Diana has always been a favorite subject for painters. We find the goddess of the Aventine in the colors of Rembrandt, Titian or Vermeer. One of the most common scenes is that where the young hunter Actaeon, lost in the woods, accidentally surprises the virgin coming out of her bath in the company of her nymphs. All are obviously in the simplest device.
That day, it was a painting by the Italian painter Guiseppe Cesari illustrating a passage from Metamorphoses of Ovid that the students were studying. We are at Jacques-Cartier College, 50 kilometers from Paris. In the first year of secondary school, the myths of Antiquity are on the program. Nothing could be more normal, therefore, for the teacher to submit this painting to her students. Until some people get offended and look away! Like the virtue leagues of another era.
To their main teacher, they will say that their religious convictions were offended. Some will go so far as to accuse the teacher of racist provocation. A false accusation that they will quickly return to. The matter could have ended there. But we are in France, where 83% of Muslims under 25 adhere to a rigorist conception according to which Islam is “the only true religion”, revealed a recent survey.
Panic immediately spread among teachers. How can we not think of Samuel Paty, whose throat was cut barely 25 kilometers away for having shown his students two caricatures of the prophet? Or to Dominique Bernard, executed by an Islamist on October 13. An attack in which 31% of young schoolchildren say they “do not totally condemn” the perpetrator or “share some of his motivations”.
Fortunately, Minister Gabriel Attal went there. He therefore found a voice to affirm that “at French school, we do not look away from a painting, we do not cover our ears during music class, we do not wear religious attire, in short , in French schools we neither negotiate the authority of the teacher nor the authority of our rules and our values”!
Accustomed to being let go by their administration, the 860,000 teachers in France breathed a sigh of relief. But for how long ? Because this regime of fear is now part of the daily life of teachers. Everyone is wondering who will be next. It is enough to mention Israel, the Shoah, the Algerian War, apostasy, women’s rights, homosexuality or even the shadow of a breast on a master’s canvas.
It is no coincidence that the latest book by the former Inspector General of National Education Jean-Pierre Obin is entitled The teachers are afraid (The Observatory). It opens with the story of this professor who gave a course on Nazism… not to mention the Jews! “I don’t want to find my car vandalized like last time,” he said. […] I have a wife and children. » At the beginning of the 2000s, these cases only concerned around sixty establishments. We are no longer there. Four out of five teachers say they have had trouble with students regarding their religious beliefs. More than half admit to self-censorship.
Because, if our governments are too often concerned about education as rubbish, this is not the case with the Islamists, who have long targeted public schools, considered a place of perdition.
As strange as it may seem, the best allies of this self-censorship do not live in the suburbs. They live in these bohemian neighborhoods of big cities. Like Marie G. who launched a petition to remove the name of Serge Gainsbourg from a new station on the Lilas metro line. The author of the brilliant Lilac Puncher would have, she said, praised “feminicides” and “incestuous rapes”. In support, slightly provocative song lyrics. In Titicacaa man wants to drown an Inca princess in the lake of the same name. Lemon Incest, more suggestive and performed with his daughter, evokes incest in words that are nevertheless unambiguous: “The love that we will never make together is the most beautiful, the most violent, the purest, the most intoxicating”. In short, nothing to worry about.
From Diane the Huntress to Gainsbarre, these feminists like the Islamists can only conceive of art through the small lens of their obtuse morality. Art is no longer this vast enterprise of exploration touching the confines of the human soul. He is nothing more than the virtuous confirmation of our sad passions. Here we discover the holy alliance of Islamism and Wokism against a common enemy: art and culture.
The story of Diane, this feminist before her time, is terribly current. For having surprised her in her privacy, Actaeon was transformed into a deer. This was fatal to him since he was devoured by his dogs unable to recognize him. So it is with academic and artistic freedoms which, by dint of being increasingly nibbled away by our new Mormons, could be cruelly missed by us. We will soon be like this pack which, having become orphaned, it is said, after having sacrificed its master, then searched desperately for him.