“Sylvie, know that millions of people hate you”, “I went off topic through your fault, your text was going around in circles”, “I hope you’re at the end of your life because I’m not going to have the average”, “We’re going to meet in the forest too, Sylvie, you’ll see” : here are some of the thousands of comments addressed to the French writer Sylvie Germain. In question, an extract from his novel angry daysfor which she received the Prix Femina in 1989, and offered first year students the general French baccalaureate test this year.
The text of about twenty lines describes nine brothers, a kind of woodsmen brought up in the forests of the Morvan at an indefinite past period. The students had to question the way in which these nine individuals were shaped by the environment in which they evolved. A choice deemed difficult, even incomprehensible, by certain candidates who had to dissect this extract and who have therefore not hesitated for a week to directly threaten the author on Twitter, Instagram or TikTok.
A little “pot pourri” of what was posted as a comment on the instagram of #SylvieGermain. It should be noted in passing that given the language level, if some fail their baccalaureate, it will not be only because they did not understand the text, huh… pic.twitter.com/aNNEUcrGXb
— Fun’n’roses / personal account (@FunNroses) June 17, 2022
Many Internet users have therefore come to the defense of Sylvie Germain by denouncing the gratuitous violence and the low educational level of the candidates concerned.
I just saw that the text commentary was Sylvie Germain at the baccalaureate, I’ll have died of that, I’ve been reading it since the fr baccalaureate, it’s too strong. On the other hand, it’s a shame to insult him on the pcq networks, you didn’t understand his text, there were 2 other options
— RATsiatitude | Sophie de Woippy (@Asiatitude) June 18, 2022
In an interview given to our colleagues from Figaro StudentSylvie Germain, relativizes, believing that she is only one “pretext”without feeling concerned “personally”.
“I’m kind of worried about the symptom this reveals. They want degrees without any effort.”
Sylvie Germainat franceinfo
“They proclaim themselves victims for a yes for a no and designate as persecutors those very people whom they insult and threaten”, continues the writer, who had not been informed that her text had been chosen, confidentiality of the subjects of examination obliges. And asks the question: “What adults will they become?”
Here is the excerpt given to the students:
“They were men of the forests. And the forests had made them in their image. In their power, their solitude, their hardness. Hardness drawn from that of their common ground, this granite base of a tender pink millions of centuries old , rustling with springs, riddled with ponds, protruding everywhere from between grasses, ferns and brambles. The same song inhabited them, men and trees. A song that has always been confronted with silence, with rock. A song without melody A brutal song, clashing like the seasons – summers crushing heat, long winters petrified under the snow A song made up of cries, clamors, resonances and stridency A song that chanted as much their joys as their anger .
Because everything in them took on accents of anger, even love. They had been brought up more among trees than among men, they had fed themselves since childhood on fruits, vegetables and wild berries which grow in the undergrowth and on the flesh of animals which lodge in the forests; they knew all the paths traced in the sky by the stars and all the paths that wind between the trees, the brambles and the thickets and in whose shadow the foxes, the wild cats and the deer slip, and the alleys that the boars. Alleys traced at ground level between grasses and thorns parallel to the Milky Way, as if mirroring. As an echo also to the road that led pilgrims from Vézelay to Santiago de Compostela. They knew all the centuries-old passages dug by beasts, men and stars.
The house where they were born had very quickly shown itself to be much too small to be able to shelter them all, and too poor above all to be able to feed them. They were the sons of Ephraim Mauperthuis and Reinette-la-Grasse.”