Guillaume Bachelay is a former deputy of the PS (Socialist Party) of Seine-Maritime. This French politician published in 2016
Politics saved by books,
published by Stock.
The anticipated written test of the French baccalaureate will remain marked by the digital outburst that targeted Sylvie Germain and the extract from her novel
Jours de anger
, published in 1789 by Éditions Gallimard – a description of men shaped by the environment in which they lived. grown up – subject to general series students.
Pens stored and smartphones in hand, like the driver who missed the intersection and cursed the GPS, disgruntled students denounced the complexity of the text to comment on and blamed its author.
Judged responsible for the poor grades to come, she received a barrage of insults and threats on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.
Reading the angry messages posted via a freshly created
hashtag
, we imagined the #Racine as a “top tweet” after, in similar circumstances, a thorny passage from
Andromaque
.
Yet we couldn't smile.
If there is no question of confusing the young generation with an abusive and noisy minority, our literary nation, faced with this reality, cannot go its way shrugging its shoulders.
And first of all faced with the impact of so-called social networks on consciences, not just those of millennials.
The difficulty of concentrating, of formalizing one's thought, of grasping the statements then of linking them to give them meaning, of mobilizing the vocabulary that makes up the language whose nuances are those of the world.
Guillaume Bachelay
The text given for the exam activated the springs of the electronic bubbles that are the networks: the brutalization of public debate by the digital mob, the hypersensitivity to reality and the renunciation of effort – twenty lines from a novel to interpret in a written composition.
In their digital protest, students invoked the presence of words that would have denied them access to the meaning of the text.
Asked about these attacks, Sylvie Germain told
Le Figaro Étudiant
that she had been "slightly perplexed by this extract which was perhaps not very obvious out of context" while recalling that it "was not delusional" for those who mobilized "a little curiosity" and did not renounce "the effort of reflection as much as of imagination".
Neither "alleys" nor "secular", "stridences" no more, prevented us from grasping the thread of the story, that of human beings brought up in nature from which they have adopted the rhythm of the seasons and the harshness of the codes.
“
They were forest people.
And the forests had made them in their image
“, thus opened the extract from the French baccalaureate booed on the Net.
The difficulty of concentrating, of formalizing one's thought, of grasping the statements then of linking them to give them meaning, of mobilizing the vocabulary that makes up the language whose nuances are those of the world - these observations, the real cause of the anger experienced by some students, figure in many testimonials from many teachers.
The meeting of texts and characters cultivates invaluable virtues – astonishment, patience –, teaches us to put ourselves in the shoes of others (“the novel is fraternity”, writes Romain Gary), relieves us from the burden of dogma thanks to the experience of the complexity of the world and transmits to us the pleasure of words to say it.
Guillaume Bachelay
The OECD rankings and the Pisa studies are called upon to say what is actually going on.
They call for joint action more than controversy since they indicate both that France devotes a high level of total compulsory instruction time to reading and written expression in primary education, that it ranks barely above the average in reading comprehension and that the weight of social inequalities on school results is the heaviest there.
The choice is not between equal opportunities and excellence, nor between general knowledge and specialized education, but in their joint requirement at school where "learning today" does not mean that everything begins here and now, nor with oneself. and without works.
For this republican project, literature is an indispensable guide.
The meeting of texts and characters cultivates invaluable virtues – astonishment, patience –, teaches us to put ourselves in the shoes of others (“
the novel is fraternity
”, writes Romain Gary), relieves us from the burden of dogma thanks to the experience of the complexity of the world and transmits to us the pleasure of words to say it.
This is the living and vital lesson, in
I married a communist
, a novel by Philip Roth published in 1998 by Gallimard, delivered to Nathan Zuckerman by his literature teacher: “
You want to revolt against society.
I'll tell you how to do it: write well (…) You want a lost cause to defend?
Fight for the word
”.