One year to the day after his assassination by a radicalized Islamist ex-student, Arras paid tribute on Sunday to Professor Dominique Bernard, during a ceremony focused on the arts in the presence of several ministers and his relatives.
The ceremony begins at 11:00 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 that[il voulait]” and having to “be careful”, reports his wife, Isabelle Bernard, in a rare interview with Le Monde published on Saturday. “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 (Pas-de-Calais), at the same place where several thousand people gathered two days after the assassination of the professor, stabbed at the entrance to the Gambetta-Carnot school campus where he taught.
Designed with the teacher’s loved ones as a “cultural memorial sequence”, according to the mayor of Arras Frédéric Leturque, the ceremony must include different artistic performances, from an interpretation of Mozart’s K.285 quartet to that of a song by Damien Saez, “Paradise Children”, according to the forecast.
– “No more speeches” –
Also on the program are readings of poems and contemporary dance, which aim to “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, including the ministers of Justice Didier Migaud, of the Interior Bruno Retailleau and of National Education Anne Genetet .
“I don’t want any more speeches. What’s the point? Everything has been said,” explains Isabelle Bernard to Le Monde. “It is out of the question” that there will be a political recovery, she told La Voix du Nord, in another interview also published on Saturday.
“What more beautiful response than musicians, actors, dancers,” she continues to La Voix du Nord, 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: “to defend the humanist values defended by Dominique (…) to advance young people, 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.
Its first edition, open to 4th, 3rd and 2nd year students from Arras and its surrounding areas, has the theme of tolerance.
– “Literature lover” –
“A terrorist act pushes people to withdraw into themselves, and it’s quite the opposite that I want with this prize: to open the school even more,” declared Isabelle Bernard to Le Monde.
Dominique Bernard had taught for 25 years in the establishment where he died. “Loving literature, he liked to transmit this love to his students,” remembers his sister Emmanuelle Delatte in an interview with the Christian weekly Le Pèlerin, published 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 she and her husband had become “aware of (their) vulnerability”. “Who will be next? Because there will be one,” she told him.
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