French politicians from right, left and centre-leaning camps stood in solidarity with a Paris school principal who had received death threats after asking a student to remove her Muslim veil on the premises. They expressed dismay as the person had to resign due to threats of violence.
Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, a former education minister, will also receive the school principal later Wednesday in a show of support.
The headmaster at the Maurice-Ravel lycee in eastern Paris quit after receiving death threats online after an altercation with a student in February. He had asked three students to remove their Islamic headscarves on school premises, but one of them refused and an altercation ensued, according to prosecutors. He later received death threats online.
According to a school letter sent to teachers, pupils and parents on Tuesday, the principal stood down for “security reasons”, while education officials said he had taken “early retirement”.
In a message addressed to the school’s staff, quoted by French communist daily L’Humanite, the principal said that he had taken the decision to leave “for his own safety and that of the school”.
The student lodged a complaint against the principal, accusing him of mistreating her during the incident. She told French daily Le Parisien that she had been “hit hard on the arm” by the principal.
The student is an adult who was at the school for vocational training.
The Paris public prosecutor’s office told AFP on Wednesday that her complaint had been dismissed.
A probe has also been launched into cyber-harassment following the death threats against the headmaster. A 26-year-old man has been arrested for making death threats against the principal on the internet. He is due to stand trial in April.
In a further show of support, the education ministry said in a statement that it would “never” abandon teachers in the face of “threats”. The ministry said that “all teams” remained mobilised, adding that the principal’s decision to leave his post was “understandable given the seriousness of the attacks against him.”
Education Minister Nicole Belloubet had visited the school in early March and deplored the “unacceptable attacks”.
Secularism and religion are hot-button issues in France, which is home to Europe’s largest Muslim community.
France in 2004 banned school children from wearing “signs or outfits by which students ostensibly show a religious affiliation” such as headscarves, turbans or kippah on the basis of the country’s secular laws which are meant to guarantee neutrality in state institutions.
The resignation from the headmaster comes as the country goes through deep tensions, following a series of incidents including the killing of a teacher by an Islamist former pupil last year.
A ‘collective failure’
“It’s a disgrace,” Bruno Retailleau, the head of the right-wing Republicans faction in the Senate upper house, said on X (former Twitter) on Wednesday.
“We can’t accept it,” Boris Vallaud, the head of the Socialist deputies in the National Assembly lower house, told television broadcaster France 2, calling the incident “a collective failure”.
Marion Marechal, the granddaughter of far-right patriarch Jean-Marie Le Pen and a far-right politician herself, spoke on Sud Radio of a “defeat of the state” in the face of “the Islamist gangrene”.
Maud Bregeon, a lawmaker with President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, also took aim at “an Islamist movement”.
“Authority lies with school heads and teachers, and we have a duty to support this educational community,” Bregeon said.
Socialist Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo called the principal to “assure him of her total support and solidarity”, said her office, adding she was “appalled and dismayed.”