Xavier-Laurent Salvador is an associate professor of modern literature and co-founder of the Observatory of Decolonialism.
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On October 1, 1954, the Algerian War began with the assassination of a teacher. Guy Monnerot has since been recognized as “dead for France”. Today, in France, it is a disowned principal who withdraws after being singled out for Islamist vengeance by an insolent student.
The school has been, is and will always remain the place of confrontation for all religious fanaticism for the simple reason that it is in the school that the future of a civilization is at stake. Not in companies, not in shops or in the frenzied places of consumption where they try to immerse us; nor in the obscure offices of a European Commission far from everything where the key rates of the currency or the value of the debt would be negotiated between merchants and the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, it is with the first of the civil servants, the professors, that the brass columns of a feared and respected Republic are built. Collapse the school, and all the principles that depend on it, among which we can cite language and secularism: there will be nothing left of French citizenship.
All those these days who agree to undermine the educational institution are in reality agreeing to demand sometimes respect for their religious particularism, sometimes respect for their sexual identity, sometimes their inclusive mania; adult obscenity broke into the world of childhood. At the same time as it reversed classroom pedagogy, carnival society made respect a mark owed to the child, and no longer to the adult.
Also read: Éric Maurin: “The ban on the veil coincided with a clear improvement in the results of young Muslim girls”
This is why we are witnessing the convergence of the struggles of the craziest communitarianisms and insolent religious fundamentalisms: all demand that we respect them,
at
the same time as they claim to generalize contempt for those who do not resemble them. The Creil scarf affair had marked the beginning of a slow descent into hell for the school: children, convinced of fanaticism by their family circle, had been pushed to confront academic authority. But the State knew how to promote an impassable border around the school grounds.
But at the same time, through cowardice no doubt, the equivalents of headmasters in higher education establishments freed themselves from any obligation by allowing all religious particularisms to be expressed on campus, in fact creating a divisive situation: the school was secular, the university was beneath everything. School was the place of respect for authority; the university became the place of disguise. This is the flaw, this is how we have created a world in which adult students in preparatory classes find themselves on the one hand required to respect the principle of neutrality while their friends at university find themselves exempt.
The affair which took place at the Maurice-Ravel high school is the paroxysm of an inversion of guilty values for which the entire Institution bears responsibility.
Xavier-Laurent Salvador
France Universités, the “club” of French university presidents, published its “guide to secularism 2023” a few weeks ago. Judge for yourself: we speak there, under the pen of the “Secularism Referent”, of “open secularism” no doubt to better denounce the old one which had to be “closed”. We read there, in resolutely inclusive writing, scandalous proposals. I will only remember one:
“Similarly, a student or non-INSPÉ civil servant must refrain from wearing religious symbols during an internship in an educational establishment. She and he, however, regain their freedom when they return to class.”
What freedom are we talking about? Real Islamist freedom within universities as opposed to school prison? We are paying a high price for this cowardice, and the betrayal of the clerics tastes like blood: soon the children of France, including undoubtedly Muslim children themselves, will end up being imprisoned in the private schools of their “community” , by fear. This will be the symptom of the collective “locked-in syndrome” of these people who are as frightened by freedom as by terrorism. This is because only the republican school knows how to train republican elites.
The affair which took place at the Maurice-Ravel high school is the paroxysm of an inversion of guilty values for which the entire Institution bears responsibility. The withdrawal of the principal is a shame which signals the guilty resignation of the entire public service: the same weakness which leads the police to flee or the firefighters to no longer dare to enter certain neighborhoods for fear that they will be attacked.
Read also Lycée Maurice-Ravel: the political class between support and anger after the resignation of the principal threatened with death
In a speech to the Assembly in March 1904, Jean-Jaurès affirmed that
“democracy can only live through the teaching of [the] unconditional freedom of the human being… Anyone who has not doctrinally renounced contesting the absolute freedom of the human person has no right to teach in a democracy
. And immediately he adds that
“any doctrine, even that which can consequently lead to conclusions of servitude, has the right to propagate from mind to mind”
.
Taking the risk of servitude by dispersing the ideal of freedom is the honor of the republic. Are we collectively ready to lose this bet?
Not me, not us. Schools and higher education establishments must once again become places where the absolute freedom of the human person is taught by making possible the emancipation of the child from the shackles of identity to which we want to resign him. A “minister”, etymologically, is a “servant” of the people: it is time for these people to remember this; or they leave.