It is a year almost to the day since a French schoolteacher was killed by a young Islamist. Dominque Bernard, a high school teacher in Arras, died almost exactly three years after another teacher, Samuel Paty, was slain in similar circumstances and by the same ideology. A memorial service this week will remember Bernard; on Monday, schools across France will observe a minute’s silence in honour of the two teachers. The silence is unlikely to be universally respected. It wasn’t last year, when a minute’s silence for Bernard was interrupted by 357 ‘incidents’ in the schools and colleges of France.
A teenage girl struck a teacher who asked her to remove her headscarf
In the immediate aftermath of Bernard’s murder, the then prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, declared: ‘We will not give in to violence, we will confront it and we will fight it.’
France is losing this fight. Each year, thousands of teachers are threatened or assaulted.
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