French President François Hollande has emphasised the role of education in upholding Republican values and rooting out home-grown terrorism as the country grapples with uncomfortable questions over its integration model, reports FRANCE 24.
The January 7th-9th attacks by French-born Islamist terrorists have stunned the nation and prompted a new bout of soul-searching, rattling the nation’s faith in the Republican model of integration and its cherished secular values.
In a speech at Paris’s Sorbonne University on Wednesday, Hollande said teachers were “in the front line” of the battle to defend “Republican values” against extremist ideologies.
The French president praised teachers’ response to “to the commotion, fear, silence and, in some cases, denial elicited by these horrific acts”, referring to the handful of incidents reported as schools across the country observed a minute of silence on January 8th, a day after brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi massacred 12 people in an attack on satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.
While the vast majority of schools said pupils observed the minute with respectful silence, in a few cases teachers were heckled or told that the murdered Charlie Hebdo cartoonists had “got what they deserved” for mocking the Prophet Mohammed in their drawings.
“We must neither amplify nor underestimate these incidents,” Hollande told the audience of teachers, lecturers and headmasters, “but rather examine them with lucidity.”
On Thursday, his education minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, said the government would invest 250 million euros over three years as part of “great mobilization of schools in favour of Republican values”.
Measures unveiled include the urgent hiring of staff trained to “teach moral, civic and secular values”, the encouragement of “critical thinking and debate”, and stiffer penalties for pupils who undermine teachers’ authority.
Since the terrorist attacks, France’s worst in fifty years, the country has been awash with talk of tackling taboos and facing ingrained problems head on.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said France had to wake up to the “territorial, ethnic and social apartheid” plaguing the country. “This is not about looking for excuses,” he said, “but about looking at the reality of our country”.
Valls was referring to conditions in some of France’s poorest suburbs with a heavily immigrant population, where disaffected youths are prey to crime and extremist groups, including radical Islamists.
He spoke of “daily discriminations” against people “who do not have the right colour of skin or the right family name”, adding that the violent riots that rocked Paris suburbs in 2005 had “left scars that are still there”.
The prime minister’s words marked a turning point in France’s mainstream political discourse, which has traditionally refrained from talk of ethnicity and faith when describing French society.
Predictably, they have stirred controversy and led to cracks in the national unity that had prevailed among mainstream parties in the wake of the attacks, with former president Nicolas Sarkozy accusing Valls of an “appalling” comparison with apartheid in South Africa.
Nancy Green, a professor of French history at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), said the very term “banlieue”, the French word for suburb, had become synonymous with stigmatization.
“The banlieues’ immigrant communities helped build a diverse and rich France, but there is not enough talk of their positive contribution,” she said.
Last month, Hollande delivered a passionate defence of the benefits of immigration as he formally inaugurated France’s first immigration museum, seven years after its hushed opening under his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.
Warning against racism, anti-Semitism and the "intolerable" rise in Islamophobia, he said the National Museum of Immigration in Paris would help "remind the French where they come from, what values they carry as French citizens, and what direction we wish to take together”.
His was a rare plea in a context of growing anti-immigrant rhetoric among many political parties, chief among them the far-right National Front, which picked up an unprecedented 25 percent of the vote in last year’s European elections.