Sarkozy’s Holocaust education plan met with ill-informed criticism

Last week, French president Nicolas Sarkozy sparked controversy by dropping what The New York… Last week, French president Nicolas Sarkozy sparked controversy by dropping what The New York Times called “an intellectual bombshell.” In a speech to members of the French Jewish community last Wednesday, Sarkozy proposed requiring every fifth-grade student to learn the story of a French child killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust. According to the Times, Sarkozy said, “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.”

His plan was criticized on all sides. Some argued that showing favoritism to an atrocity committed primarily against Jews would offend France’s Arab and African populations. Others argued that the proposal violated the separation of church and state, while some lamented the national chauvinism suggested by only requiring children to learn about French victims. Even some Jews disagreed with the plan, arguing that having children so young learn about the Holocaust would traumatize them. Philosopher Pascal Bruckner described the proposal as “truly obscene, the very opposite of spirituality” and suggested the French “judge [the suggestion] for what it is: a crazy proposal of the president, not the word of Gospel.”

Sarkozy admitted that he developed the proposal with no prior consultation but, in the face of strong criticism, vowed to continue with his plan.

Up until now, the Times reported, French students have studied the Holocaust as “a crime against humanity,” and when they are older, take trips to concentration camps. French teachers appeared adamant about keeping Holocaust curricula the way it was. Gilles Moindrot, secretary general of a large union for teachers, remarked: “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.”

Critics may be right to wonder why the children are being required to learn the stories only of French children, but beyond that, their complaints seem ill-informed. Teaching personal stories from victims of the European holocaust is not, as some have suggested, a violation of secularism. Nor is it the case that learning about their personal stories will be any more traumatizing than the horrific truths they will eventually discover about the Holocaust anyway. The event was and remains a trauma to all of humanity, and if the next generation is to do a better job preventing modern-day holocausts than past generations, there’s no reason for them not to understand the importance of the event early.

There’s a way to teach their stories tactfully, of course. When I was young, my class was assigned a similar exercise, where we had to learn about the stories of young victims. My parents, in teaching me about the European holocaust, tried to shield me from certain depictions of violence until they felt I was old enough to handle them. Whether or not I was “traumatized” is, I suppose, subjective. But this sort of lesson is not uncommon in American schools, and certainly less traumatic than so much of what children all over the world will see and experience in their youth.

The flimsiness of the arguments made against Sarkozy’s proposal suggest that there is more to the issue than meets the eye – namely, that many French are angry over their new president’s overt religiosity and not-so-conventionally-pious lifestyle. The thrice-married president, nicknamed “L’Americain,” has recently made some statements that don’t sit so well with traditionally secular French society. In one such speech in December, the president suggested a secular society should treat religion as an asset, not a danger, which set off alarms for French secularists.

In a speech given in Saudi Arabia last month, the Times reported that he repeatedly invoked references to God, who “liberates man.” (The piece did not report whether Sarkozy also referred to women, or whether any were present in the audience to hear his address.)

The real reason so many were opposed to Sarkozy’s proposal was the religious overtones with which he presented it, blaming the violence on an “absence of God” and calling it “radically incompatible with Judeo-Christian monotheism.” This religious presentation, disappointing to secularists and viewed in the recent tradition of Sarkozy’s Catholic confessionalism, led opponents to skip right past the proposal and condemn his motivations.

But with recent studies suggesting anti-Semitism on the rise in Europe (specific figures on France are difficult to ascertain, although reports from papers like the International Herald Tribune and European Jewish Press suggest the country is not unique) the proposal could be a valuable lesson in eradicating religious hatred early in life. It’s a shame that Sarkozy and his opponents let God – and politics – get in the way.

E-mail Marin at mec45@pitt.edu.