PARIS. The French prime minister said a teenager will be sued by the state for falsely accusing her headteacher of hitting her during a heated argument over whether she was wearing an Islamic headdress. The principal allegedly insisted that the pupil remove her headgear inside the school, in accordance with French law.
After death threats circulated on social media, the head teacher resigned. Islamist intimidation in French schools is taken extremely seriously The case comes following the murder of two teachers. Samuel Paty was beheaded on the street in a Paris suburb in 2020 while Dominique Bernard was killed in his school in Arras (near Calais) five months ago.
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The principal of the Paris school, whose name was not made public, announced his decision in an email sent Friday to colleagues at the Maurice Ravel high school in Paris’ 20th district. “I finally made the decision to leave my duties”, he explained, “because I was worried about my safety and that of the institute”. “I leave after seven rich and intense years spent at your side, and after 45 years in public education,” he wrote, thanking his colleagues for the support they have shown him in the last three weeks.
In the incident, which occurred on February 28, the head teacher told three pupils that they should comply with the law by removing their headgear. Two accepted the principal’s decision, but the third did not. An altercation would have arisen from there. In the following days, the man was the subject of death threats on social media, which were reported by the school to an Interior Ministry hotline.
Prosecutors said two people had been arrested in connection with the death threats. Their identities were not revealed, but the Education Ministry said they had no connection to the school.
Police were sent to patrol the school, which also received a visit from Education Minister Nicole Belloubet. Officers found no evidence that the headteacher hit the girl, and now Prime Minister Gabriel Attal has stepped in to say the girl must be taken to court for making false accusations.
“The State… will always stand by these officials, those who are on the front line in the face of these violations of secularism, these attempts at Islamism to enter our educational institutions,” he declared.
Politicians from the right and the left have expressed their outrage that a respected teacher’s career was cut short by an Internet hate campaign. “This government is incapable of protecting our schools,” Marine Le Pen said on Twitter.
“It’s a defeat for the state… and the gangrene of Islamism is gaining even more ground,” said his niece Marion Maréchal of the rival right-wing Reconquest party.
«This is how it ends when the line is not to cause controversy. This is what all these small concessions lead to,” said Bruno Retailleau of the center-right Republicans.
«It is unacceptable. When a headteacher resigns due to death threats, it is a collective failure,” said Boris Vallaud of the Socialist Party.
Meanwhile, several schools in Paris were forced to close on Wednesday after bomb alerts from suspected Islamists. Last week, around 30 other schools in the Paris area received similar threats, accompanied by a video of a beheading.
While investigators are obligated to take the threats seriously, they cannot rule out that they are part of a Russian disinformation campaign. Earlier this month Prime Minister Attal warned that the Kremlin had embarked on a “massive destabilization undertaking” to undermine French support for Ukraine.