Mélina Facchin (in Haut-Rhin), with AFP
modified to
3:38 p.m., October 13, 2022
Two years after the assassination of Samuel Paty, teachers and students are preparing to honor the memory of the professor, against a backdrop of concern about respect for secularism, with a “rise in power of reports for wearing uniforms and religious accessories”, according to the Minister of Education Pap Ndiaye. The ministry published Thursday morning the figures of attacks on secularism in schools, colleges and high schools for September, which show an increase in reports for the wearing of outfits such as abayas and qamis (long traditional clothes worn respectively by women and men). men).
313 reports recorded in September
A total of 313 reports were recorded last month and 904 in the second quarter of 2022. This is an increase compared to the average of 627 incidents recorded in the first quarter of 2022. Incidents for “wearing religious signs and clothing” represent more than half of September reports (54%), compared to 41% in the second quarter of 2022 and 22% in the first quarter.
“There is objectively an increase in reports for wearing religious clothes and accessories, which we have been observing for a year, with perhaps an acceleration in the meantime. And so it is obviously on this question that we are working”, declared the Minister of Education Pap Ndiaye while traveling to a college in Val-de-Marne. “We encourage heads of establishments and academies to report all reports. Do not put anything under the rug,” he added.
A state anti-radicalization service is sounding the alarm
Before the start of the school year in September, a State anti-radicalization service had sounded the alarm: the Interministerial Committee for the Prevention of Delinquency and Radicalization (CIPDR) had accused the “Islamist movement” of questioning the principle of secularism at school” by relying on social networks, in particular Twitter or TikTok, to encourage the wearing of clothing marking a religious affiliation.
The management staff of the ID-FO union asked for “clear directives” in the face of a problem which “has not diminished since the start of the school year, quite the contrary”. “We cannot publish a catalog of all the clothes that could be religious,” replied Pap Ndiaye in an interview with Le Monde on Thursday. “That’s why headteachers need to look carefully for conspicuous signs.”
Tensions in high schools in Haut-Rhin and Essonne
A sign of the tensions around secularism, a teacher at a high school in Thann in the Haut-Rhin received in early October “death threats from the uncle of one of his students” after having “addressed in class freedom of expression, cartoons of Muhammad and Charlie Hebdo”, according to a judicial source. The rectorate of Strasbourg “firmly” condemned Wednesday these “intimidations and threats”.
The teacher immediately filed a complaint. The high school student will soon be heard by the examining magistrate for “apology for terrorism”, and her 39-year-old uncle has been indicted. However, both deny threatening the teacher.
In Essonne, a history and geography teacher at a high school in Evry was placed under police protection on Thursday after his establishment received an anonymous letter threatening to make him “a Samuel Paty”, said Thursday a police source to AFP.
Soon a tribute to Samuel Paty
These incidents come as schools prepare to pay tribute to Samuel Paty, a 47-year-old history and geography teacher, beheaded on October 16, 2020 by a radicalized young man who accused him of having shown caricatures of Muhammad to His students.
The tragedy had aroused considerable emotion. A tribute time will take place on Friday or Monday in schools, colleges and high schools. It “may take different forms” of which “the content will be left to the choice of the teams”, indicates the minister in a letter sent to the rectors of the academy. The assassination of Samuel Paty was a “huge shock” which “is still felt”, underlines Pap Ndiaye in The world.
The minister will be present at the Sorbonne on Saturday afternoon alongside Mickaëlle Paty, sister of the teacher, for the presentation of the first Samuel Paty prize to middle school students, organized by the Association of History and Geography Teachers (APHG) . The next day, the anniversary of the death of Samuel Paty, a ceremony will take place at 6 p.m. in front of the college where he worked, and a wreath of flowers will be laid in Square Samuel-Paty in Paris, opposite the Sorbonne, inaugurated in 2021.