“Libertarian greetings”, wrote Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, known as Gaby, at the bottom of the countless forums and petitions that he has signed, notably in Release, over the past four decades. Briefly communist, long environmentalist, tireless defender of educational innovation, he died this Friday, at the age of 85 years. The Experimental High School of Saint-Nazaire (Loire-Atlantique), founded in 1982, and the Group of retired educators without borders, created ten years later, are among the main initiatives of this tireless activist.
It is not for nothing either in the course of his famous younger brother Daniel, said Dany, child of the Liberation born in April 1945 in Montauban. Gaby was born in 1936 in Montrouge. Like her friend Hannah Arendt, her father Erich Cohn-Bendit, a German Jewish intellectual and communist, fled Nazi Germany three years earlier, after the Reichstag fire, to settle in Paris.
In the mid-1950s, the militant career of young Gaby, a philosophy student, began with a brief membership of the PCF, which he left in 1956. Fiercely anti-Stalinist, he joined the “Socialisme ou barbarie” group of Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis. It denounces exploitation and a “State capitalism” practiced in the USSR and in all the so-called “socialist” countries.
Critical green activist
Its real battle, that of National Education, began in the early 1960s. “I discovered teachers tense over their achievements who murdered the happiness of learning with boring lectures to die for”, he will tell Release. German teacher and follower of Freinet pedagogy, he refuses the system with his grades, penalties, rankings. He headed for a time the Emancipated School, an extreme left current of the Federation of National Education from which he moved away in the early 1970s, tired of the quarrels between Trotskyist and non-Trotskyist chapels. In the meantime, he found his little brother, who came to study in France in 1966, after his schooling in Germany. Gaby will introduce Dany to her libertarian friends… with the consequences that we know.
At a good distance from each other, the two Cohn-Bendits will continue, over the decades, their political companionship. In 1978, the eldest, of French nationality, campaigned for the lifting of the residence ban in France for the “Jewish-German” Cohn-Bendit, expelled ten years earlier by the Gaullist authorities.
In 1999, it was again he, the earthy teacher with a large red beard, who prepared the ground for Dany’s political landing. It is with his big brother, in Saint-Nazaire, that the candidate will hold his first meeting of the head of the list of the Greens in the Europeans of 1999. Unpredictable, Gaby is sometimes difficult to follow in his political choices. Green activist, he often bangs very hard against his party leadership, especially against “The politburo” by Cécile Duflot and Jean-Vincent Placé. At the end of 2015, the liberal-libertarian even went so far as to call his “friends” to vote Juppé in 2016 in the primary of the right.
For the right to educational experimentation
On educational policy issues, on the other hand, it is predictable and much more constant. In the archives of Libé, there are more than twenty forums that defend the right to educational experimentation. Few of the Ministers of Education have not been entitled to their open letter denouncing the inadequacies of “These schools that make sheep or breakers”.
The first dates back to 1981. Addressed to Savary, Prime Minister of Education under François Mitterrand: “Allow me, comrade-minister to pose a problem […], that of all these young people who today absolutely cannot stand the school system anymore ”, writes Gaby Cohn-Bendit. As trained, the teaching staff is in his opinion unable to face this challenge. The answer can only be in experiments that he himself qualifies as “Marginal”. “Let us search, invent. Our failures, but also our successes, will benefit everyone ”, he concludes. Message received: in February 1982, the Experimental High School of Saint-Nazaire is open to all dropouts. The pupils only come to the classes that interest them, they do the cleaning, the cooking, etc. Some manage to get the bac. Cohn Bendit cash in on the fury of the lookouts of the Republican school who do not support this “Anarcho-subversive mess” self-managed.
The other forums for ministers will remain a dead letter. In 1996, the bearded pedagogue tries to explain to François Bayrou, Minister of Chirac, that it is necessary to invent “A whole new profession” for “Educate the children of the crisis, unemployment and the discomfort of the suburbs”. He will not have more success in 2012 with Vincent Peillon, Minister of Holland: “You said you wanted to rebuild the school. He […] there are teachers who are ready to embark on this refoundation, allow them to come together. ”
Against “the tyranny of coitus”
Among the many texts that the retired teacher sent to Release, one of the tastiest denounced, in 1998, the appearance of Viagra and “The tyranny of coitus”. In a furiously post-sixty-eight momentum, he went to war with the bandaison, summoning male domination de Bourdieu and the famous New Love Disorder by Bruckner and Finkielkraut. “I am announcing the good news: male and female orgasm is possible without coitus, and within everyone’s reach. […] Viagra, who cares ”, proclaimed the retired professor.
Libertarian, minority, marginal: the jovial Gaby Cohn-Bendit will have cultivated and claimed these qualifiers all his life. To the point, sometimes, of straying dangerously. In the name of the fight for freedom of expression, in 1979 he published a text explaining that we should not censor Robert Faurisson, the man who disputes the existence of the gas chambers. While emphasizing “The indisputable and abominable reality” of the Jewish genocide, the one who, as a child, was hidden under a false identity to escape the roundups, went so far as to suggest that the denialist was perhaps not entirely wrong. He will apologize shortly after. In an attempt to explain the distraction of his elder brother, Dany Cohn-Bendit will point out his unfortunate propensity to “Always look for a truth on the other side”.