Claire teaches at the Grenoble academy. After the assassination of the Charlie Hebdo journalists, she gave her students a lesson on the Enlightenment and the dangers of fanaticism. After the Bataclan massacre, she took out her notes to give the same course. It’s heartbreaking that, this week, she will do it again. But each time, she says, with more disillusionment, like the hero of Musset Lorenzaccio whose verses she quotes: “You ask me why […] ? So do you want me to poison myself, or jump into the Arno? Do you want me to be a specter, and when I knock on this skeleton, no sound comes out? »
A few days after the brutal assassination of French teacher Dominique Bernard in Arras by a former student of his high school, Mohammed Mogouchkov, this testimony expresses the exasperation but also the fear which is that of French teachers today. Because they are on the front line of a war that does not speak its name. The one which, from Arras to Brussels via Sderot, opposes Islamist obscurantism to the Enlightenment and our liberal democracies.
A simple teacher, Dominique Bernard was neither more nor less courageous than the others. A graduate of letters, he was on the front line of this fight, he who taught French and literature. Like Samuel Paty – his history colleague whose throat was slit three years earlier by an Islamist also from the Caucasus – he was the bearer of this precious knowledge called the humanities and which has long been at the heart of our school.
In short, he fought ignorance, which is at the very foundations of the rise of Islamist totalitarianism in the world, including here. Because it is crass ignorance that is today pushing these obscurantist crowds in the streets to protest against an explosion that occurred in a hospital in Gaza before even knowing who was responsible and while numerous indications lead us to believe that it could be the result of a faulty shot from Islamic Jihad. What does the truth matter to those who believe?
The assassin was not mistaken, he who wanted to slit the throat of a history teacher and who, in his video, explicitly declared his hatred of French schools. A school whose teachings he had probably suffered like so much blasphemy, from the history of the Shoah to the theory of evolution, from the Jewish origins of Palestine to civic education lessons. A school which above all had the fault of thinking about the world outside of ideological dictates. You only have to look at the schools in Gaza, which exude anti-Semitism according to a recent UN report, to know what education he dreamed of.
The irony of current events will have meant that we are commemorating these days the 40th anniversary of the death of the sociologist Raymond Aron who was one of the first to dismantle the mechanisms of totalitarianism and to show that it could prosper on the left as well as to the right. This “engaged spectator”, as he liked to call himself, may well be a specialist in Marx, but he will be hated by this left which refused to see the common points which brought together fascism, Nazism and communism. It was better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron.
Now, are those who refused to see the gulag not like two drops of water to those who even today refuse to see in contemporary Islamism, born in the 1920s with the Muslim Brotherhood, another incarnation of totalitarianism ? Are they not like those who, like Black Lives Matter, salute those Hamas fighters who, on October 7, infiltrated Israel by motorized paraglider for the sole purpose of slaughtering Jewish women and children? Or to this professor of “black history” at Cornell University, Russell Rickford, who considered this anti-Semitic attack “exhilarating” and “energizing” while claiming… “to abhor the murder of civilians”? Statements similar to those made in 2006 by the popess of “gender” Judith Butler who defined Hezbollah and Hamas as “progressive, left-wing social movements”, even if she condemned the recent violence.
Just a few minutes before dying, Dominique Bernard had confided to a colleague his concern about “the difficulty of transmitting”, the “ignorance” and the “lack of taste for culture” that he felt in his classes. “We are heading for disaster,” he will say, probably knowing how the body of humanities within the school was being whittled away a little more every day. And especially by those who want to clear the way and impose an increasingly ideological vision of history and literature.
“Dominique Bernard did not want to be a hero,” writes Cécile, of the Versailles academy. We do not want to be applauded, congratulated. We do not want a tribute, posthumous or not. We do not expect thanks for our work which we know is of public utility. We just want to do this, this work. Now is not just a time for mourning, it is a time for action. »
We owe this action to Dominique Bernard who fell in the fight against obscurantism.
Note: These testimonials from teachers were relayed by the Café Pédagogique website.