On March 26, 2025, a physics and chemistry teacher at the Janot-Curie High School in the city of Sens (Yonne, France)) held a one-minute’s silence to honor Palestinian children killed by Israeli bombings in Gaza with her sophomore class (students aged 16-17). She was immediately suspended and is now subject to disciplinary proceedings. The Dijon rectorate (regional education authority) deemed her initiative a “breach of the obligation of neutrality incumbent on civil servants”. It was at the request of students, moved by the images coming out of Gaza, that she organized this minute of silence after class had officially ended (the bell had rung), informing her pupils that participation was voluntary and that anyone wishing to leave was free to do so.

The teacher—who has chosen to remain anonymous—has said she does not regret her gesture, believing that “this is something the Ministry of Education should have done long ago.” She also stressed that her action was intended to respond to her students’ distress over the  situation in Gaza.

Her suspension has drawn criticism, primarily from teachers’ unions and student associations. With the exception of La France Insoumise (a left-wing party), the political sphere has remained silent. The French Education Minister, Élisabeth Borne (a former Prime Minister), has been conspicuously absent from the debate.

Meanwhile, on that same date, the head of OCHA (the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), Tom Fletcher, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that 14,000 babies in Gaza could die within the next 48 hours if humanitarian convoys did not reach the besieged Palestinian enclave. Since March 2, Israel has been blocking or allowing only trickles of aid into Gaza. This blockade has been condemned by several NGOs—Doctors of the World, Oxfam and the Norwegian Refugee Council among them—which warn of a “total collapse” of humanitarian aid and denounce “one of the worst humanitarian failures of our generation.”

To date, over 25,000 Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza, more than 50,000 injured (many maimed or permanently disabled) and 20,000 orphaned (according to UNICEF).Yet, for the Dijon Academy, taking the initiative to hold a minute’s silence in their memory is an act deserving of punishment. As of May 26, the teacher remains suspended and her pupils deprived of her instruction.

The “rectorate”—an anonymous administrative body in media reports—has not faced public accountability. The Rector of the Dijon Academy, Mathilde Collety, and the departmental education inspector, Jean-Baptiste Lepetz, have kept themselves out of sight. Administration, by its nature, its vocation and its cowardice, does not personalize itself. This attitude recalls that of their predecessors under the Vichy regime: Rector Jean Mercier and inspector Maurice Ory, regarding the fate of Jewish children arrested and detained in Yonne’s camps at Saint-Denis-lès-Sens, Vaudeurs and Saint-Maurice-aux-Riches-Hommes, then sent on to Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande and ultimately to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

“We hardly need to discover the North Pole to realize how administrative jargon erases cruelty and pain behind false objectivity“, writes Edith Fuchs at the end of her long research in the departmental archives of Sens, trying to understand how her mother, Cilly Affenkraut, then a mother of three, was arrested in Sens in July 1942 by the French gendarmerie, deported to Auschwitz and murdered *. In such circumstances, she asks, what becomes of the “gift of action” that Hannah Arendt attributes to the human condition as the very mark of our political capacity?

When people are prevented from acting freely and morally in the face of injustice and cruelty, we lose something essential about what it means to be human.

Notes.

 *[Edith Fuchs, “Between Testimony and History: Saint-Denis-lès-Sens 1940–1942,” Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah 2013/2 No. 199, pp. 445–456].

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