is not present in the French debate. For a man who has benefited at full speed from the republican system, this is an insult to France.
The veil becomes the symbol of their anti-racism
During this time, Islamism settled in the school, the field of instruction being abandoned, the pupils being summoned to come to class with their “experience”, the hierarchy being in crumbs, the young people quickly boring and easily indignant, the veil became the symbol of their anti-racism, tolerance their watchword. Add to that fear, the essential ingredient that has allowed Islamism to pass for humanism.
School is a space that allows you to escape your family culture, to be offered not only knowledge, but critical thinking: “He taught them that you didn’t have to be Al Capone to transgress, but that it is enough to think. In human society, thinking is the most radical transgression. Then using his knuckles to hammer every syllable on his desk: ‘critical thought, that is absolute subversion'” , writes Philip Roth of his teacher in I married a communist. Because classical culture was suddenly considered to be discriminatory, because misplaced respect served as a driving force for deculturation, critical thinking, the kind that Samuel Paty tried to instill in his students, became so transgressive that it was sacrificed on the altar of fear. That students of Muslim obedience organize themselves to circumvent the law and come to school in a veil, abaya or qamis in delirious proportions above all says their lack of culture: it is not their culture of origin that they claim , but the effacement of the latter in favor of Islamism, which, in the absence of a real umma, relies on an aesthetic umma by the generalization of the Islamist uniform.
The school lost the day when the politicians stopped seeing the French in becoming in the immigrant, the school became the playground of the Islamists the day when the only horizon of the social contract was no longer anything but tolerance. To tolerate is to allow something that is not in accordance with the law, it is to put up with something that one finds unpleasant and unjust. Samuel Paty died of tolerance.