It’s a fleeting image from Christine Tournadre’s documentary, Le Collège de Monsieur Paty: in the background of one sequence we see a poster stuck to the door of a cupboard, where we can read this sentence: “He Just one click for everything to change. » Around these words life goes on, students go from class to class, teachers try to cope, but deep down, how do we get back up? The film wanted to outline an answer, but the assassination of Dominique Bernard, French teacher, on Friday October 13 in the Gambetta-Carnot high school in Arras, tends to demonstrate that the worst fears evoked by the teachers throughout the documentary are a dramatic reality.
The director was able to film, from October 2021 to July 2022, the reconstruction of a handful of 9th grade middle school students and a few teachers. The documentary was broadcast a few days after the knife attack which claimed the life of a teacher at the Gambetta-Carnot high school in Arras on Friday October 13 and injured several people at the establishment.
Christine Tournadre spoke with the middle school students who attended the course, on October 5, 2020, on freedom of expression during which Samuel Paty presented caricatures of Mohammed. “A course like any other,” remembers a schoolgirl. But the beginning of an unspeakable spiral, which will turn, through the malice of a few adults, the banal lie of a 13-year-old minor into a terrorist attack (Samuel Paty is assassinated then beheaded in the middle of the street on October 16, 2020), with the complicity of six minors, students of the Bois-d’Aulne college in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines).
The camera modestly films the stages of mourning that teachers and students go through. First, astonishment: How could we get to this point? How could students turn against their teacher? How could a 6th grader ask her classmates to like the photo of their decapitated teacher? “We are the educators. We almost failed,” says a teacher.
Acceptance then reconstruction
Another stage of grief: anger. How to stay in your role as a teacher, maintain distance and height and address students? Here again, the documentary serves as therapy. Months after the tragedy, the wounds are still gaping. “I can’t talk to the students about it. I can’t…” admits a teacher. All suppressed rage.
On the students’ side, the embarrassment is palpable. In November, six minors, former classmates, will be tried for their involvement in this horror by the Paris children’s court. When asked by educators about everyone’s responsibility, the director also takes the time to film the silences in an uncomfortable closed session.
Finally, there is acceptance and then reconstruction. How to grow up, for some; teach, for others. A path is emerging through workshops organized by the French Association of Victims of Terrorism. The words of the speakers find a particular resonance, we can believe that a bond is re-woven through this shared experience, that of victim.
However, there is a blind spot in this documentary. If students and teachers have the courage to speak out in complete transparency, during the 80 minutes of the film, Samuel Paty’s hierarchy is strangely absent. However, she had received the alerts from the teacher, concerning the threats targeting him, several days before his assassination.