WORLDS COLLIDE

 

It was a strange event : a collision between a moment of tribute and the noise of daily life. On one side, the forecourt of Angers town hall and, on the other side, in the street, the concert of horns and sirens. On one side, a deadly silence. On the other side, life which goes on. Are those two worlds irreconcilable?

The ceremony in memory of Samuel Paty, the murdered teacher of history who displayed a Mahomet caricature to his class, was placed under the symbol of resistance, that exact word which designates the boulevard along town hall, as reminded by Christophe Béchu, the Angers mayor.

After the pledge, after the silence, after the national anthem, applauses covered for a while the turmoil of road traffic. They seemed to exorcise fear, to galvanize people against the forgetfulness.

Freedom of speech reaffirmed, but speeches inaudible

 Angers, Oct. 18 2020.- Around five hundred persons gathered on sunday afternoon on Ralliement square to pay tribute to the memory of Sébastien Paty, the teacher savagely beheaded because of a lesson he gave a few days before about the freedom of speech to secondary school-pupils in a college near Paris.

Unfortunately, they were largely inaudible because the sound system used that sunday was not appropriate to an audience stood up on half of Ralliement square. Several speakers succeeded each other and the crowd reacted sometimes with applauses, sometimes with boos, not because it disagreed what was said, but rather because it disaproved those who acted against the freedom of speech. 

No many banners and flags were visible. No shouts were heard. The public seemed to be still under the astonishment of the crime and the infringement of a symbol of the country, the teachers, and above all, freedom of speech, itself an iconic principle of the french revolution.