A minute of silence in colleges and high schools: the French educational community, in shock, honored Thursday the memory of a Spanish teacher stabbed the day before by a student, in the south-west of the country.
The death in her classroom of Agnès Lassalle, 52, has upset teachers and students, just over two years after the assassination of Samuel Paty, a history and geography teacher beheaded by a young refugee from Russia. Chechen, radicalized Islamist.
“It’s time for meditation, emotion, solidarity too,” said the Minister of Education Pap Ndiaye, traveling in front of the students of a college in Savoie (center-east).
In the morning, students from the Saint-Thomas d’Aquin Catholic high school in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, in the Basque Country, where the tragedy took place, had returned to their establishment with, for some, bouquets of flowers or white roses.
“It’s important to be present (at school) for your family, loved ones, students, you also have to give strength to those who have seen this,” said Rudy, a 3rd grade student who describes Ms. Lassalle as a “very nice teacher”, “listening”.
“Very dedicated”, this Spanish teacher “devoted most of her time to preparing her lessons […]to help his students grow,” said Mr. Ndiaye.
The alleged perpetrator of the attack, aged 16, will be heard on Friday by an investigating magistrate as part of an open judicial investigation for “premeditated murder”, explained the Bayonne prosecutor Jérôme Bourrier, during a press conference.
Follow-up by a psychiatrist
During his police custody, the suspected teenager “brought forward a small voice which speaks to him, a being whom he describes as selfish, manipulative, egocentric, who incites him to do evil and who would have suggested to him the day before to commit an assassination”, explained Jérôme Bourrier.
“Follow-up by a psychiatrist”, the high school student had made in October “a drug suicide attempt and had since been prescribed antidepressants”.
He also admitted “a form of animosity towards his Spanish teacher”, the only subject where his results were not good.
According to the prosecutor, “the adolescent appears accessible to criminal liability subject to the expertise which will have to be ordered”.
The boy had arrived at the start of the school year in this calm and popular college-high school in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, crowned with a mention very well for the patent, according to the rectorate.
A classmate from his old college described him as “a shy boy”, who had “two or three friends but not many more”. “Sometimes arrogant” or “choleric”, he did not like “too much to be taken back by the teachers in class”, according to her.
At 9.45 a.m. on Wednesday, in Spanish class, the young man got up, locked the classroom door and walked towards the teacher, taking out a kitchen knife with an 18 cm blade, hidden in a paper towel roll, explained the prosecutor.
“I ruined my life”
He dealt “a single violent blow” with his right hand, “from top to bottom”, which “resulted in the section of the aorta and the attack of the right lung over a length of approximately 14 cm, with a perforation of the sternum”.
The young man was “appeased, controlled” in a nearby classroom by two teachers.
“At that time, continued the prosecutor, he allegedly said: ‘I ruined my life, it’s all over'”.
A medico-psychological emergency cell of 10 people, in addition to school medicine, has been set up in the establishment.
“The Nation is on your side,” President Emmanuel Macron told teachers on Twitter.
Attacks on teachers are common in France, but AFP has recorded less than a dozen murders over the past four decades.
In the political class, support for professors has been accompanied by a few nuances.
Socialist Olivier Faure felt that “we ask everything of our teachers who have to face all the violence in society”, while the president of the French traditional right party, Eric Ciotti, called for “reviewing the graduation sentences for minors” and that the leader of the main far-right party, Marine Le Pen, considered “urgent to act for the safety of the French people”.