The values that built la République are crumbling
It is characteristic of France’s self-absorption that what started as a national sense of outrage at the latest Islamist killing on our soil soon evolved into a bitter scuffle between present and past tough-talking Home Secretaries. Last Friday, Dominique Bernard, a 57-year-old French literature teacher at a state Lycée in Arras, was stabbed to death by a 20-year-old Chechen former pupil, Mohammed Mogouchkov, shouting “Allahu Akbar” as Bernard tried to prevent him from entering the school’s main building. Three years almost to the day, it felt like a terrible repetition of the killing and beheading of another teacher, Samuel Paty, in a west Paris suburb.
