Imagine being a teacher in France. You come out in a cold sweat at the prospect of telling your class about Voltaire, Rousseau or Diderot. You’re terrified one of their parents will post your details on an extremist forum. You leave your workplace after dark wondering if someone’s waiting to attack you. Shocking as it may seem to British ears, this is the reality for secondary school History teachers across the Republic.
There always was an element of amicable combat in French education, of course; it encourages intense engagement. Teachers have been considered and trained as the foot soldiers of the Republic since the 1880s. With the birth of the Third Republic, education was wrested from the hands of the Catholic Church and made free, mandatory and secular. During their training years, teachers were nicknamed the “Black Hussars”, since they wore a black uniform and looked decidedly serious.
Their task was to spread rational thinking, esprit critique, the values of the Enlightenment — and to root out religious intolerance and superstition from their classes. In every village, across France, they gained status, offering a counter-power to the local priest. Their aim was clear: to emancipate young minds that had been too long controlled by the Church. It wasn’t easy.
Today, still, teachers are seen as playing a crucial role in French society by educating future citizens, by teaching them to reason and think critically. Many French teachers consider their work a public duty, which they carry out with determination, conviction and sometimes a heightened sense of sacrifice. Samuel Paty was among them, before he was brutally murdered by an 18-year-old Chechen Islamist on 16 October.
His assassination has revealed the many failures of an institution and its people, but it has also prompted a new determination to tackle the roots of religious separatism — which has been gaining influence in France since the 1980s. A recent poll conducted by the IFOP institute for the Jean Jaurès Foundation, on the sixth anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, shows that “religion has seeped through State Education in a way that is now affecting teachers’ work and lives.” Teachers and their managers tend not to confront it with the resolve and courage of their predecessors. This is indeed one of the most shocking findings of this poll: for fear of ruffling too many feathers, scared for their personal safety, many teachers in France resort to self-censorship.
Fatiha Agag-Boudjahlat, who teaches History and Geography in Toulouse, is an anomaly: an educator willing to publicly declare her political opinions. In her essay “Le Grand Détournement”, which gained her the Laïcité Award in 2019, she argued that a semantic aberration was slowly undermining French democracy. Little by little, she wrote, concepts and words have been turned upside down, or “deviated” from their meaning, by relativists of all hues: tolerance is being used to justify intolerance, antiracism to validate essentialism, and feminism to claim, for instance, that religious garments are a new form of freedom for women.
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