Paris (AFP)

The Minister of National Education Jean-Michel Blanquer launched Wednesday his think tank "The Laboratory of the Republic", intended to win "the battle of ideas" by defending in particular "humanism and universalism" against "wokism ".

"The Republic is not an incantation", "not a hollow formula", but "a compass and also an anchor", pleaded Mr. Blanquer in front of approximately 200 people gathered at the House of Latin America in Paris (VIIe arrondissement).

Mr. Blanquer's think tank, whose secretary general is MEP Ilana Cicurel, will work on four axes defining, in the Constitution, the Republic: "indivisible, secular, democratic and social".

"We will have commissions that will work on these four dimensions. We must look at how this leads to public policies of the 21st century," explained Mr. Blanquer, who thus intends to feed the presidential campaign.

Inaugurated a year after the savage assassination by an Islamist of the teacher Samuel Paty on October 16, 2000, this think tank must "first address the youth", continued Mr. Blanquer.

In front of a few ministers (Emmanuelle Wargon, Bérangère Abba ...), parliamentarians (François Patriat, Aurore Bergé, Gilles Le Gendre ...) but also intellectuals such as the philosopher Élisabeth Badinter and the writer and actress Rachel Khan, M. Blanquer went on the offensive against "wokism", this movement claiming to be progressive and claiming to be aware of the oppressions experienced by minorities.

Defending a "Gramscian vision", according to which "there can be political victory only if the battle of ideas is won", Mr. Blanquer has strangled this "thought of fragmentation" contrary to the Republican ideal, which according to him creeps into four fields.

"The academic field", first, "which had to undergo the advances of wokism, of cancel culture", when "real strategies of power were put in place";

the media domain, "classic media like social networks" where "a certain aggressiveness" is developing;

the cultural world;

and the political world.

"Do not let ourselves be described as old and frank," hammered Mr. Blanquer.

"There is an attractiveness of the republican model. Humanism and universalism are not values ​​to be discarded from history," he added.

© 2021 AFP