A minute of homage to Samuel Paty in the company of ministers -

Thomas Coex / AP / SIPA

This Monday at 11 am, the students of France stopped for a minute of “very respectful” silence in homage to Samuel Paty, assassinated on the evening of the All Saints holidays, also an opportunity for the teachers to return to the freedom of expression and secularism at school.

After two weeks of vacation, 12 million students made this Monday, in a reconfigured France, a special return to school between health and safety vigilance, and a tribute to Samuel Paty, brutally murdered on October 16 for having shown caricatures in class. of Muhammad.

Free trade and strong emotion

The Ministry of Education asked teachers to observe a minute of silence in class at 11 hours after the reading of Jean Jaurès' letter to teachers.

“This minute of silence was very moving, my Third Year students were all very respectful and very touched.

They needed this time of meditation, ”testified Benjamin Marol, professor of history and geography at a college in Montreuil near Paris.

According to this teacher, it was on the other hand "essential to be able to exchange before this minute of silence with the class on the facts which took place in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, so that this minute can have meaning".

"You have to be aware that all students do not have the same level of information, they do not all follow the news," he added.

Respect 

This is the observation of Salomé, a fourth year student in a Parisian college.

"There were actually only two of us in the class who actually followed what happened to Samuel Paty, so it was important to come back to the facts, all together, before closing the sequence with a minute of silence. », She says.

“We were all very respectful during that minute of silence, it was important for all of us to follow it,” she said.

At the Jean-Jaurès de Cenon college, an establishment in the Priority Education Network (REP) in the suburbs of Bordeaux, the history-geo professor Françoise Lecoeur said she was "very moved" during the tribute.

"Here our students come from very different backgrounds, from backgrounds where the discourse on the values ​​of the Republic is not that of the house, religion, but also the education of girls", she continued.

Become a free citizen

Prime Minister Jean Castex paid tribute to Samuel Paty in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, the city where he taught, by observing a minute of silence with the students of a local CM2 class.

Jean Castex, who previously went to the college in Bois d'Aulne, insisted on the necessary collective reconstruction and the central role of teachers in the school of the Republic.

“Here, Samuel Paty taught every child of the Republic to become a free citizen.

For him, for our country, we will continue.

It is our honor and our duty, ”the Prime Minister wrote on Twitter.

The strike as a protest

The start of the school year, which was initially to be postponed to 10:00 a.m. to give the teaching teams time to prepare this tribute to the beheaded teacher, was finally kept to the usual schedule, resulting in the filing of a strike notice by several teachers' unions.

The teachers of the Pasteur college of Villemomble in Seine-Saint-Denis, for example, went on strike Monday to protest "against the organization, reduced, of the tribute to Samuel Paty, an unworthy decision", according to them.

“Other organizations were possible to take into account the conditions of this extraordinary re-entry.

They were swept aside with a wave of the hand, without consideration for human and educational imperatives, ”they regretted in a statement.

Thomas Saettler, professor of physics-chemistry, union member SNES-FSU, explains to him that, for the teachers, it was impossible not to meet again to speak about the emotion generated by the fact that a teacher was assassinated for to have practiced his profession, and it was important that we build our response ”.

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