An "unworthy request", which will not be followed up.

Through the voice of its first vice-president Guillaume Jean, the departmental council of Vendée has responded to a controversy which has been agitating a college in the territory for a few days.

In an online petition, several teachers' associations and unions, and in particular Sud éducation, are calling for the name of a school in Aizenay, near La Roche-sur-Yon, to be changed.

They ask that the Alexander Solzhenitsyn College (1918-2008) be renamed, to no longer pay tribute to this Russian writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970.

The collective believes that “Solzhenitsyn was certainly a talented writer, but he was also a personality close to Putin, despite the opposition of their commitments during the time of the USSR.

Not stingy with compliments to the Russian dictator who awarded him the state prize, Solzhenitsyn shared with him his vision of Russian unity, a blind patriotism”.

Instead, the unions proposed the name of Voline, “a Ukrainian poet convicted in Tsarist Russia for insurrection”.

"Unnecessary controversy"

Asked by

20 Minutes,

Guillaume Jean believes that it is "clumsiness at best, ideology at worst".

As he wrote on his Facebook account on Sunday evening, he argues that the initiative "demonstrates ignorance of Solzhenitsyn's work which, while recalling in

the Gulag Archipelago

, the strong ties existing between Ukraine and Russia, wanted the rapprochement between member countries of the former USSR to come from the will of the peoples and not from a renewed imperialism".

According to the vice-president, this petition, for the moment signed by only twenty people, creates “a useless controversy by changing absolutely nothing in the fate of Ukrainians leaving their country”.

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War in Ukraine: “School is a benchmark for them”… The first steps of two Ukrainian teenagers in a French college

  • Russian

  • Pays de la Loire

  • War in Ukraine

  • Society

  • Middle School

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