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The New York Times
Europe
By Making Holocaust
Personal to Pupils,
Sarkozy Stirs Anger
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Regis Duvignau/Reuters
President Nicolas Sarkozy in Périgueux, France, where
he promoted a curriculum based on young victims of the Nazis. |
By ELAINE SCIOLINO,
nytimes.com on the Web, February 16, 2008
PARIS — President Nicolas
Sarkozy dropped an intellectual bombshell this week, surprising the nation and
touching off waves of protest with his revision of the school curriculum:
beginning next fall, he said, every fifth grader will have to learn the life
story of one of the 11,000 French children killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.
“Nothing is more moving, for a child, than the story of a child his own age, who
has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but who, in the dawn
of the 1940s, had the bad fortune to be defined as a Jew,” Mr. Sarkozy said at
the end of a dinner speech to France’s Jewish community on Wednesday night.
He added that every French child should be “entrusted with the memory of a
French child-victim of the Holocaust.”
Adding to the national fracas over the announcement, Mr. Sarkozy wrapped his
plan in the cloak of religion, placing blame for the wars and violence of the
last century on an “absence of God” and calling the Nazi belief in a hierarchy
of races “radically incompatible with Judeo-Christian monotheism.”
Education Minister Xavier Darcos explained later that the aim of the plan was to
“create an identification between a child of today and one of the same age who
was deported and gassed.”
The Holocaust is already taught in French schools, but some psychiatrists and
educators predicted that requiring students to identify with a specific victim
would traumatize them.
Secularists accused Mr. Sarkozy, who is already under fire for his frequent
praise of God and religion, of subverting both the country’s iron-clad
separation of church and state and the national ideal of a single, nonreligious
identity for all.
Political opponents dismissed the plan as his latest misguided idea, unveiled
without reflection or consultation. Some historians argued that the focus on
victims could steer attention away from the Vichy government’s collaboration
with the Nazis. Still others warned that the plan could backfire, creating
resentment among France’s ethnic Arab and African populations if they felt their
own histories were getting short shrift.
“Every day the president throws out a new unhappy idea with no coherence,” said
Pascal Bruckner, the philosopher. “But this last one is truly obscene, the
very opposite of spirituality. Let’s judge it for what it is: a
crazy proposal of the president, not the word of the Gospel.”
The initiative has also pitted some Jews against one another. “It is
unimaginable, unbearable, tragic and above all, unjust,” Simone Veil, a
Holocaust survivor and honorary president of the Foundation for the Memory of
the Holocaust, told the Web site of the magazine L’Express. “You cannot
inflict this on little ones of 10 years old! You cannot ask a child to
identify with a dead child. The weight of this memory is much too heavy to
bear.”
Ms. Veil was in the audience when Mr. Sarkozy spoke, and said that when she
heard his words, “My blood turned to ice.”
But Serge Klarsfeld, a Jewish historian who has devoted his life to recording
the list and biographies of France’s Holocaust victims, praised the president
for his “courage.”
“This is the crowning glory of long and arduous work,” he said. “To those
who say it’s too difficult for young children — that’s not true. What they
see on television or in a horror film is much worse. This is not a morbid
mission.”
Mr. Klarsfeld likened the plan to a practice by the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which gives visitors small booklets
describing the experiences of Holocaust victims and survivors.
On one level, Mr. Sarkozy’s plan is a logical extension of his sometimes
sentimental and pedagogical approach to governing. Last year, he enraged
politicians on the left, the biggest union for high school teachers and some
historians and teachers when he ordered all high schools in France to read a
handwritten letter of a 17-year-old student who was executed by the Nazis for
his resistance activities.
On another level, it reflects his oft-stated declaration that as president, he
is also a “friend” as he calls himself, of Israel. By extension, he is
also a friend of France’s Jews. He is, for example, the first French
president to address the annual dinner of France’s Jewish community.
But there is something else. Mr. Sarkozy is shattering another barrier in French
intellectual life: religion. His public statements on the subject seem to
reflect a deeply held belief that religious values have an important place in
everyday French society — an iconoclastic position for a French politician.
When Mr. Sarkozy was made an Honorary Canon of the Basilica of St. John Lateran
in Rome last December, he proposed a “positive secularism” that “does not
consider religions a danger, but an asset.” He was even more provocative
in declaring that “the schoolteacher will never be able to replace the priest or
the pastor” in teaching the difference between good and evil.
In Saudi Arabia last month, he infused his speech with more than a dozen
references to God, who, he said, “liberates” man. He also said last month
that it was a mistake to delete the reference to “Europe’s Christian roots” from
the European Constitution.
In France, a country where one’s religion is typically kept private, Mr. Sarkozy
heralds his religious identity, referring publicly to his Jewish grandfather and
wearing his Roman Catholicism on his sleeve.
“I am of Catholic culture, Catholic tradition, Catholic belief, even if my
religious practice is episodic,” he wrote in a book of essays in 2004. “I
consider myself as a member of the Catholic Church.”
Still, Mr. Sarkozy’s conduct in his personal life seems to contradict the image
of Catholic spirituality. Twice divorced, three times married, he has
alienated the country to the point that there is widespread disapproval of his
behavior in his personal life.
That level of disapproval seems to have made Mr. Sarkozy vulnerable in almost
anything he does these days, including his Holocaust initiative.
Teachers defended the current approach to the Holocaust in French schools.
Since 2002, fifth-graders have studied the Nazis’ systematic destruction of six
million Jews as a crime against humanity.
Older children watch films on the Holocaust, visit Holocaust museums and
memorials and take field trips to concentration camps. Schools where
students were taken away for deportation hang plaques in their memory.
“The Holocaust has to be put in the context of the rise of the Nazis and the
war, not just emotion and dramatic spectacle,” said Gilles Moindrot,
secretary-general of the largest union for primary school teachers. “If
you do this with the memory of individual Jews, you’d have to do it with the
victims of slavery or the wars of religion. We can’t have this approach.”
Some of Mr. Sarkozy’s other political foes accuse him of trying to put his
personal stamp everywhere. “One day he is giving us sermons about God,”
said Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a Socialist senator on LCI television on Friday,
adding, “Now he has suddenly turned himself into a teacher.”
Other analysts blamed the confessional approach of the United States for
infecting Mr. Sarkozy’s thinking. “Listen, it’s in the air of the times,”
said Régis Debray, the philosopher and author, on France Inter radio Friday.
“There is a religious sentimentality, a pretty vague religiousness, let’s say,
in the world of show business, in the world of business, that comes from
America. It’s the neoconservative wave of the born-agains.”
MRAP, an organization that campaigns against racism, accused Mr. Sarkozy of
chauvinism by singling out French victims of the Holocaust for study and
excluding other groups, like the Gypsies.
Mr. Sarkozy’s advisers acknowledged that he came up with his Holocaust plan for
schoolchildren without any formal consultation. In the face of the
criticism, however, Mr. Sarkozy vowed to proceed.
“It is ignorance — not knowledge — that leads to the repetition of abominable
situations,” he said during a visit to Périgueux in central France on Friday,
adding, “You do not traumatize children by giving them the gift of the memory of
a country.”
PROFILE: Nicolas
Sarkozy
www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1822723/posts
Profile: Nicolas Sarkozy
news.bbc.co.uk | Monday, 23 April 2007 | BBC
Posted on 04/24/2007 9:59:21 AM PDT by Maelstorm Profile: Nicolas Sarkozy
Nicolas Sarkozy casts himself as a moderniser, championing a clean break with
France's traditional ruling elite.
His strong showing in the first round of the presidential election set up an
intriguing contest against Socialist candidate Segolene Royal.
As a highly combative interior minister and UMP leader he has sharply divided
opinion in France - not least by adopting a tough stance on immigration.
He famously described young delinquents in the Paris suburbs as racaille, or
"rabble".
That blunt comment -- made before the 2005 riots -- encouraged some critics to
put him in the same category as far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Integration policy
Mr Sarkozy, 52, pushed through measures to curb illegal immigration -- including
deportations -- and to integrate skilled migrants into French society.
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Cartoon of Nicholas Sarkozy |
Mr Sarkozy is a gift to cartoonists
But he has also advocated positive discrimination to help reduce youth
unemployment -- a challenge to those wedded to the French idea of equality.
His call for state help for Muslims to build mosques was also controversial.
Unlike most of the French ruling class, Mr Sarkozy did not go to the Ecole
Nationale d'Administration, but trained as a lawyer.
The son of a Hungarian immigrant and a French mother of Greek Jewish origin, he
was baptised a Roman Catholic and grew up in Paris.
One of his main political influences is not French but British, according to his
other biographer, Nicolas Domenach.
"He admires Tony Blair hugely -- for many reasons," he says.
"Tony Blair was able to seduce the media, in the way Sarkozy does. And
Sarkozy looks at how Tony Blair was able to sell his political ideology."
Mr Sarkozy has called for "a rupture with a certain style of politics", saying
he wants to encourage social mobility, better schools and cuts in public sector
staff.
Rise through the ranks
He served as mayor of the affluent Paris suburb of Neuilly from 1983 to 2002,
then became interior minister. He also had a brief spell as finance
minister in 2004.
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Jacques Chirac |
President Chirac famously fell out
with Mr Sarkozy
"He's hyperactive, he's ambitious, he's a heavy worker, a workaholic, he never
rests," says Anita Hausser, who wrote a biography of Mr Sarkozy and is political
editor at the French broadcaster LCI.
She says his appeal is simple.
"He was a lawyer, so he seems close to the people, and he wants to show them
that he understands their problems and that he will solve their problems."
It seems that rather than a new ideology, he is a pragmatist who will use any
solution as long as it works, the BBC's Caroline Wyatt in Paris says.
Initially a protege of President Chirac, the two fell out dramatically when Mr
Sarkozy backed a Chirac rival for the presidency in 1995 -- a slight that has
never been forgotten.
Even those on the left in France admit Mr Sarkozy is a formidable political
force.
He has shown strong protectionist instincts -- pouring state funds into saving
the ailing French company Alstom. Yet he also promises to make the French
less scared of economic success.
He is often described as an Atlanticist, but he too was against the war in Iraq.
He is not too keen on the old Franco-German alliance -- but upset new EU members
by saying those with lower taxes than old Europe should not receive EU
subsidies.
He has voiced opposition to Turkey's bid to join the EU.
Twice married, Mr Sarkozy has three children -- the third by his current wife
Cecilia.
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