One year to the day after his assassination by a radicalized Islamist ex-student, Arras (Pas-de-Calais) paid tribute on Sunday October 13 to Professor Dominique Bernard. The ceremony will focus on the arts. Relatives of Dominique Bernard and four ministers are expected: Didier Migaud (Justice); Bruno Retailleau (Interior); Anne Genetet (National Education); Agnès Pannier-Runacher (Ecological transition, elected MP for the Arras constituency).
The ceremony will begin at 11 a.m., the time at which Dominique Bernard, 57, was killed with several stab wounds by Mohammed Mogouchkov, a Russian from Ingushetia, then aged 20.
At the time when he had him as a student in college, the French teacher lamented not being able to “say everything[il voulait] » and have to ” be careful “reported his wife, Isabelle Bernard, in a rare interview with Monde published Saturday October 12. “The management team did everything to point out the dangerous character of this boy”she assures.
The ceremony will be held on the Place des Héros in Arras, at the same place where several thousand people gathered two days after the assassination of the teacher, stabbed at the entrance to the Gambetta-Carnot school campus where he taught.
Thought with those close to the teacher as a “cultural memory sequence”according to the mayor of Arras Frédéric Leturque, the ceremony must include different artistic performances.
“I don’t want any more speeches”
Also included in the program are poetry readings and contemporary dance, which aim to highlight “highlight the values of the Republic, freedom and living together”underlines Frédéric Leturque.
The mayor will be, according to the forecast, the only one to speak, despite the presence of several members of the government. “I don’t want any more speeches. What’s the point? Everything has been said”explains Isabelle Bernard to World. ” It’s out of the question “ that there is a political recovery, she affirms to The Voice of the Northin another interview also published on Saturday.
“What more beautiful response than musicians, actors, dancers”she continues to the local daily, adding that the other victims of October 13, 2023 “also participated, through their ideas, in building this tribute”. Another teacher and two school officers were injured.
Objective : “defend the humanist values defended by Dominique […] to help young people move forward, to prevent such unjust crimes from being committed again”. It is with this in mind that she created, in her husband’s name, a literary prize for short stories written by adolescents. “A terrorist act pushes people to withdraw into themselves, and that’s the opposite of what I want with this award: to open the school even more”declares Isabelle Bernard at Monde.
“Who will be next? Because there will be one”
Dominique Bernard had taught for 25 years in the establishment where he died. “A lover of literature, he loved transmitting this love to his students”remembers his sister Emmanuelle Delatte in an interview with the Christian weekly The Pilgrimpublished Wednesday. “He considered that reading and writing contribute to making us free beings”she continues.
A minute of silence will be observed on Monday in middle and high schools across France in tribute to Dominique Bernard and Samuel Paty, a history and geography teacher also murdered by a young radicalized Islamist on October 16, 2020, in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines) .
When they learned of the assassination of Samuel Paty, Isabelle Bernard remembers that her husband and herself had taken “awareness of (their) vulnerability ». “Who will be next? Because there will be one”she told him.
