“See you in two weeks, hi!
"The day after the assassination of a teacher from Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines) who had shown caricatures of Muhammad during a civic education course, these little words from the bahut, as old as the concept school holidays, fell strangely this Saturday, October 17 at midday on the sidewalk of the Maurice-Ravel high school in Paris.
Like ellipses between two bad news.
Lou, Mathilde and Clara, 17, are in their final year at this establishment in the 12th arrondissement of Paris, which overlooks the Cours de Vincennes.
At the end of the avenue: the Hyper Cacher store, where four people were killed by Amedy Coulibaly during the 2015 attacks. The three teenagers were then in 6th grade.
“I could draw all the details of that day,” Lou says, between puffs drawn on his rolled up cigarette.
I see my mother again, sitting in a bathrobe on a chair.
She didn't move until my brother called, who was in the neighborhood, we didn't know where.
"
These subjects, "we never talked about them in college"
But the pedagogical process that followed, the hours of explanation of the events, the work on freedom of expression, on the right to blasphemy, in the months or years that followed?
No memory.
And for good reason.
Although the National Education at the time, as it is preparing to do again today, made resources and documents available to all classes, these three students did not see any. the colour.
"We are now studying these subjects, in geopolitics class, but we never talked about them when we were in college, ensure Mathilde and Clara.
After the 2015 attacks, we talked about all this in the playground, but not in class.
The atmosphere was more like saying:
It happened, we're going back to school, we don't mention it anymore
”.
A taboo ?
Clara nods: “Actually, yes.
"
Elsewhere, projects have been set up, alarm bells sounded, "and some establishments are very involved in very successful projects, on teaching religious matters or on media education", nuance Anne Lescot, the head of the January 11 Fund, a group of foundations created in 2015 to “prevent radicalization leading to violence” and “train young people to think critically”.
But these initiatives “remain the fact of the will of a person, she explains, a teacher or a driving school leader.
"
"I told my students that the trap is twofold"
This emptiness did not prevent Mathilde and Clara, educated in a fairly privileged Parisian high school, from building their reflection and keeping the memory of an event that marked the conversations in their families.
None were surprised by the speech of the professor of economics, who, on Saturday morning, devoted an hour of his class to the attack perpetrated the night before.
"He reminded us of the principle of freedom of expression, the fact that one can be shocked by a caricature as one can be by religious remarks", summarizes Lou.
“I wanted to stress that this kind of act is not madness, it's politics.
The search for a confrontation of extremes.
I told my students that the trap is twofold, ”explains the teacher, anxious to keep the emotion of the moment at bay.
READ ALSO>
Conflans attack: a history professor described as "discreet and benevolent"
The students had trouble getting out on this light gray Saturday morning.
So accustomed to fake news, Lou first believed in “bullshit” when she read on her phone the mention of a beheaded college professor in the Paris region on Friday evening.
“It didn't seem possible to me.
Inconceivable ”, she confides.
“We didn't just kill someone… breaths her neighbor, in a small voice.
We killed a teacher.
"